Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: prentice crawford on January 16, 2007, 09:08:57 AM
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Woof All,
It looks like Tom Tancredo is throwing his hat into the ring! :-D www.teamtancredo.org
P.C.
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Cool. He might well ride a groundswell of angry Americans right into the white house.
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A pleasant fellow with some very liberal views:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070116/...l_pr/obama2008
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I'll be curious what the Clinton machine does to Obama. He will be hard to beat, though I fear an Obama presidency would result in a good-looking Jimmy Carter.
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My prediction is that he's running to be Hillary Evita Clinton's running mate.
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Possible, but Obama is polling much better than the would-be dowager empress. The MSM is falling all over it's self to annoint him, and Obama could pull lots of undecideds while Hillary polarizes the voting public into love/hate.
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I picture more of an Obama/Edwards or Edwards/Obama ticket. Empress Clinton wants nothing to do with him. He's thrown a stick in the wheel of her perceived bike ride the White House.
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It's so far off, it's hard to say how it'll all unfold, but I will say that Obama is the front runner for the nomination, if not the presidency.
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Disagree. He is very young, and has very little experience at the national level. He has only one statewide race-- the one two years ago which put him in the Senate. Even this is much less than it seems. The original Republican candidate, whose name slips my mind, dropped out of the race when his divorcing wife made apparently founded accusations about him in strip clubs or something like that. So at the last minute, bomb thrower and carpetbagger Alan Keyes stepped in. Don't get me wrong: I love AK (don't agree with everything he says, but possibly one of the most principled and articulate men in American politics today) but for him to step in very late, very underfunded, and being his very uncompormising self did not make for much of a challenge for Osama.
I caught Osama on , , , the Jay Leno show I think it was. On a personal level a very appealing fellow, and he seems to manifest well the desire of many American people to proceed without personal rancor towards the opposition, but his actual positions are quite the standard liberal democratic fare.
My prediction, he will run a while, be well liked by the Dem faithful, do surprisingly well against Lady Evita, and then, due in part to the fact that he will not have been personally nasty towards her, will be swept up in grand unity ticket with him as VP candidate.
President Bush's many unprincipled domestic policies and his perceived incompetence in leading the Iraqi front of the Islamo Fascist war combined with the unprincipled Republican Congress have left the Republicans in array.
RINO Guiliani?
Tax and regulate McCain?
I had strong hopes for Newt Gingrich, but some recent moves of his (e.g. a special on FOX saying he was dedicating himself to the return of God to the American political sphere or some comletely unsound strategy--politically speaking-- like that) read to me like he has decided not to run.
There is a good chance that Reps will seek the equivalent of "Dem-lite" RINO Gov. Schwarzenegger of CA.
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Woof,
The goldenboy of the Dems and the lib press Obama, has admitted to snorting coke in the past and going down the road to being a pothead. I don't think that will fly with but the most lib of libs, when it comes to the number one or number two spot in government. It's not cute like wild willy's, I didn't inhale or Bush throwing back a few. :lol:
P.C.
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Woof,
For the Right, I think Duncan Hunter will start to rise to the top above Newt and others trying to give Conservative Republicans a reason to go vote 08. A Liberal Republican like Guiliani getting the nomination would guarantee Hillary's ascension to the throne as Queen of the world! :evil: I, like many Conservatives, would waste our vote on a darkhorse, then go home and clean our guns. :-D
P.C.
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I agree that Obama isn't a good choice, that's why i've said he had the potential to be a "good looking Jimmy Carter". The last thing we need right now is a standard issue lib dem in office, however I see him taking Hillary out in the primary and the primary fight making them not be on the same ticket.
I think Rudy is way too liberal to win the repub voters over for the nomination. His takes on abortion and gun control are prpbably fatal to his aspirations. Mitt Romney seems to be viable, but his mormon faith won't get the pass from the MSM that Keith "allahu akbar" Ellison's belief sytem got.
Note: I predicted the republicans would keep congress, so :roll:
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Also, Republican Congressman (and former Libertarian Presidential candidate) Ron Paul is running.
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FWIW,
I'd never vote for McCain. War hero, but horribly unprincipled politician.
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Democratic Field
It's Hillary versus everybody else.
Thursday, January 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Illinois Senator Barack Obama's announcement this week that he's likely to enter the Presidential race adds a dash of glamour and excitement to the Democratic field. But all of his media attention doesn't change the basic truth of the 2008 primary contest: The race is between Hillary Rodham Clinton and everybody else.
New York's junior Senator hasn't announced yet, but her troops have long been massing, ready to march on her orders. And what a political machine it is, starting with her husband, who has made it clear he is aching for her to run. Psychoanalyzing the Clintons is perilous, but we suspect the former President doesn't like the way his years in office ended, with impeachment, the Marc Rich pardon and Al Gore's failure to deliver a third symbolic term. A victory for his wife would be a kind of political redemption for him too.
Mrs. Clinton brings her own considerable strengths, not least intelligence and self-discipline. She has performed far more smoothly in the Senate than many observers expected, and she hasn't been a polarizing figure in New York (winning 67% of the vote in November).
Then there are those Clinton legions--of fund-raisers, union chiefs, party bosses, think tank operatives, media consultants. Mrs. Clinton blew through more than $30 million during her all but uncontested Senate re-election campaign, and she will have little trouble raising another $100 million or more. Longtime aide Harold Ickes--famous for his silent depositions in Clinton II--is the seasoned hand on money matters and he'll also bring on Big Labor. Meanwhile, former White House chief of staff John Podesta has set up the Center for American Progress, from which she can poach left-leaning policy ideas.
From her national perch on the Armed Services Committee, Mrs. Clinton has so far also walked a remarkable tightrope on the Iraq war, only recently coming out for some sort of "cap" on the number of troops. A major story over the coming year will be whether she can resist the defeatist tug of her party's antiwar left as she tries to win the Democratic nomination.
Which brings up her biggest liability--the fear in many Democratic hearts that she's not "electable." Mrs. Clinton carries much of the scandal baggage of her husband's tenure without much of his political charisma. If one potential Democratic theme is to run against the "divisive" Bush Republicans, Hillary is not your ideal "uniter." Perhaps American voters won't want to hear about Arkansas, et cetera, all over again, but then is that a risk Democrats want to take?
This is where Mr. Obama comes in, bidding to be the un-Hillary. At age 45, he's already managed the remarkable feat of writing his own autobiography, literally and politically. He's applauded for saying he's proud that he did inhale, and he has the virtue of being a genuinely fresh face. But campaigns have a way of filling in a candidate's resumes in ways other than they design, including their positions on actual issues. Mr. Obama is already moving left on national security--which is dangerous ground for a political rookie amid what the Pentagon calls "the long war" on terror.
North Carolina's John Edwards is another vigorous contender, though the erstwhile Vice Presidential candidate failed to deliver his home state to John Kerry last time around. This time he's raising the decibels on his "two Americas" campaign theme, hoping to catch some of that Hubert Humphrey political magic. If he can sell this message as a millionaire trial lawyer, he'll have earned the nomination.
The rest of the Democratic field includes two governors--Iowa's Tom Vilsack and New Mexico's Bill Richardson--who have solid state records, and Mr. Richardson also has foreign-policy credentials. But both will have trouble breaking through the fund-raising barriers erected by the campaign-finance limits they themselves have supported. This is a shame, because both men have something to offer. And then there is the usual gaggle of Senators--Dodd, Biden and even Kerry--who are running because . . . well, because that seems to be what their DNA has programmed them to do.
If we were betting on a wild card challenger, we'd look instead to Al Gore. The former Vice President has been coy about his intentions. But he might be getting a ton of free publicity for his global warming "documentary" come Oscar time, and there's little doubt he could raise money if he got in. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, there are a lot of Democrats who feel passionately about him and his near-win in 2000.
There are cycles in politics, and, after eight years of Republicans in the White House, Democrats in 2008 will have the public's normal desire for change on their side. On the other hand, they will also have to show they can be trusted on national security in a post 9/11 world, especially running against the likes of Republicans John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. Mrs. Clinton's studied middle-ground on security suggests she understands that. The main Democratic drama of the coming months will be whether her party really trusts that she and her husband have learned enough not to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s.
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Obama's past offers ammo for critics
By RYAN KEITH, Associated Press Writer Wed Jan 17, 2:45 PM ET
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may have a lot of explaining to do.
He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive. He supported allowing retired police officers to carry concealed weapons, but opposed allowing people to use banned handguns to defend against intruders in their homes. And the list of sensitive topics goes on.
With only a slim, two-year record in the U.S. Senate, Obama doesn't have many controversial congressional votes which political opponents can frame into attack ads. But his eight years as an Illinois state senator are sprinkled with potentially explosive land mines, such as his abortion and gun control votes.
Obama — who filed papers this week creating an exploratory committee to seek the 2008 Democratic nomination — may also find himself fielding questions about his actions outside public office, from his acknowledgment of cocaine use in his youth to a more recent land purchase from a political supporter who is facing charges in an unrelated kickback scheme involving investment firms seeking state business.
Obama was known in the Illinois Capitol as a consistently liberal senator who reflected the views of voters in his Chicago district. He helped reform the state death penalty system and create tax breaks for the poor while developing a reputation as someone who would work with critics to build consensus.
He had a 100 percent rating from the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council for his support of abortion rights, family planning services and health insurance coverage for female contraceptives.
One vote that especially riled abortion opponents involved restrictions on a type of abortion where the fetus sometimes survives, occasionally for hours. The restrictions, which never became law, included requiring the presence of a second doctor to care for the fetus.
"Everyone's going to use this and pound him over the head with it," said Daniel McConchie, vice president and chief of staff for Americans United for Life.
Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said voters will be able to judge distorted accounts of his votes against his legislative career in general.
"I don't doubt that if you take a series of votes and twist them and kind of squint, you can write a narrative the way you want to write it," Gibbs said. "I think what people understand is that (what matters) is taking the full measure of his career and the full measure of his legislative efforts."
Abortion opponents see Obama's vote on medical care for aborted fetuses as a refusal to protect the helpless. Some have even accused him of supporting infanticide.
Obama — who joined several other Democrats in voting "present" in 2001 and "no" the next year — argued the legislation was worded in a way that unconstitutionally threatened a woman's right to abortion by defining the fetus as a child.
"It would essentially bar abortions because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this was a child then this would be an anti-abortion statute," Obama said in the Senate's debate in March 2001.
During his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, Obama said he supported similar federal legislation that included language clarifying that the measure did not interfere with abortion rights.
Such hot-button issues were the exception in a legislative career that focused more on building consensus to improve the justice system and aid the poor.
Gibbs noted Obama's leadership on legislation requiring police to videotape interrogations in murder cases. It started out as a controversial idea but ended up passing the Senate unanimously.
Allies and opponents alike say he listened to those who disagreed, cooperated with Republicans and incorporated other people's suggestions for improving legislation.
"He was looked upon by members of both parties as someone whose view we listened carefully to," said Republican state Sen. Kirk Dillard from Hinsdale, Ill.
Obama regularly supported gun-control measures, including a ban on semiautomatic "assault weapons" and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month.
He also opposed letting people use a self-defense argument if charged with violating local handgun bans by using weapons in their homes. The bill was a reaction to a Chicago-area man who, after shooting an intruder, was charged with a handgun violation.
Supporters framed the issue as a fundamental question of whether homeowners have the right to protect themselves.
Obama joined several Chicago Democrats who argued the measure could open loopholes letting gun owners use their weapons on the street. They said local governments should have the final say, but the self-defense exception passed 41-16 and ultimately became state law.
"It's bad politics to be on the wrong side of the Second Amendment come election time," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "It will certainly be talked about. You can take that to the bank."
On the other hand, Obama parted company with gun control advocates when he backed a measure to let retired police officers and military police carry concealed weapons.
Obama occasionally supported higher taxes, joining other Democrats in pushing to raise more than 300 taxes and fees on businesses in 2004 to help solve a budget deficit. The increases passed the Senate 30-28.
That's one reason Illinois business groups gave Obama a low rating, while labor groups praised him. But even Obama's allies say he refused to become a rubber stamp for their legislation.
"He always wants to understand an issue and think it through," said Roberta Lynch, deputy director for Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "You have to make your case no matter who you are."
For six years, Obama served in a Republican-controlled Senate, so he and fellow Democrats only got a fraction of their bills signed into law.
During his last two years, Democrats controlled the chamber and he was the go-to guy on a variety of issues. He helped pass legislation overhauling Illinois' troubled capital punishment system and was a key figure in requiring a massive statewide study of traffic stops to look for signs of racial profiling. Although police groups opposed the legislation, they say Obama listened to their concerns and accepted some of their suggestions to improve the bill.
Even when he was in the political minority, Obama sometimes played a critical role. He helped write one of the rare ethics laws in a state known for government corruption and worked on welfare reform with Republicans.
He sponsored legislation to bar job and housing discrimination against gays, and he helped create a state version of the earned income tax credit for the poor. Obama also led efforts to reject federal rules that would have put workers' overtime checks in jeopardy.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/01/18/report-hillary-preparing-to-play-the-muslim-card-on-obama/
Wow
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Woof,
Yep, that's my girl :lol: paint the other guy as a potential terrorist because he went to school at a Madrasa when he was younger. The Clintons aren't going to take any prisoners in this coup attempt! :evil:
P.C.
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Woof,
Of course she will also come out strong against racial profiling; heck she'll probably be know as the first Muslim President :wink:.
P.C.
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Cue the Darth Vader theme music.....
Hillary Clinton Launching Presidential Run
'I'm In,' Former First Lady Says, as She Seeks to Become the First Female President
By KATE SNOW
Jan. 20, 2006 — - Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has announced that she is forming an exploratory committee for president, thereby launching a bid to become the first female chief executive of the United States.
"I'm in," she said on a Web site, hillaryclinton.com. "And I'm in to win.
"As a senator, I will spend two years doing everything in my power to limit the damage George W. Bush can do," Clinton's statement added. "But only a new president will be able to undo Bush's mistakes and restore our hope and optimism."
While the timing of the news was a closely guarded secret, the announcement itself is not all together surprising. The junior senator from New York has been considering a presidential run for months.
During a televised debate just before her re-election to the Senate last November, Clinton told voters they should not count on her completing a full six-year Senate term.
Many political watchers consider Clinton the Democrat to beat -- particularly given her prolific fundraising abilities. Associates of Clinton say she will be capable of raising tens of millions of dollars in the year to come.
Clinton enjoys a substantial early lead for the nomination. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll last month, she was supported by 39 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, well ahead of her nearest competitors -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., with 17 percent support; former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., with 12 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore, 10 percent.
Clinton's support is particularly strong among Democratic women; 49 percent favor her for the nomination, compared with 29 percent of Democratic men.
But Clinton herself has also frequently acknowledged that there will be a "vigorous debate" prior to the next presidential election. And Clinton will be anxious to distinguish herself from the other leading candidates -- Obama and Edwards.
This past week, Clinton made a highly-publicized trip to Iraq, where she met with top U.S. commanders. During that trip, she told ABC News' Jonathan Karl the situation in Iraq is "heartbreaking."
"I don't know that the American people or the Congress at this point believe this mission can work," she told ABC News.
After returning to the United States, Clinton proposed legislation to cap the number of American troops serving in Iraq and to begin a redeployment of troops out of Baghdad, and eventually out of Iraq. She also supports putting conditions on the money being spent in Iraq.
Obama proposed similar legislation the following day. He often points to the fact that he never supported the war in the first place. Clinton did vote to authorize the use of force in 2002.
Prior to Clinton's proposal for legislation, Edwards leveled indirect criticism at Clinton for not taking bolder action to oppose the war. In a speech commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., he said: "If you're in Congress and you know that this war is going in the wrong direction, and you know that we should not escalate this war in Iraq, it is no longer okay to study your options and keep your own private counsel."
ABC News' political director Mark Halperin and the ABC News polling unit contributed to this report.
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Ann Coulter has her badly off days, but this is not one of them. I could have put it in the Rants thread, but I think it fits better here:
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It's nice to have a president who is not so sleazy that not a single Supreme Court justice shows up for his State of the Union address (Bill Clinton, January 1999, when eight justices stayed away to protest Clinton's disregard for the law and David Souter skipped the speech to watch "Sex and the City").
Speaking of which, the horny hick's wife finally ended the breathless anticipation by announcing that she is running for president. I studied tapes of Hillary feigning surprise at hearing about Monica to help me look surprised upon learning that she's running.
As long as we have revived the practice of celebrating multicultural milestones (briefly suspended when Condoleeza Rice became the first black female to be secretary of state), let us pause to note that Mrs. Clinton, if elected, would be the first woman to become president after her husband had sex with an intern in the Oval Office.
According to the famed "polls" -- or, as I call them, "surveys of uninformed people who think it's possible to get the answer wrong" -- Hillary is the current front-runner for the Democrats. Other than the massive case of narcolepsy her name inspires, this would cause me not the slightest distress -- except for the fact that the Republicans' current front-runners are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.
Fortunately, polls at this stage are nothing but name recognition contests, so please stop asking me to comment on them. "Arsenic" and "proctologist" have sky-high name recognition going for them, too.
In January, two years before the 2000 presidential election, the leading Republican candidate in New Hampshire was ... Liddy Dole (WMUR-TV/CNN poll, Jan. 12, 1999). In the end, Liddy Dole's most successful run turned out to be a mad dash from her husband Bob after he accidentally popped two Viagras.
At this stage before the 1992 presidential election, the three leading Democratic candidates were, in order: Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson and Lloyd Bentsen (Public Opinion Online, Feb. 21, 1991).
Only three months before the 1988 election, William Schneider cheerfully reported in The National Journal that Michael Dukakis beat George Herbert Walker Bush in 22 of 25 polls taken since April of that year. Bush did considerably better in the poll taken on Election Day.
The average poll respondent reads the above information and immediately responds that the administrations of presidents Cuomo, Dole and Dukakis were going in "the wrong direction."
Still and all, Mrs. Clinton is probably the real front-runner based on: (1) the multiple millions of dollars she has raised, and (2) the fact that her leading Democratic opponent is named "Barack Hussein Obama." Or, as he's known at CNN, "Osama." Or, as he's known on the Clinton campaign, "The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations."
Mrs. Clinton's acolytes are floating the idea of Hillary as another Margaret Thatcher to get past the question, "Can a woman be elected president?" This is based on the many, many things Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher have in common, such as the lack of a Y chromosome and ... hmmm, you know, I think that's it.
Girl-power feminists who got where they are by marrying men with money or power -- Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry -- love to complain about how hard it is for a woman to be taken seriously.
It has nothing to do with their being women. It has to do with their cheap paths to power. Kevin Federline isn't taken seriously either.
It is as easy to imagine Americans voting for someone like Margaret Thatcher or Condoleezza Rice for president as it is difficult to imagine them voting for someone like Hillary. (Or Kevin Federline.) Hillary isn't piggybacking on Thatcher because she's a woman, she's piggybacking on Thatcher because Thatcher made it on her own, which Hillary did not.
But the most urgent question surrounding Hillary's candidacy is: How will the Democrats out-macho us if Hillary is their presidential nominee? Unlike their last presidential nominee, she doesn't even have any fake Purple Hearts.
Sen. Jim Webb, who managed to give the rebuttal to President Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday night without challenging the president to a fistfight (well done, Jim!), won his election last November by portraying himself as one of the new gun-totin' Democrats.
He once opposed women in the military by calling the idea "a horny woman's dream." But -- as some of us warned you -- it appears that Webb has already been fitted for his tutu by Rahm Emanuel.
Webb began his rebuttal by complaining that we don't have national health care and aren't spending enough on "education" (teachers unions). In other words, he talked about national issues that only are national issues because of this country's rash experiment with women's suffrage. I guess we should all be relieved that at least Webb's response did not involve putting a young boy's penis into a man's mouth, as characters in his novels are wont to do. He then palavered on about the vast military experience of his entire family in order to better denounce the war in Iraq. As long as Democrats keep insisting that only warriors can discuss war, how about telling the chick to butt out?
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From: Tom Tancredo for President progress report,
Let Down By The State Of The Union Address?
Dear friend of this campaign,
Thanks to your early financial support, my campaign for the Republican nomination is really gearing up. Please know that I'm very grateful! And as a result of my campaign, the causes we deeply believe in are being heard nationally. In the last week, I've appeared on Fox and Friends, Neil Cavuto, Wolf Blitzer, Bill O'Reilly, and just this evening, Paula Zahn, plus just about every radio talk show you can think of. I'm traveling weekly to Iowa and New Hampshire to meet with voters in those all-important early states. In fact, we're looking for office locations in Iowa now. Wherever I go, the message I bring is the same. I stand for Border Security, Immigration Sanity, and a return to basic Law and Order along our porous borders. Last night, as I was listening to the President's State of the Union Address, I felt very sad, let down, and very, very angry. The White House seems determined to work with Pelosi and McCain to ram through an illegal alien amnesty. He seems almost glad to have a Democratic Congress! Both the President and the Democrats like to call what they want "comprehensive immigration reform," but we aren't buying it! The truth is, they're trotting out the same old pig... with a slightly different shade of lipstick. When I was first elected to Congress, there was no organized effort to fight the open-borders crowd who ran Capitol Hill. Things looked very bleak. So I formed the House Immigration Caucus, which now boasts over 100 members of Congress! Since I formed the Caucus not a single amnesty bill has passed in Congress! Now I'm taking this fight national, with my exploratory committee for a Presidential run. If you feel you would like to make a donation to back my efforts please go to www.teamtancredo.org and pass this on to all your friends.Thank You! Sincerely, Tom Tancredo
Woof P.C.
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Well Hillary, do you think America "is ready for a woman president." This was the first question asked at a "town hall" extravaganza for the Hill. Oh I get it, lets get that out of the way. and surely most people are supposed to sit there blindly and think, "well I could vote for a woman". We know the media is drooling all over this.
BTW, weren't most Presidents fathers? :?
This is such a rehearsed planned question. Please, anybody but another Clinton. As one who generally votes Republican I'll take Biden, Obama who I don't know, Richardson, etc. But Clintons I know (despite the never ending *we really don't know Hillary*). I'm not even sure I wouldn't rather have Jimmy Carter come back then *them* again. And I'm old enough to remember Carter. Can't we just get rid of both the Bushes and the Clintons? Come on Dems lets make a bargain. Remember, we could always bring in Jeb just to piss ya off. 8-)
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/16566417.htm
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Craig, all,
I thought of Condi when Hillary started changing her emphasis from 'woman' to 'mom'. Of course Condi is out for now because a) she isn't running and b) Bush foreign policy is currently in low regard.
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Speaking of foreign policy, this speech Mitt Romney gave in Israel last week offers a very clear plan regarding Iran and a worthwhile read IMO.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016622.php
Mitt Romney Herzliya Conference Speech
January 23, 2007
Thank you Ron Lauder for that introduction. And thank you for what you do – and to you Uzi Arad as well – to make this important conference happen. It’s good to be at the Herzliya Conference this afternoon. It’s been a busy day. I saw the sunrise in Jerusalem. And along with friends, I traveled to the Gaza border, from there wechoppered up to the Lebanese border. And now here.I am glad to be in Israel again. It has been about 10 years since my last visit and I am struck by how much has changed. The economy is booming. As someone who spent most of my career in business, I have great respect for the ingenuity and resilience of Israel’s workers and entrepreneurs.
But the changes are not only economic and they are not only positive.
And it is not just Israel that has changed in the past decade, but the world around us. Unfortunately, many have not fully caught up with the new strategic paradigm we face.In that old world, the Arab-Israeli conflict was thought of as just another intractable regionalconflict. One that drags on…that should be resolved…but is not part of a global threat to theworld order.9/11 changed that perspective. Or it should have. Contrary to the Baker-Hamilton Commission, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict will not magically mollify the jihadists. No, what we should have realized since 9/11 is that what the world regarded as an Israeli-Arab conflict over borders represented something much larger. It was the oldest, most active front of the radical Islamist jihad against the entire West. It therefore was not really aboutborders. It was about the refusal of many parts of the Muslim world to accept Israel's right toexist – within any borders.
This distinction came into vivid focus this summer. The war in Lebanon had little to do with thePalestinians. And it had nothing to do with a two-state solution. It demonstrated that Israel isnow facing a jihadist front that from Tehran through Damascus to Southern Lebanon andGaza.As Tony Blair astutely put it, Hizbullah was not fighting “for the coming into being of a Palestinian state...but for the going out of being of an Israeli state."
Yet we have still not fully absorbed the magnitude of the change. As far as our enemies areconcerned, there is just one conflict. And in this single conflict, the goal of destroying Israel issimply a way station toward the real goal of subjugating the entire West.Jihadism -- violent radical Islamic fundamentalism -- has emerged as this century’s nightmare. It follows the same dark path as last century’s horrors: fascism and Soviet-styled communism.In my country, the attack by Al Queda has led some to believe that we are threatened by aband of fanatics in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They imagine that if we couldonly get Bin Laden and his cohorts, all this unpleasantness could be over.But Jihadism is much, much more.
Jihadists are among Shia and Sunni, promoted by Hamasand Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, financed by knowing and unknowing Muslimgovernments, and preached to hundreds of millions in many nations. Their goal is theoverthrow of moderate Muslim states and their replacement by a caliphate. Their strategy isthe collapse of the economy, the government, and the military of America and our friends.To their eyes, our destruction is not delusional, but possible.In my country, the focus has been on Iraq, which is understandable. We have some 140,000 men and women there, with more on the way. And we are suffering casualties. Indeed, the past few days have been especially painful for the United States. Thousands of American families continue to make the greatest sacrifice for security in Iraq. And for whatever the mistakes made and the challenges before us, we must remain committed to making everyeffort for success there.And on Iraq, I would just like to make another point. Some Congressional leaders in theUnited States today are arguing that the President is not authorized to allow our forces topursue Iranian elements inside Iraq – which are attacking our own troops. That would be folly.
But today, I wish to focus on the regime that has become the heart of the Jihadist threat - Iran. I believe that Iran’s leaders and ambitions represent the greatest threat to the world sincethe fall of the Soviet Union, and before that, Nazi Germany.
Ahmadinejad has gone well beyond the boundary of outrage…beginning with his calculateddesecration of history. Indeed, when he denies the Holocaust, he could care less about history– his point is about the present and the future. His purpose is not to deny the Holocaust, but todeny Israel. He is testing the waters. He wants to know who will object. And how they willregister their objection.The Iranian regime threatens not only Israel, but also every other nation in the region, andultimately the world. And that threat would take on an entirely new dimension if Iran were allowed to become a nuclear power. And just think of the signal a nuclear Iran would send toother rogue regimes with nuclear ambitions – this could be a tipping point in the developmentand proliferation of nuclear regimes. How should the civilized world approach this challenge?
Our first goal should be to dispense with three major schools of wishful thinking:The first school concedes that Iran must not be allowed to go nuclear. But that's where thecertitude ends. Beyond that recognition, there is only the hope that Iran’s weakeningeconomy and political rivalries will yield a change in the government’s leadership. We are all hopeful, but this is not a strategy. The second assumes that it is possible to live with a nuclear Iran. This thinking is based onthe theory that Iran, once granted the privilege of joining the nuclear club, will be aresponsible actor.
Neither their words nor their record justify this conclusion. The third school believes that the logic of deterrence, which served us through the Cold War,will apply to Iran. But for all of the Soviets’ deep flaws, they were never suicidal. A Sovietcommitment to national survival was never in question. This assumption simply cannot bemade about an irrational regime that celebrates martyrdom.Each of these three represents a rationale for inaction, rather than a strategy for success.Each would in all likelihood yield the same result – an Iran that is nuclear armed, threateningthe world, or worse. They should be rejected. And they should be replaced with anunderstanding of two fundamental realities:
1) Iran must stopped;
2) Iran can be stopped.
It is inconceivable to me that some think otherwise. Their view must be based ondisbelief…disbelief that Iran’s regime means what it says.Few believed that Hitler meant when he called for the destruction of the Jewish people in Mein Kampf. Few believed what Osama bin Laden said.
The 9/11 Commission found numerous failures – failures of intelligence, of coordination, andof analysis. But they found that the most critical failure was what they called a “failure ofimagination.” Americans simply could not believe that people would crash airplanes full ofinnocent people into buildings full of innocent people.
Since that happened, can we really dismiss horrific threats as mere rhetoric? A nuclear Iran is unacceptable because, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates pointed out inhis confirmation hearings, we have no way of guaranteeing that Iran will not use a nuclearweapon. Many people do understand that Iran must be stopped, but they do not believe it is possible. They see the modest sanctions that the UN took three years to produce. They see Russia refusing to end its cooperation with Iran's nuclear program. They conclude that the UNSecurity Council will never produce sanctions tough enough – and soon enough - to stop Iran.
What is less appreciated is what the US and Europe can do. Yes, we should continue toencourage China and Russia to work with us on the UN Security Council. And from my meetings in Israel over the past few days, and in China two months ago, I have reason to bemore optimistic about the role China could play.But we must not sit idle while we wait for cooperation: The US and Europe can do much toexploit the Iranian regime’s vulnerabilities.
In considering our strategy, we must remember that the government and the clerics arenot the sole center of power. The people of Iran also represent a major source of power. Byand large, they have not been radicalized by their government and clerics. They feareconomic stagnation and political repression. Most are not seeking a military confrontationwith the West. Indeed, most want greater engagement with the West - there’s a reason, for example, that there are more than 75,000 bloggers active in Iran today. A successfulstrategy should consider and encompass the people of Iran, as well as their leaders. In my view, our strategy to stop Iran should include the following five dimensions:
First, we must continue tighten economic sanctions. Our model should be at least as severeto the sanctions imposed on Apartheid South Africa. We should demand no less from theinternational community today.The Bush Administration deserves credit for the efforts it has made on the economic trackthus far. The Administration’s campaign to deny Iran access to the international bankingsystem is crucial. The United States and Europe must ensure that Iran is unable to obtaincredit. And we must ensure that Iranian purchases in foreign currencies become difficult or impossible.
We must also be imaginative in the way we pressure Iran economically – an issue I havebeen looking into. In my meetings this week in Israel, I have become aware of the potential ofUS pension funds to further isolate the Iranian economy. We should explore a selective disinvestment policy. After a series of briefings here, I have contacted the Treasurer of my own state of Massachusetts and Governors of other states to begin this process by meetingtoday with senior Israeli leaders in Boston.
Second, we must impose diplomatic isolation of Iran’s Government. Ahmadinejad should notbe provided the trappings, respect, and recognition of a responsible head of state as hetravels. In fact, when former Iranian President Khatami traveled to Boston last year to lectureat Harvard University, I denied him state police security for his visit. The real question is: why was he invited in the first place? Ahmadinejad is even more strident than Khatami. He should neither be invited to foreign capitals nor feted by foreign leaders. This would haveimportant symbolic significance, not just to Ahmadinejad, but to the people of Iran.Diplomatic isolation should also include an indictment of Ahmadinejad for incitement togenocide under the Genocide Convention. The United States should lead this effort.
The full title of the Genocide Convention is the Convention on the Prevention andPunishment of the Crime of Genocide. Remember that word: Prevention.Article III of that treaty establishes that “public incitement to commit genocide” is apunishable crime. Every signatory to this treaty, including the U.S. and most Europeancountries, shares an obligation to enforce it. So do human rights groups that care aboutinternational humanitarian law.Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, and human rights advocate and former Canadian JusticeMinister Irwin Cotler have spoken out on this issue.In addition, former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton has been a forceful advocate for this effort, and is joined by Alan Dershowitz. If these two can agree, they must be on to something.
Third, Arab states must join this effort to prevent a nuclear Iran. These states can do muchmore than wring their hands and urge America to act. They should support Iraq’s nascentgovernment, They can help America focus on Iran by quickly turning down the temperatureof the Arab-Israeli conflict -- stopping the financial and weapons flows to Hamas andHizbullah…thawing relations with Israel…and telling the Palestinians they must dropterrorism and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Fourth, we must make it clear that while nuclearization may be a source of pride, it can alsobe a source of peril. The military option remains on the table. And further, nuclear materialthat falls into the hands of terrorists would surely provoke a devastating response from thecivilized world.
Fifth, our strategy should be integrated into a broader approach to the broader Muslim world.I agree with our friend, former Prime Minister Aznar of Spain, that a central purpose of NATO should be to defeat radical Islam. I believe this has two critical dimensions. The first is anunquestionably capable military. This will mean a greater investment by the United States aswell as other nations. The second is a global partnership which includes NATO and otherallies. Its mission would be to support progressive Muslim communities and leaders in every nation where radical Islam is battling modernity and moderation. This Partnership for Prosperity should help provide the tools and funding necessary for moderates to win the debate in their own societies. They need secular public schools, micro credit and banking,the rule of law, adequate healthcare, human rights, and competitive economic policies. In thefinal analysis, only Muslims will be able to permanently defeat radical Islam. And we canhelp.
We should remember that in the two other global confrontations with totalitarianism in thepast century, it was not always obvious that the West would prevail. Indeed, in these conflicts, the balance of power was not always in the West’s favor. Those were wars we could have lost, but did not.
In the current conflict, the balance of forces is not nearly as dangerously close as it wasduring moments of World War II and the Cold War. There is no comparison between the economic, diplomatic, and military resources of the West and the handful of weak terrorist states that threaten us. In the previous global wars, there were many ways to lose, and victory was far fromguaranteed. In the current conflict, there is only one way to lose, and that is if we as acivilization decide not to lift a finger to defend ourselves, our values, and our way of life.
It is time for the world to plainly speak three truths:
One, Iran must be stopped.
Two, Iran can be stopped.
And three, Iran will be stopped.
Thank you.
-
Biden Unbound: Lays Into
Clinton, Obama, Edwards
Loquacious Senator, Democratic Candidate on Hillary: 'Four of 10 Is the Max
You Can Get?' Edwards 'Doesn't Know What He's Talking About'
NEW YORK OBSERVER
By: Jason Horowitz
Date: 2/5/2007
Senator Joseph Biden doesn't think highly of the Iraq policies of some of
the other Democrats who are running for President.
To hear him tell it, Hillary Clinton's position is calibrated, confusing and
"a very bad idea." John Edwards doesn't know what he's talking about and is
pushing a recipe for Armageddon in the Middle East. Barack Obama is offering
charming but insubstantial fluff. And all of them are playing politics.
"Let me put it this way," Mr. Biden said. "You didn't hear any one of them
get in this debate at all until they announced for President."
Mr. Biden, who ran an ill-fated campaign for President in 1988, is a man who
believes his time has finally come, announcing this week that he was filing
papers to make his 2008 Presidential bid official. Although he admits to a
tendency to "bloviate," he thinks that an aggressive advocate with rough
edges might be just what the party needs right now. "Democrats nominated the
perfect blow-dried candidates in 2000 and 2004," he said, "and they couldn't
connect."
Though Mr. Biden, 64, has never achieved his national ambitions, he has in
recent years emerged as one of the party's go-to experts on foreign policy.
In the past week, he has spearheaded the Democratic pushback against the
President's plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, opposing the move with a
non-binding resolution that his party has rallied around.
On a recent weekday afternoon, he was discussing his rivals over a bowl of
tomato soup in the corner of a diner in Delaware, about a 15-minute drive
from his Senate office. He wore a red cardigan and blue shirt, periodically
raising his raspy voice over the sound of loudspeakers summoning customers
to pick up their sandwiches. He had showed up carrying a Mead notebook
filled with handwritten talking points, but once he'd gotten started, he
closed the book and pushed it aside.
The subject he prefers to talk about these days-particularly when
contrasting himself with his prospective Presidential rivals-is Iraq.
Addressing Mrs. Clinton's latest proposal to cap American troops and to
threaten Iraqi leaders with cuts in funding, Mr. Biden lowered his voice and
leaned in close over the table.
"From the part of Hillary's proposal, the part that really baffles me is,
'We're going to teach the Iraqis a lesson.' We're not going to equip them?
O.K. Cap our troops and withdraw support from the Iraqis? That's a real good
idea."
The result of Mrs. Clinton's position on Iraq, Mr. Biden says, would be
"nothing but disaster."
Most early polls show Mrs. Clinton as the party's clear front-runner. Mr.
Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is firmly in
the thick of a pack of third-tier candidates. Still, he thinks that at such
a precarious point in the nation's history, voters are seeking someone with
his level of experience to take the helm.
"Are they going to turn to Hillary Clinton?" Biden asked, lowering his voice
to a hush to explain why Mrs. Clinton won't win the election.
"Everyone in the world knows her," he said. "Her husband has used every
single legitimate tool in his behalf to lock people in, shut people down.
Legitimate. And she can't break out of 30 percent for a choice for
Democrats? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in a place where 100
percent of the Democrats know you? They've looked at you for the last three
years. And four out of 10 is the max you can get?"
Mr. Biden is equally skeptical-albeit in a slightly more backhanded
way-about Mr. Obama. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American
who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I
mean, that's a storybook, man."
But-and the "but" was clearly inevitable-he doubts whether American voters
are going to elect "a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the
Senate," and added: "I don't recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan
or a tactic."
(After the interview with Mr. Biden and shortly before press time, Mr. Obama
proposed legislation that would require all American combat brigades to be
withdrawn from Iraq by the end of March 2008.)
Mr. Biden seemed to reserve a special scorn for Mr. Edwards, who suffered
from a perceived lack of depth in foreign policy in the Presidential
election of 2004.
"I don't think John Edwards knows what the heck he is talking about," Mr.
Biden said, when asked about Mr. Edwards' advocacy of the immediate
withdrawal of about 40,000 American troops from Iraq.
"John Edwards wants you and all the Democrats to think, 'I want us out of
there,' but when you come back and you say, 'O.K., John'"-here, the word
"John" became an accusatory, mocking refrain-"'what about the chaos that
will ensue? Do we have any interest, John, left in the region?' Well, John
will have to answer yes or no. If he says yes, what are they? What are those
interests, John? How do you protect those interests, John, if you are
completely withdrawn? Are you withdrawn from the region, John? Are you
withdrawn from Iraq, John? In what period? So all this stuff is like so much
Fluffernutter out there. So for me, what I think you have to do is have a
strategic notion. And they may have it-they are just smart enough not to
enunciate it."
The targets of Mr. Biden's criticism, whether out of shock, indifference or
a calculation that it would be unwise in this case to meet fire with fire,
declined to respond in kind.
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton wrote in an e-mail: "Senator Obama
opposed the Iraq War from Day 1 and has articulated clear principles in how
to address the tragic mistakes President Bush has made there." And as for
rest-including Mr. Biden's use of the words "articulate" and "nice-looking"
to describe the Senator from Illinois-the spokesman said, "Senator Biden's
words speak for themselves." The press offices for Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Edwards declined to say anything at all.
By contrast with what Mr. Biden describes alternately as his opponents'
caution and their detachment from reality, the Senator from Delaware has for
months been pushing a comprehensive plan to split Iraq into autonomous
Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish ethnic regions that is controversial, to say the
least.
Under the plan, local policing and laws will be the responsibility of
regional authorities. Most of the American troops would be withdrawn, with
small numbers remaining to help with anti-terrorism operations. The ensuing
chaos from ethnic migrations within Iraq would be contained with the help of
political pressure created by a conference of Iraq's neighbors.
But the idea of an American endorsement of Iraqi federation along those
lines has drawn criticism from just about every ideological corner of the
foreign-policy establishment. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, another potential
2008 candidate who played a major role in negotiating the peace talks that
ended the war in Bosnia, said in a recent interview that the Biden plan
would have people in mixed cities like Baghdad "fleeing for their lives."
Richard Perle, one of the chief architects of the war in Iraq, who resigned
from his advisory position at the Pentagon in 2003 after a
conflict-of-interest scandal, called the idea "harebrained." And perhaps
most notably, the original author of the partition plan, former Council on
Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, has suggested that spiraling chaos
on the ground in Iraq may have already rendered it unworkable.
Mr. Biden counters their criticism by insisting that Iraq has already
fractured along ethnic lines, and that the only pragmatic approach at this
point is to police the process in a way that could prevent a wider civil war
and, eventually, lead to a sort of stability.
"You have to give them breathing room," he said.
The Iraq he envisions has three ethnically homogenous enclaves, with a
central government responsible for securing the country's international
borders and distributing oil revenues.
He'd put the Shiite majority in the south, limiting their geographic control
but keeping them from being drawn into a wider Sunni-Shiite conflict.
He'd move the Sunni majority into the oil-poor Anbar province in the West,
but they would be guaranteed a cut of oil revenues worth billions of
dollars. Mr. Biden's hope is that the oil money and relative calm would
drain the loyal Baathist insurgency of support while simultaneously making
the province less amenable to Al Qaeda provocateurs.
"The argument that you make with Sunni tribal leaders is, 'You are not going
to get back to the point where you run the show,'" said Mr. Biden. They will
have to be made to understand that "you get a much bigger piece of the pie
by giving up a little of the pie."
He'd keep the Kurds up in the north, where they already enjoy a measure of
de facto autonomy, but would seek guarantees that they would not take it
upon themselves to purge Sunni residents from the mixed city of Kirkuk, or
to lay exclusive claim to the enormous oil resources in that region, or to
secede from Iraq by forming an independent Kurdistan.
Mr. Biden said he has made the argument to Kurdish leaders over the course
of his seven trips to Iraq as follows: "You will be eaten alive by the Turks
and the Iranians, they will attack you, there will be an all-out war."
The clear implication is that the United States, not for the first time,
would be unable to protect them. "I don't see how we could," he said.
Mr. Biden disagrees with foreign leaders like Britain's Tony Blair and
Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, who say that the key to fixing Iraq's problems
is solving the dispute between Israel and Palestinians.
"They are wrong, because I think it is a veiled way to do what the Europeans
and the Arabists have always wanted to do, which is back Israel into a
corner," he said. "They still blame Israel."
Mr. Biden says that support for his Iraq plan is growing. The influential
New York Senator Chuck Schumer has declared at various times that he
supports the plan-albeit in an uncharacteristically quiet manner-as has
Michael O'Hanlon, a prominent Iraq policy expert at the Brookings
Institution.
But their support, for Mr. Biden, is almost an afterthought. If one thing is
clear about him, it is that he doesn't mind being alone.
"They may be politically right, and I may be politically wrong," he said.
"But I believe I am substantively right, and their substantive approaches
are not very deep and will not get us where I want to go."
http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14092&ic=News+Story+1
-
Dick Morris on the upcoming elections:
Although Barack Obama is an “exciting phenomenon,” he is the equivalent of “political stem cells: You can make him into any tissue you want.”
“It is in the national interest that, if there is a Democratic president, that it not be Hillary.”
“The Republican field is like the New York Yankees: They’ve got a pitching rotation of really great names who are 45 years old and who probably won Cy Young Awards when they were younger. But they’ll have a sore arm by the World Series and will end up on the [disabled list]. Republicans need to look to the minor leagues.”
He laid out the political future: “Hillary will be the next president, and she’ll be the worst president we’ve ever seen.” No matter what happens, the situation in Iraq will “assure that the GOP gets massacred in 2008 congressional elections.” In 2010, the Republicans will take back the Congress — “Hillary will give Republicans the same gift she gave them in 1994” — and they’ll win the presidency in 2012, but thanks to demographic shifts favoring Democrats (namely the rising Hispanic and African-American populations), “that will be the last Republican president we’ll ever see.”
========================
From today's NY Slimes:
Biden Unwraps His Bid for ’08 With an Oops!
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: February 1, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — In an era of meticulous political choreography, the staging of the kickoff for this presidential candidacy could hardly have gone worse.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., head of the Foreign Relations Committee, who Wednesday announced his Democratic presidential candidacy.
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday with the hope that he could ride his foreign policy expertise into contention for the Democratic nomination, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for president, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
The remark, published Wednesday in The New York Observer, left Mr. Biden’s campaign struggling to survive its first hours and injected race more directly into the presidential contest. The day ended, appropriately enough for the way politics is practiced now, with Mr. Biden explaining himself to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Earlier, in a decidedly nonpresidential afternoon conference call with reporters that had been intended to announce his candidacy, Mr. Biden, speaking over loud echoes and a blaring television set, said that he had been “quoted accurately.” He volunteered that he had called Mr. Obama to express regret that his remarks had been taken “out of context,” and that Mr. Obama had assured him he had nothing to explain.
“Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” he said, adding: “Call Senator Obama. He knew what I meant by it. The idea was very straightforward and simple. This guy is something brand new that nobody has seen before.”
Asked about Mr. Biden’s comments, Mr. Obama said in an interview, “I didn’t take it personally and I don’t think he intended to offend.” Mr. Obama, who serves with Mr. Biden on the Foreign Relations Committee, added, “But the way he constructed the statement was probably a little unfortunate.”
But later in the day, with Mr. Biden coming under fire from some black leaders, Mr. Obama issued a statement that approached a condemnation. “I didn’t take Senator Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate,” he said. “African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”
For Mr. Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it was an inauspicious beginning to his first presidential campaign since 1988, when he dropped out after acknowledging using without attribution portions of a speech from a British politician. By the end of the day on Wednesday, Democrats were asking only half-jokingly whether Mr. Biden might be remembered for having the shortest-lived presidential campaign in the history of the Republic.
Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Biden issued a written statement. “I deeply regret any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone,” he said. “That was not my intent and I expressed that to Senator Obama.”
Under questioning from reporters at his announcement conference call, Mr. Biden was pressed on what he meant in his description of Mr. Obama, particularly in his use of the word clean.
“He understood exactly what I meant,” Mr. Biden said. “And I have no doubt that Jesse Jackson and every other black leader — Al Sharpton and the rest — will know exactly what I meant.”
When he was asked, again, what he meant, Mr. Biden — known in Washington for his long-winded ways and his love of the microphone and the spotlight — bristled as he struggled over the squawk of feedback and echoes.
“I’m not going to repeat everything I just said,” he said. “There is a vote that starts at 2:30, it takes 11 minutes to get to the floor. I can take one more question but not on the subject I have already spoken to.”
And after taking one more question, Mr. Biden did something entirely out of character: He announced he was done talking.
Mr. Biden’s assurances notwithstanding, both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton — African-Americans who have run for president — said they had no idea what Mr. Biden meant. And both suggested they felt at least a little offended by the remarks.
Mr. Jackson described Mr. Biden’s remarks to the Observer, which also included critical statements about the Iraq positions of two of his Democratic opponents — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina — as “blabbering bluster.”
A wounded note to his voice, Mr. Jackson pointed out that he had run against Mr. Biden for the 1988 Democratic nomination, and had lasted far longer and drawn more votes than did Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden was forced out in September 1987.
“I am not sure what he means — ask him to explain what he meant,” Mr. Jackson said. “I don’t know whether it was an attempt to diminish what I had done in ’88, or to say Barack is all style and no substance.”
Mr. Sharpton said that when Mr. Biden called him to apologize, Mr. Sharpton started off the conversation reassuring Mr. Biden about his hygienic practices. “I told him I take a bath every day,” Mr. Sharpton said.
No stranger to electoral intrigue, Mr. Sharpton was quick to offer a political motive: That Mr. Biden was drawing distinctions between Mr. Obama and African-American leaders like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson, to “discredit Mr. Obama with his base.”
At the very least, Mr. Biden’s remarks obscured a campaign roll-out in which he said that Mr. Bush had “dug America into a very big hole” with the war in Iraq and that the nation would need a leader experienced in foreign policy to take over during dangerous times. More than that, it seemed sure to harden Mr. Biden’s image in political circles as politically undisciplined, an image he had been working scrupulously to change in what has emerged as a long-term political rehabilitation project for him.
In his conference call, Mr. Biden quoted his mother in trying to explain what he meant about Mr. Obama. “My mother has an expression: Clean as a whistle and sharp as a tack,” Mr. Biden said, showering more praise on one of his biggest opponents for the nomination.
On Comedy Central, he told Mr. Stewart: “What got me in trouble was using the world clean. I should have said fresh. What I meant was he’s got new ideas.”
Mr. Biden’s comments also focused new attention on remarks he made about Indians last year, when he said, “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
Before he went on television, Mr. Biden found himself sharing a stage with Mr. Obama at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq, where he was noticeably solicitous to his new presidential rival as members of the committee questioned Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state. Mr. Biden chastised Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, to keep his comments short (“just one minute, Senator, or we will have everybody else”).
But he could not have been more accommodating to Mr. Obama as the senator from Illinois began wrapping up: “I know I’m out of time.”
Mr. Biden would have none of that. “That’s O.K.,” he told Mr. Obama. “You’re making a very salient point.”
Jeff Zeleny and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, and Conrad Mulcahy from New York.
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President Clinton
By FRED BARNES
February 1, 2007; Page A17
Senator Hillary Clinton is waging two presidential campaigns at once. She is running for the Democratic presidential nomination while keeping a sharp eye on the general election campaign against the Republican presidential nominee, whoever that turns out to be. Mrs. Clinton wants to run as a centrist, not a liberal, in the general election. But there's a problem. She is being tugged to the left in the nomination fight, forced to take positions that may jeopardize her chances later against the Republican candidate.
Her opponents in the Democratic primaries next year don't have this problem. They are unabashed liberals who have done nothing to place themselves near the ideological center of American politics. Mrs. Clinton, however, spent her first term as senator from New York downplaying her image as a staunch liberal. Instead, she has sought with some success to fashion a reputation as a centrist on some several key issues, particularly national security. And while doing so, she became the undisputed frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination. She became electable.
A glance at the breakdown of red and blue states in the 2004 presidential race shows how little it would take for her to win the general election. If she holds the states won by Democrat John Kerry, she would need to add only one populous red state or two smaller ones. And there are numerous Republican states that have drifted toward the Democrats since 2004 -- Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, Nevada, Arizona and Virginia, just to name a few.
But Mrs. Clinton's ability to pick up one or two of these red states depends on her maintaining credibility as a centrist on key issues. That is a difficult task. Given the pressure from her party's liberal base and from her Democratic opponents for the presidential nomination, it's now very much in doubt whether she can accomplish it. She's already becoming more liberal than it's safe to be in a presidential election in a nation with an enduring center-right majority.
As surprising as this may sound, Mrs. Clinton starts her campaign as the Democratic candidate furthest to the right. The only two Democrats who might have gotten to her right -- Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and former Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia -- dropped out of the race. So she faces competition from a phalanx of liberals, two of whom -- Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards -- are formidable opponents.
In her six years in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton has gone a good ways toward achieving the threshold requirement for a female candidate for president: making herself believable as a commander in chief. She did this by spending long hours at Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, forging a supportive relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, and voting in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
She became conversant on defense issues. At a breakfast with reporters in late 2003, I asked her if there had been good reason to believe, as President Bush did, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. "The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent," she said, in concluding Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons.
Mrs. Clinton had done her own "due diligence," she went on, by attending classified briefings on Capitol Hill and at the White House and the Pentagon, and also by consulting national security officials from the Clinton administration whom she trusted. All agreed Saddam had WMD. Now, an investigation was needed on how everyone had been "so misled," Mrs. Clinton said. But she declined to endorse the theory of Sen. Edward Kennedy that the existence of WMD was a "fraud" cooked up by Mr. Bush to justify the war in Iraq.
It was a strong answer and I was impressed. Mrs. Clinton further burnished her credentials as a serious person on national security affairs by refusing once the war turned unpopular to repudiate her vote, as Mr. Edwards had. (Mr. Obama, as a state legislator, had opposed the war from the outset.) She criticized the conduct of the postwar occupation and suggested there might never have been a vote to go to war had it been known Saddam had no WMD. But this was the standard sort of second-guessing by a senator, Democrat or Republican.
Then came January 2007 and two events: the sudden effort by Democrats to compel Mr. Bush to bring the Iraq war to an end and the just-as-sudden acceleration of the presidential race. Mrs. Clinton joined the stampede to cast the president and the war in the most pessimistic light. She dramatically escalated her criticism.
First, after a trip to Iraq, she called for a cap on American troops in Iraq at the current level of 137,000, thus no "surge" in the number of troops. At a Senate hearing a few days later, Mrs. Clinton lectured Gen. David Petraeus, the new Iraq commander, on the appropriate counterinsurgency strategy in Baghdad; she asked the general, the Army's foremost expert on counterinsurgency, no questions. Then during her first campaign trip to Iowa, she demanded Mr. Bush "extricate our country" from Iraq before he leaves office.
It was as if all the pressure had gotten to Mrs. Clinton and she'd forgotten her need to remain resolute on national security. Rather than acting like a potential president, she acted like a bickering senator. She put the reputation she'd earned for seriousness on national security at risk. That the Iraq war was unpopular in 2006 and early 2007 probably won't help her in 2008, when Mr. Bush is stepping down.
The question now is whether Mrs. Clinton will stand up to the political pressure to move left on other issues. In 2005, she boldly reached out to pro-lifers, calling abortion "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." She said both sides in the abortion debate should seek "common ground." Will she repeat that when she and the other Democrats appear before groups like Naral Pro-Choice America?
And on health care, Mrs. Clinton insists she's learned from her painful experience of authoring a failed national plan in 1993 that relied heavily on government mandates. Lobbyists for health-care groups say she speaks approvingly now of injecting free-market incentives into the system. But will she advocate them as part of a centrist health-care initiative in the Democratic primaries?
Presidential campaigns are unfair to liberals. The American electorate prefers presidents to be centrists (Bill Clinton, the elder George Bush) or conservatives (Ronald Reagan, the younger George Bush). Voters usually opt for a presidential candidate who is tough-minded, rather than wavering or vulnerable to fleeting passions, on one issue above all, national security. Hillary Clinton was well on her way to becoming such a candidate. Until now.
Mr. Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is the author of "Rebel-in-Chief" (Crown Forum, 2006).
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Interesting political point by VDH that: "We are in a rare period in American political history, in which the battlefield alone will determine the next election..."
As time permits, I'll post my take on each candidate. So far there isn't one running from my wing of conservatism. A new face with wisdom and maturity is needed in the race, How about Hanson...
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGM2Y2Q1YjYzYzc4NjhiYzI2NzliNGU4M2M4NzhkODk=
February 2, 2007 7:15 AM
Hedging on Iraq
The Democrats prepare for anything, and advocate nothing.
By Victor Davis Hanson
For all the talk of cutting off funds, redeployment, and pulling out, the new Democratic Congress will, at least for now, probably do nothing except speak impassioned words and make implicit threats. Here’s why.
First, they have to digest what they have swallowed. Democratic critics had previously framed their opposition to the war in terms of a disastrous tenure of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; a culpable indifference to the status quo in Baghdad and at Centcom; a failure to listen to the more intellectual generals such as David Petraeus; the “too few troops” mantra; and the lionization of Gens. Shinseki, Zinni, and other shunned military critics.
But now Abizaid, Casey, Khalilzad, and Rumsfeld are all absent — or about to be — from direct involvement in the war. The supposed villain cast of Cobra II and Fiasco has exited, and the purported good guys have entered. David Petraeus will, de facto, be in charge, not just in the strictly military sense, but, given the press and politics of the war, spiritually as well — in the manner that Grant by late summer 1864 had become symbolic of the entire Union military effort that was his to win or lose. Many of those officers involved in the “revolt of the generals” have now largely supported the surge — something Democrats themselves had inadvertently apparently called for when they serially lamented there were too few troops to win in Iraq.
All the old targets of the Democrats are no more, and it will take time for them to re-adjust the crosshairs to aim at men and policies that they have heretofore viewed sympathetically.
Second, there is also a new twist to the Democratic criticism, evident in their increasing attacks on the Iraqi government in general and on Prime Minister Maliki in particular. The Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan/Code Pink rants are no longer to be echoed by bellowing Sens. Durbin, Kennedy, or Kerry, saying in effect that American troops at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or on patrol in Iraq are somehow akin to Hitler, Pol Pot, terrorists, or Saddam Hussein. Instead, in the new liberal brief, we are dying for incompetent Iraqi sectarians who can’t even conduct a decent execution.
That is, we are getting the Sen. Webb brand of critique of Iraq, given in terms of the national interest. Democrats seem to be saying that the Iraqis aren’t worth another American life, and that the hope of democracy over there was misplaced, making futile the rare opportunity offered by American blood and treasure.
It matters little whether this is factually correct; their only concern is the immediate political ramifications of such a “blame ’em” stance. In terms of the effect on military operations, Bush is, in a weird way, sometimes being attacked from his right by the Left — that the Iraqis are tying our hands, or not doing their own part, or incapable of enlightened government.
Not only will the administration bring pressure on Maliki by playing the sympathetic good cop to the Democrats’ bad, but also in the process it will ironically be given, for a time, more leeway to inflict damage on the jihadists. If the old liberal mantra was Abu Ghraib ad nauseam, the new one is that the treacherous Iraqis are releasing those killers that our brave soldiers arrest. While the Democrats may have meant to attack our present tactics in terms of naiveté and incompetence, the charge often translates as insufficient force applied — giving Bush a window to do more, not less.
Third, for all the gloom about Iraq, it remains volatile. We have gone from wild exultation in April 2003 when Saddam’s statue fell, to depression in 2004 during the pullback from Fallujah, to optimism at the elections and the Cedar Revolution in the spring of 2005, to gloom over the sectarian killing. Of course, the politics and punditry have adjusted accordingly.
Now all agree that the surge is not merely an increase of a few thousand troops, but a last effort to bring in new tactics and personnel to win or lose the war in 2007. Given the 2008 election to come, Democrats are crafting the necessary holding position for the next few months, which will allow them to readjust their past records either to defeat or to victory — something difficult to achieve should they now vote to cut off funds before the verdict is in.
Fourth, there is the “what next?” dilemma. It is fine for Democrats to talk of “redeployment” out of Iraq, “engagement” with Syria and Iran, more soft power, Europeans and the United Nations, organizing “regional interests,” etc. — until one realizes that we did mostly just that for most of the 1990s.
And? We got Syrian absorption of Lebanon, Afghanistan as an al Qaeda base, a Libyan WMD program, worldwide serial terrorist attacks, Oslo, a Pakistani bomb, a full-bore Iranian nuclear program, Oil-for-Food — and 9/11. If one doubts any of this, just reflect on why the Democrats have not offered any specific alternative plans. And when pressed, they usually talk only of “talking” and thereby bring embarrassment to even their liberal questioners.
So, privately, some sober Democrats realize that the use of force in the present was a reaction to the frustrations of the past. For all the slurs against the neocons, it could be wise to stay mum, and see whether the stabilization of Afghanistan and Iraq might well, in fact, still provide the United States with options unavailable in the past. It could be even wiser to let Bush take the heat for the ordeal in Iraq, and the slanders against democratization, and then, if it all finally succeeds, to huff, snort, nit-pick about the messy details — and then take advantage of the favorable outcome.
In contrast to the complex daily Democratic triangulation, the Republican position has solidified and can’t really be further nuanced. More troops, Secretary Rumsfeld, new tactics — these are no longer issues between a Sen. McCain and the administration. And the other front-runners likewise support the current effort, and its success or failure will help determine their own particular fates.
We are in a rare period in American political history, in which the battlefield alone will determine the next election, perhaps not seen since 1864. The economy, scandal, social issues, domestic spending, jobs, all these usual criteria and more pale in comparison to what happens in Iraq, where a few thousand brave American soldiers will determine our collective future.
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If only Victor Hanson would run for president....
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Doug, GM:
VDH is probably right that the battlefield may well trump all-- but given the political position of our Commander in Chief, at the moment I glumly doubt a favorable outcome. My understanding is the plan for the "surge" (what a stupid word that is-- for it clearly implies that this effort will promptly recede) that was presented to the President called for 30k troops, so , , , he asked for 20K. IMHO this is simply the latest version of the same mistake that President Bush has been making for quite a while now.
But I digress (please feel to discuss further on the Iraq thread or the Politics thread) and this is the 2008 Presidential Race thread. So here are two articles that must be read together for the relevance to this thread to be understood. :evil:
TAC,
CD
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http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009591
JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL
Paper Chase
Did investigators turn a blind eye to the seriousness of the Sandy Berger scandal?
Monday, January 29, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Washington scandals are curious things. Sometimes special prosecutors are appointed and the media provide saturation coverage of their doings. An example would be the Valerie Plame episode, which led to this month's perjury trial of Scooter Libby, the former White House aide accused of lying about who first told him Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
Then there are the barely noticed scandals, which prosecutors pursue quietly and professionally. Take the case of Donald Keyser, a former State Department official who last week was sentenced to just over a year in jail for keeping classified documents at his home and for lying about his personal relationship with a Taiwanese diplomat.
Then there is Sandy Berger, the former Clinton national security adviser who pleaded guilty last year to knowingly taking and destroying classified documents from the National Archives while preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. When archives officials caught Mr. Berger, they bizarrely first asked a friend of his, former Clinton White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, for an explanation, rather than contact the Justice Department. After initially lying to investigators, Mr. Berger finally admitted that he took the documents, but only for "personal convenience."
Prosecutors accepted Mr. Berger's assurance that he had taken only five documents from the archives, even though on three of his four visits there he had access to original working papers of the National Security Council for which no adequate inventory exists. Nancy Smith, the archives official who provided the materials to Mr. Berger, said that she would "never know what if any original documents were missing." We have only Mr. Berger's word that he didn't take anything else. The Justice Department secured his agreement to take a polygraph on the matter, but never followed through and administered it.
The issue is still relevant. Officials of the 9/11 Commission are now on record expressing "grave concern" about the materials to which Mr. Berger had access. A report from the National Archives Inspector General last month found he took extraordinary measures to spirit them out of the archives, including hiding them in his pockets and socks. He also went outside without an escort and put some documents under a construction trailer, from where he could later retrieve them.
After archives staff became suspicious of Mr. Berger during his third visit, they numbered some of the documents he looked at. After he left, they reviewed the documents and noted that No. 217 was missing. The next time he came, the staff gave him another copy of 217 with the comment that it had been inadvertently not made available to him during his previous visit. Mr. Berger appropriated the same document again.
What could have been so important for Mr. Berger to take such risks? Was he trying to airbrush history by removing embarrassing information about the Clinton administration's fight against Osama bin Laden? As columnist Ron Cass has noted with dry understatement, "Bill Clinton has great sensitivity to his place in history and to accusations that he did too little to respond to al Qaeda." Last year the former president blew up when Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" asked him, "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were president?"
Richard Miniter, author of "Losing bin Laden," notes that in 1996 President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan wrote Mr. Clinton a letter offering to hand over bin Laden, then living in Khartoum. A draft of that document was seen on the desk of a Sudanese official by then-U.S. Ambassador Tim Carney. The document itself has never been found, although there is no suggestion it was among the papers Mr. Berger was perusing.
Despite all of these unanswered questions, Mr. Berger was allowed to plead guilty last year to only a misdemeanor charge. As part of a plea agreement, the Justice Department asked him to pay a $10,000 fine for the violations, perform 100 hours of community service and lose his security clearance for just three years (meaning that he will be eligible to regain it just about the time the next president takes office). The presiding judge, outraged at the lenient plea bargain, bumped the fine up to $50,000.
The Inspector General's report found that the papers Mr. Berger took outlined the adequacy of the government's knowledge of terrorist threats in the U.S. in the final months of the Clinton administration--documents that could have been of some interest to the 9/11 Commission, before which Mr. Berger was scheduled to testify. The Washington Post buried news of the Inspector General's report on page 7; the New York Times dumped it on page 36.
But the report did catch the attention of Rep. Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who last month, while he was still committee chairman, finished his own probe of the Berger affair. This week he and 17 other top Republicans wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to detail the deficiencies the committee has found in the Justice Department's handling of the Berger case. They specifically asked him to administer the polygraph examination that Mr. Berger agreed to but was inexplicably never given.
While a polygraph is not admissible in court, it is a valuable tool investigators can use to lead them to other evidence. Andrew Napolitano, a former judge who is a legal analyst for Fox News, notes: "If they ask him, did you take document X, Y, Z, and he says no, and the polygraph shows that he's lying, that will send them on a hunt for document X, Y, Z." In addition, Mr. Berger would have to take the test under oath and thus could be prosecuted for perjury if he lied, even though his document-theft case is closed.
Philip Zelikow and Daniel Marcus, respectively the executive director and general counsel of the 9/11 Commission, told Mr. Davis's investigators that they were never told Mr. Berger had access to original classified documents for which no copies existed. Had he known, Mr. Zelikow says, he would had "grave concern."
As it was, the 9/11 Commission was not informed of any investigation of Mr. Berger's alleged tampering with documents until only two days before his testimony, and then in only the most vague terms. Not only were the 9/11 Commission not told that Mr. Berger had access to original documents; they were affirmatively led to believe that the commission got all the documents that Mr. Berger took. Both Mr. Zelikow and Mr. Marcus understood Justice to mean that there was no way Mr. Berger had taken any other documents. An investigator for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee bluntly told Fox News last week: "The Justice Department lied to the 9/11 Commission about Sandy Berger. That is a fact." A Justice Department spokesman still insists it "has no evidence that Sandy Berger's actions deprived the 9/11 Commission of documents." But that raises the question: How hard did Justice look for such evidence?
The 9/11 Commission wishes it had known answers to that and more. It's time that Congress and the public learn why the Berger scandal was treated so nonchalantly.
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http://www.youmeworks.com/sherlock_holmes.html
Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century
by Ray Van Dune
~~~
The Case of the Purloined NSC Documents
Mrs. Hudson had only just cleared away the remains of a fast-food luncheon she had brought us from 'round the corner, when my esteemed colleague startled me with a question. "Watson, pray can you tell this humble student of the misdeeds of men, what so perplexes you in the incident of Mr. Sandy Berger?"
Having observed the great Sherlock Holmes for several lifetimes now, I am no stranger to his powers. But I can scarcely describe my amazement at having my thoughts read as clearly as if they were tattooed upon my forehead! I stammered out "But Holmes, how on Earth could you possibly know that bit of nastiness was indeed the subject of my private thoughts?!"
Holmes replied, softly and deliberately in his usual manner of speaking, but he used a charming turn of phrase I had certainly never heard from him before. I instantly determined to work it into my next commercial efforts at chronicling his exploits.
What he said was: "Elementary, my dear Watson."
Holmes continued: "As you were joylessly masticating your wretched cheeseburger, I observed you also distractedly tugging at the tops of your stockings. Have I not told you on occasion before this that such unthinking behaviors offer a window into the thoughts of men, but only to the observer who has attuned his senses to the accurate reading of them?"
I had indeed been ruminating on the actions of the now-disgraced (if insufficiently so) former National Security Advisor. So I was relieved to share with Holmes the exact question that puzzled me. "Yes, indeed you have, but can you now tell me how on Earth could that rascal Berger practically beat this rap altogether? Had he not at a minimum demonstrably lied to Federal investigators, the heinous crime for which the hapless Ms. Stewart did time, and for which the long-suffering Mr. Libby may yet?"
I was taken aback at the uncharacteristic bitterness in Holmes' response. "My good Doctor, please enlighten me… by what mechanism could Berger possibly be convicted of a crime, while never being at the slightest risk of being charged with one?! Can you seriously be unaware, or have you forgotten as has every newspaper reporter, that on the first day after his infamous Patron took an oath on the Good Book, he demanded and received letters of resignation from every US Attorney in the nation, with a view to selectively replacing the last few honest ones with cronies, guaranteed to overlook the skullduggeries from which Democrats have come to enjoy immunity not merely before the law, but just as importantly, in the press!"
"Then I suppose that clears up any remaining mystery," I mumbled, and began to quaff my soft drink. Again I was surprised by the coarseness of speech that Holmes apparently reserves for the subject of Democrats: "It bloody well does no such thing, Watson! There is still the mystery surrounding the true motives of Berger!"
Now, I was perfectly sure that I could identify his motivation, and felt positively giddy with the prospect that I might have seen the truth where the Great Detective had not. Regrettably, I again neglected Mum's advice to "remain silent and let them wonder if you are a fool," etc., and plunged ahead in my quest to be proven one. "Well, his motive is obvious, is it not, Holmes? What plainer impetus to his crime could there be than preserving the fulsome "legacy" of that vainest of former Presidents? Would not that precious national treasure be sullied, were it revealed that he had frittered away several opportunities to vaporize that vile murderous Saudi, whom his fellow Democrats have subsequently made an Albatross for his successor?"
"Ha!" my companion sniffed. "Watson, like you, I curse our bad luck that the first of the 9-11 "pilots" did not dive his aircraft empty of passengers into a certain office address in Harlem, and that the second, perhaps laden with Lawyers, was not plunged into that glass slab of a building on the East River, whose occupants are in the main devoted to the advancement of knavery worldwide!"
"Or vice-versa, it matters not, if only such a just fate could have been meted out to a few hundred professional thieves and hypocrites, instead of such protracted agony to thousands of innocents!" Holmes may speak floridly, but he knows how to make a point.
"Sadly, the attention span of the American public has lapsed thrice over or more since the tragedy occurred, and culpability for it has been villainously sown in nearly every place but the one where it should truly have taken root. Berger's Patron could now simply admit his mistake and claim, with some justification, that in the climate of those times most of his fellow politicians would have made the very same one. Consider that even today there are sitting US Senators who propose that America should emulate the strategies of our own most execrable Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain, the ninny who continues to defile the soil of England by virtue of his burial in it!"
"No, I am afraid that Bubba the First's position in the Pantheon of Presidents is as secure as a fawning press and the hosannas of preening movie stars can make it, which in today's world means it is as sound as Gibraltar."
"Given these sad realities, I must conclude that there was some far greater game afoot than we have yet perceived in this matter. The Democrats' frenzied efforts to, as it were, "Win one for the Groper", seem to have merely been staged for the benefit of the naïf's among us. Nothing could be more certain than that these poseurs value their reputations only insofar as it will serve to cloak their deceits."
I protested to Holmes "But, of those who were present at the National Security Council meetings, and so could have left evidence of their fecklessness in the margins of these documents, surely all are either dead or have retired from the labors of attaining political glory?"
I had to add "True, I can name one Democrat of that vintage who is lamentably neither dead nor retired, but surely even that fool must have known that during a Democrat administration, he had better remain silent on his peanut plantation, lest he lose any more allies or embassies while his party holds office!"
Even as I spoke these last words, I saw that Holmes had closed his eyes and traveled to some inward sanctum of thought, and that he had ceased to be aware of the comparative simpleton who sat before him. But as I prepared to rise for a stroll pending his eventual return to this world, Holmes suddenly exclaimed "Ha!" and awoke. Evidently those with his powers of the intellect need not tarry long in the land of contemplation.
With his first words Holmes demonstrated the acumen for which he has justly earned his immortality, and the right to insist that Mrs. Hudson and I be allowed to accompany him on that long journey. But I digress.
Holmes now spoke: "It is clear as crystal to me, my good friend! You will note that having eliminated the motive of protecting any who were entitled and required to participate in those NSC meetings, especially as they and their political aspirations have died away, we are inexorably drawn toward one stunning conclusion."
After an awkward silence of several seconds, I assayed "We may indeed be inexorably drawn there, Holmes, but could you favor me with a description of our destination?"
Holmes drew upon his pipe and came forth with one of his trademark perfectly-formed smoke rings. "Very well, can there be any doubt that Mr. Berger and his Patron were seeking to protect someone who has neither of the characteristics I have just mentioned?"
Holmes saw my confusion and elaborated "They seek to protect the identity of one who should NOT have been at any meeting of the National Security Council, and whose thirst for political power has NOT yet been slaked!"
"I dare say that this person argued eloquently for "kicking the can down the road", a course that would ultimately lead to disaster. Indeed, they argued for it so convincingly that their disastrous advice carried the day! And their words that will ultimately prove a curse on them are noted on the margins of the purloined documents! Nay, I should say they were so noted, until our gallant Sandbagger rescued them from the possibility of inspection by future historians!"
Indignant, I could only splutter "My God, Holmes! Who the deuce is this mystery man that the Democrats strive to protect from his own disgraceful advice?!"
Suddenly the door to our sitting chamber was kicked violently open by an obviously enraged Mrs. Hudson! She stood with one foot drawn back as if to ready to resume the kicking of things, and from her expression I feared she was set on starting out with me! Clearly, the old girl had been eavesdropping outside our chamber, when at this hour of the afternoon we should have expected to find her at the neighborhood bingo parlor!
In her fury, her lips at first could only move soundlessly, but she overcame this obstacle soon enough.
"Dr. Watson, you must certainly know our Mr. Holmes is acclaimed as the smartest man in the whole bloody world, but do you realize how my conviction in that is tested whenever I see him handing you his loaded revolver! You must be utterly bereft of a clue, and probably are still a virgin. Quite evidently, you lack even the requisite two brain cells that might by accident rub up against each other to create the illusion of thought!"
I sat there, totally at a loss for words. Mrs. Hudson however, was far from out of them, and she re-exploded…
"Oh, for Pete's sake — right-click on it, you old fart! There is no bloody mystery man!" Her eyes rolled back into her head until nearly only the whites showed. She almost screamed.
"Hallooo — this is the bloody Earth calling Dr. Watson! We'll have film at 11:00, but the breaking news about your friggen mystery man is that he's a she!!"
I could only croak out "A she…?" Mrs. Hudson went on "Now perhaps even you can guess why the old Sandbagger was happy to help her out of a jam, and even take that suite at the Crowbar Hotel if need be?"
"No, not for sex, you old buzzard — it was for his bloody health! He wanted to avoid that lead-poisoning this lady's ex-friends are so prone to… the kind you can catch from a .45 automatic!"
Mrs. Hudson paused for a long breath, which I feared was only a reload for another broadside. But her irritation was now dissipating, and perhaps she even felt a twinge of care that her stinging words may have wounded me. She came forward into the room, and looked down at me with pity as I slumped in my chair, more bewildered than ever.
"Dear silly old Watson, can't you see who Holmes is on about… it's Hillary!"
I cried out "Holmes, for God's sake, what say you of this?!" The Great Detective languidly drew at his pipe and produced another perfect smoke ring. His smile flashed, but his eyes were devoid of any mirth.
"Bingo!" said Holmes.
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Tancredo pushes for border security
By PAULA LAVIGNE
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
February 4, 2007
Council Bluffs, Ia. - Saying that illegal immigration has diluted the country's patriotism, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo advocated that border security be the nation's top priority. He spoke during a visit Saturday with supporters in western Iowa.
The Republican presidential candidate spoke to about 60 people Saturday afternoon at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 737 hall in Council Bluffs. He also visited Sioux City.
Since 1999, the Denver native has represented Colorado's 6th Congressional District.
Tancredo has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration's proposal to grant amnesty for illegal immigrants.
"We have a cult of multiculturalism. This is what permeates our society," he said. Immigrants who come to the United States but refuse to assimilate by learning the language and following the laws water down what it means to be an American, he said.
"It's a cultural, political, linguistic tower of Babel," he said.
He favors eliminating incentives for immigrants to come to the United States and reducing the number of legal immigrants.
The nation should enforce its immigration laws by building a fence along the border with Mexico, deporting illegal immigrants and going after companies that hire them for cheap labor, he said.
He cited the Dec. 12 raids on the Swift & Co. meat processing plants in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement netted 1,300 people, including almost 100 workers from the plant in Marshalltown.
"Amazingly, miraculously, all plants are operating. They're right at capacity again," said Tancredo. The congressman said he didn't know who Swift hired to replace the deported workers. "But are there Americans who would work there? You be there are," he said.
The congressman did not address the border with Canada, which is 4,000 miles long when including Alaska.
He said illegal immigrants are a drain on the nation's health care, schools and other entitlement programs and he suggested doing away with bilingual education.
Spending on English-as-a-second-language classes also concerns Peggy Sieleman, 39, from Persia, a small town north of Council Bluffs. Sieleman has four school-age children.
Government spending on social programs, especially education, should instead go toward veterans and programs for the elderly, she said. She said she supports Tancredo because he advocates better enforcement of the nation's existing immigration laws.
"I like that he speaks the truth and he does his research," she said. "He is a man of honor and character."
Tancredo is a former teacher who also worked in Colorado for the U.S. Department of Education under former presidents Reagan and Bush.
Although Tancredo doesn't have the national profile of more well-known Republican candidates such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, he recently entered the spotlight tied to today's Super Bowl in Miami.
Tancredo referred to Miami as a "Third World country" because many of the city's don't speak English. That caught the ire of Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry.
As part of his jabs against the congressman, whom Barry referred to as a "xenophobic dimwit," the columnist told readers to call Tancredo's office for Super Bowl tickets.
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I share the essence of Tancredo's concerns, but think he makes a major mistake with his thinking about legal immigration. There are many categories of legal immigration which are quite good for the United States and I am not getting that he gets that. I am also not getting that he gets the consequences for Mexico of successful execution of his ideas-- to have millions of motivated people kept in Mexico unemployed on top of those already there on top of the burgeoning narco economy is something that needs to be thought about carefully. I also am not getting that he gets all the ways in which Mexco and Mexicans are good for the US. Yes, I agree 100% that we need to control our borders!!! AND he needs to grow in his message to address these other things.
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BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, February 5, 2007 4:00 p.m. EST
Indecision 2008
Last Monday we faulted Sen. Hillary Clinton for demanding that President Bush "extricate" America from Iraq before he leaves office, and for saying, of the president's view that troops will have to remain there into his successor's (i.e., her) term, "I really resent it." We wrote, "If withdrawing from Iraq is in America's interests, why doesn't Mrs. Clinton--who by the way voted for the war--simply urge President Bush to do so on that ground, or promise to do so herself if elected?"
By the end of the week she had done as we suggested--or so the headlines seemed to indicate. "Clinton Promises to End War if Elected" was the title of an Associated Press dispatch Friday afternoon, which reported that Mrs. Clinton told a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, "If we in Congress don't end this war before January 2009, as president, I will."
Well, now, that sounds definitive. Yet on Friday's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," Democratic operative Robert Zimmerman (who, according to TPMCafe.com, had just been "bagged" by Mrs. Clinton as a fund-raiser) was furiously backtracking, in an exchange involving your humble columnist (we've made a few corrections to the CNN transcript):
Dobbs: And Sen. Clinton told you today and all those other folks sitting there, she's out of Iraq immediately if she's elected president in 2008.
Zimmerman: Well, she laid out a plan, and she put some ideas before the table that were received very well. And I applaud her initiative for doing so. Obviously, she's not pulling everyone out Jan. 20, and that's--
Dobbs: Good grief.
Zimmerman: And that's not the full statement of what she said.
Dobbs: Robert, we're going to have to pull you out of Washington. You're starting to sound like you live there, man.
Zimmerman: No, but I think, truly, you can't--you know, as Kenneth Pollack pointed out from Brookings, there aren't solutions. There are just very tough choices.
Dobbs: Let me turn to James Taranto. Now, what is the solution from--in your lights, to Iraq? What is the solution?
Taranto: Well, I don't know. I think whatever it is, it's going to be long and hard. I'm just not a military strategist. I don't--I don't feel qualified to answer that question.
I will say on Mrs. Clinton, though, I think that Robert is actually right, at least in terms of predicting what she's going to do. If she becomes president in 2009 and we are still in Iraq, as I suspect we will be, she's not going to pull out. She's not going to keep this promise. She's telling this to rally the base.
Zimmerman: I didn't say that, James. I have every belief that she will keep her promise. And she's been remarkably consistent on Iraq, where others have wavered. Because the solution is not going to be military, it's going to be a political solution.
We had not seen or read the speech when we appeared on the Dobbs show, but we looked it up later and found that (1) Zimmerman's description of it was substantially accurate, and (2) Mrs. Clinton's promise to withdraw upon inauguration was even emptier than we had thought. Here's what she said:
Now, I know very well that we're going to be debating, starting this week in the Senate, a resolution of disapproval of this president's ill-conceived plan to escalate our involvement in Iraq. Now, there are many people--there are many people who wish we could do more, but let me say that if we can get a large bipartisan vote to disapprove this president's plan for escalation, that will be the first time that we will have said "no" to President Bush and begin to reverse his policies.
Now, I want to go further. I propose capping the troop levels. I want to make it very clear that we need to threaten the Iraqi government, that we're going to take money away from their troops, not our troops who still lack body armor and armored vehicles; that we're going to send a clear message--that we are finished with their empty promises and with this president's blank check.
And let me add one other thing, and I want to be very clear about this. If I had been president in October of 2002, I would not have started this war. I would not--and if in Congress, if we in Congress, working as hard as we can to get the 60 votes you need to do anything in the Senate--believe me, I understand the frustration and the outrage, you have to have 60 votes to cap troops, to limit funding, to do anything.
If we in Congress don't end this war before January 2009, as president, I will.
And I expect to be busy in the White House in January 2009, because once and for all, we are going to provide quality, affordable, universal health-care coverage to every single American.
So she's going to end the war and give health insurance to everyone--all in the last 11 days of January! Okey dokey, artichokey.
The most telling line in Mrs. Clinton's speech is that counterfactual conditional: "If I had been president in October of 2002, I would not have started this war." This is quite an astonishing statement, seeing as how in October 2002 Mrs. Clinton voted for the war. And yet when you stop and think about it, the statement is not intuitively false. If you can imagine Mrs. Clinton as president in October 2002, you probably can imagine her not starting the Iraq war.
Whether or not you think the war was a good idea, it was indisputably the product of President Bush's leadership. He rallied the country behind it, so that it commanded something like 70% support in opinion polls. Congress's support was similarly strong, with 69% of the House and 77% of the Senate (including not just Mrs. Clinton but also fellow Democratic presidential candidates John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, along with John Kerry) voting in favor of the war.
Mrs. Clinton now says that if she were president in 2002, she would not have led the country to war. This amounts to an acknowledgment that her vote in favor of the war was not an act of leadership--that she was a follower. Was she following the president? This president? Obviously not. President Bush led the public to support the war, and Sen. Clinton followed the public. Now that public opinion has turned against the president and the war, so has Mrs. Clinton.
How does Mrs. Clinton deal with a problem about which public opinion has not yet gelled? On Thursday she spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and blogress Heather Robinson captured this choice quote:
I have advocated engagement with our enemies and Israel's enemies because I want to understand better what we can do to defeat those who . . . are aiming their weapons at us. . . . This is a worthy debate. . . . There are many, including our president, who reject any engagement with Iran and Syria. I believe that is a good-faith position to take, but I'm not sure it's the smart strategy that'll take us to the goal we share.
What do I mean by engagement or some kind of process? I'm not sure anything positive would come out of it . . . but there are a number of factors that argue for doing what I'm suggesting.
Says Robinson: "And what was it she was suggesting, exactly? Well, she never said."
So on Iraq, Mrs. Clinton stands resolutely on the side of public opinion, whichever side that may be in any given year. On Iran, about which public opinion is unformed, she is maddeningly noncommittal. This is fine for a senator, who merely casts one vote among 100. But the president--especially in times of international peril--needs to be able to make decisions in the national interest. Sometimes that means shaping public opinion, as President Bush did when he persuaded the public and Congress to support the war in Iraq. Sometimes it means defying public opinion, as Bush has done lately by resisting pressure to flee.
Were these decisions bad ones? History will judge, but at the moment most Americans seem to think so. Mrs. Clinton is seeking to become President Bush's successor by countering his dangerous boldness with extreme caution. She is presenting herself as the candidate who won't make bad decisions because she won't make decisions--who won't lead us astray because she will not lead.
But an excess of caution is itself a form of recklessness. Someone who won't make decisions won't make good or necessary decisions either. Therein lies the peril of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Oh Grow Up!
"The president gets on my nerves. The war gets on my nerves. I don't think it's affected our lives that much, 'cause I'm too young to drive, I'm too young to vote. But killing and death in general, I don't know, it bothers me mentally."--Colin Wilkey, 15, a freshman at Hopkinton High School, quoted in the "Teen Life" feature of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, Feb. 5
"I think it's the height of irresponsibility and I really resent it--this was his decision to go to war, he went with an ill-conceived plan, an incompetently executed strategy, and we should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office."--Hillary Clinton, 59, a sophomore in the U.S. Senate, quoted in the "Politics" section of the New York Times, Jan. 28
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Picking a couple passages from Reagan speeches in honor of his birthday in the context of looking for a governing philosophy for our next leader. (If your time is limited, read the two Reagan speeches linked rather than my ramblings.) Here is Reagan quoting Lincoln:
"What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."" - Reagan speech 1992 RNC http://www.presidentreagan.info/speeches/rnc.cfm
Amazingly, what was an issue for Lincoln, was the issue of Reagan and certainly the economic issue of 2008. Distracted by war, Republicans largely didn't show up for the debate on economic policy differences in 2006 and for the most part couldn't demonstrate that their view was noticably different from their opponents.
Here's another Reagan quote from his farewell Oval office speech expanding on what he meant by his usage of the famous Shining City on a Hill vision:
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still." http://www.presidentreagan.info/speeches/farewell.cfm
There is so much in there. For today's controversies I'll pick out the parts about free ports and open doors.
Free trade versus protectionism has been debated for centuries. Both parties have members on both sides. Put me with Reagan and the free traders. I see at least one conservative running with tendencies toward protectionism.
Lastly, I don't interpret the Reagan vision of open doors to be in conflict with the paramount need today to secure our borders; there aren't any suicide bombers in his shining city vision. In my view we can should favor and encourage increased legal immigration and guest workers, highly screened, while enacting a lock-down, zero tolerance border enforcement for our national security (echoing what Crafty wrote in the previous post). My reasons are economic and moral, but I also think a general anti-immigration message will not win in 2008.
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All:
In my sense of "how the world works" one of the very most important things is marginal tax rates. Sen. McCain I perceive as not being good on this issue, and Guliani as having better instincts. I saw a bit of Romney on the tube last night wherein he was speaking about taxes and I was pretty impressed-- the man identified himself as a supply-sider. IMHO supply side's "win-win" attitude is also politically sound for Republicans as a counter to Dems promises of tax "Peter to give to Paul & Mary."
Here's this from this morning's NY Slimes on Romney:
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Mormon Candidate Braces for Religion as Issue
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: February 8, 2007
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — As he begins campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is facing a threshold issue: Will his religion — he is a Mormon — be a big obstacle to winning the White House?
Polls show a substantial number of Americans will not vote for a Mormon for president. The religion is viewed with suspicion by Christian conservatives, a vital part of the Republicans’ primary base.
Mr. Romney’s advisers acknowledged that popular misconceptions about Mormonism — as well as questions about whether Mormons are beholden to their church’s leaders on public policy — could give his opponents ammunition in the wide-open fight among Republicans to become the consensus candidate of social conservatives.
Mr. Romney, in an extended interview on the subject as he drove through South Carolina last week, expressed confidence that he could quell concerns about his faith, pointing to his own experience winning in Massachusetts. He said he shared with many Americans the bafflement over obsolete Mormon practices like polygamy — he described it as “bizarre” — and disputed the argument that his faith would require him to be loyal to his church before his country.
“People have interest early on in your religion and any similar element of your background,” he said. “But as soon as they begin to watch you on TV and see the debates and hear you talking about issues, they are overwhelmingly concerned with your vision of the future and the leadership skills that you can bring to bear.”
Still, Mr. Romney is taking no chances. He has set up a meeting this month in Florida with 100 ministers and religious broadcasters. That gathering follows what was by all accounts a successful meeting at his home last fall with evangelical leaders, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell; the Rev. Franklin Graham, who is a son of the Rev. Billy Graham; and Paula White, a popular preacher.
Mr. Romney said he was giving strong consideration to a public address about his faith and political views, modeled after the one John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 in the face of a wave of concern about his being a Roman Catholic.
Mr. Romney’s aides said he had closely studied Kennedy’s speech in trying to measure how to navigate the task of becoming the nation’s first Mormon president, and he has consulted other Mormon elected leaders, including Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, about how to proceed.
Mr. Romney appears to be making some headway. Several prominent evangelical leaders said that, after meeting him, they had grown sufficiently comfortable with the notion of Mr. Romney as president to overcome any concerns they might have about his religion.
On a pragmatic level, some said that Mr. Romney — despite questions among conservatives about his shifting views on abortion and gay rights — struck them as the Republican candidate best able to win and carry their social conservative agenda to the White House.
“There’s this growing acceptance of this idea that Mitt Romney may well be and is our best candidate,” said Jay Sekulow, the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal advocacy group, and a prominent host on Christian radio.
Mark DeMoss, an evangelical public relations consultant who represents many conservative Christian groups, said it was “more important to me that a candidate shares my values than my faith,” adding, “And if I look at it this way, Mr. Romney would be my top choice.”
Mormons consider themselves to be Christians, but some beliefs central to Mormons are regarded by other churches as heretical. For example, Mormons have three books of Scripture other than the Bible, including the Book of Mormon, which Mormons believe was translated from golden plates discovered in 1827 by Joseph Smith Jr., the church’s founder and first prophet.
Mormons believe that Smith rescued Christianity from apostasy and restored the church to what was envisioned in the New Testament — but these doctrines are beyond the pale for most Christian churches.
Beyond that, there are perceptions among some people regarding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the church is formally known, that account for at least some of the public unease: that Mormons still practice polygamy (the church renounced polygamy in 1890), that it is more of a cult than a religion and that its members take political direction from the church’s leaders.
Several Republicans said such perceptions could be a problem for Mr. Romney, especially in the South, which has had a disproportionate influence in selecting Republican presidential nominees.
Gloria A. Haskins, a state representative from South Carolina who is supporting Senator John McCain for the Republican nomination, said discussions with her constituents in Greenville, an evangelical stronghold, convinced her that a Mormon like Mr. Romney could not win a Republican primary in her state. South Carolina has one of the earliest, and most critical, primaries next year.
“From what I hear in my district, it is very doubtful,” Ms. Haskins said. “This is South Carolina. We’re very mainstream, evangelical, Christian, conservative. It will come up. In this of all states, it will come up.”
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But Katon Dawson, the state Republican chairman, said he thought Mr. Romney had made significant progress in dealing with those concerns. “I have heard him on his personal faith and on his character and conviction and the love for his country,” Mr. Dawson said. “I have all confidence that he will be able to answer those questions, whether they be in negative ads against him or in forums or in debates.”
Mr. Romney’s candidacy has stirred discussion about faith and the White House unlike any since Kennedy, including a remarkable debate that unfolded recently in The New Republic. Damon Linker, a critic of the influence of Christian conservatism on politics, described Mormonism as a “theologically unstable, and thus politically perilous, religion.”
The article brought a stinging rebuttal in the same publication from Richard Lyman Bushman, a Mormon who is a history professor at Columbia University, and who said Mr. Linker’s arguments had “no grounding in reality.”
Mr. Romney is not the first Mormon to seek a presidential nomination, but by every indication he has the best chance yet of being in the general election next year. His father, George Romney, was a candidate in 1968, but his campaign collapsed before he ever had to deal seriously with questions about religion.
Senator Hatch said his own candidacy in 2000, which was something of a long shot, was to “knock down prejudice against my faith.”
“There’s a lot of prejudice out there,” Mr. Hatch said. “We’ve come a long way, but there are still many people around the country who consider the Mormon faith a cult.”
But if Mr. Romney has made progress with evangelicals, he appears to face a larger challenge in dispelling apprehensions among the public at large. A national poll by The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News last June found 37 percent said they would not vote for a Mormon for president.
Mr. Romney offered assurances that seemed to reflect what Kennedy told the nation in discussing his Catholicism some 50 years ago. Mr. Romney said the requirements of his faith would never overcome his political obligations. He pointed out that in Massachusetts, he had signed laws allowing stores to sell alcohol on Sundays, even though he was prohibited by his faith from drinking, and to expand the state lottery, though Mormons are forbidden to gamble. He also noted that Mormons are not exclusively Republicans, pointing to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader.
“There’s no church-directed view,” Mr. Romney said. “How can you have Harry Reid on one side and Orrin Hatch on the other without recognizing that the church doesn’t direct political views? I very clearly subscribe to Abraham Lincoln’s view of America’s political religion. And that is when you take the oath of office, your responsibility is to the nation, and that is first and foremost.”
He said he was not concerned about the resistance in the polls. “If you did a poll and said: ‘Could a divorced actor be elected as president? Would you vote for a divorced actor as president?’ my guess is 70 percent would say no. But then they saw Ronald Reagan. They heard him. They heard his vision. They heard his experience. They said: ‘I like Ronald Reagan. I’m voting for him.’ ”
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Second post of the morning:
WSJ:
CAMPAIGN 2008
Reckless Caution
Edwards vs. Clinton: Indecision 2008.
BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, February 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
When NBC's Tim Russert asked John Edwards on Sunday if he, as president, would accept a nuclear-armed Iran, the silver-tongued lawyer got tongue-tied: "I--there's no answer to that question at this moment. I think that it's a--it's a--it's a very bad thing for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. I think we have--we have many steps in front of us that have not been used. We ought to negotiate directly with the Iranians, which has not, not been done. The things that I just talked about, I think, are the right approach in dealing with Iran. And then we'll, we'll see what the result is. . . . I think--I think the--we don't know, and you have to make a judgment as you go along, and that's what I would do as president."
Less than two weeks earlier, Mr. Edwards had spoken by satellite to Israel's annual Herzliya Conference. "Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. . . . To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table. Let me reiterate--all options must remain on the table."
Why did Mr. Edwards's views morph so quickly from hawkish to weaselly? Probably because confrontation with Iran is very unpopular among the Democratic antiwar base. Last week Ezra Klein of The American Prospect, a left-liberal magazine, confronted Mr. Edwards about the Herzliya speech, and the candidate waffled. Although allowing that "it would be foolish for any American president to ever take any option off the table," he offered this criticism of President Bush: "When he uses this kind of language 'options are on the table,' he does it in a very threatening kind of way." Does Mr. Edwards mean to be docile?
Mr. Klein asked if America can live with a nuclear Iran. "I'm not ready to cross that bridge yet," Mr. Edwards answered. There's a world of difference between the unequivocal "under no circumstances" and the coy "I'm not ready." And that "yet" suggests it is only a matter of time before he does cross the bridge.
Mr. Edwards is not the only Democratic presidential candidate without a comprehensible position on Iran. Last week Hillary Clinton spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Heather Robinson of PoliticalMavens.com reported that Mrs. Clinton said: "There are many, including our president, who reject any engagement with Iran and Syria. I believe that is a good-faith position to take, but I'm not sure it's the smart strategy that'll take us to the goal we share. What do I mean by engagement or some kind of process? I'm not sure anything positive would come out of it . . . but there are a number of factors that argue for doing what I'm suggesting." Whatever that may be.
Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have something else in common: Both voted for the Iraq war in 2002, and both turned against it only after it became unpopular. On Iraq, they followed public opinion; on Iran, they are waiting to be led.
Pandering to public sentiment may be fine for a senator, but the president needs to be able to make decisions in the national interest--which sometimes means shaping public opinion, sometimes defying it. Mr. Bush has done both, whether or not his decisions were wise ones.
Perhaps voters next year, chastened by Mr. Bush's dangerous boldness, will opt for someone more risk-averse. But if a crisis arises and the president proves unable to lead, they may find themselves longing for Mr. Bush's steadfastness. An excess of caution is itself a form of recklessness.
Mr. Taranto is the editor of OpinionJournal.com.
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Hillary on Iraq
From stalwart hawk to get out fast.
Thursday, February 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
One pleasant surprise of Hillary Rodham Clinton's tenure as New York Senator has been her tough-minded approach on national security. She responded to 9/11 by supporting President Bush's strategy of taking on not just terrorists but the states that harbor them. She also voted for the war in Iraq and has refused to follow much of her party in alleging that Mr. Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction.
But as Mrs. Clinton bids to win the Democratic Presidential nomination, she is taking a marked turn to the left. Pressured by other candidates and by her party's left wing, she is walking back her hawkish statements and is now all but part of the antiwar camp. The polls show her to be the favorite to be the next Commander in Chief, so what she really believes, and how firmly she'll stick to it, deserves to be debated. Here's a summary of the arc of Mrs. Clinton's public thinking on Iraq:
• October 10, 2002. Mrs. Clinton addresses the Senate on the use-of-force resolution. "The facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt," she declares, citing Saddam's record of using chemical weapons, the invasion of Kuwait, and his history of deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors. "As a result, President Clinton, with the British and others, ordered an intensive four-day air assault, Operation Desert Fox, on known and suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and other military targets," she continues, adding that Saddam "has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members."
While she expresses her preference for working through the U.N. if possible, she adds, "I believe the authority to use force to enforce that mandate is inherent in the original 1991 U.N. resolution, as President Clinton recognized when he launched Operation Desert Fox in 1998."
• December 15, 2003. It is clear by now that no large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. But Mrs. Clinton tells the Council on Foreign Relations that "Yesterday was a good day. I was thrilled that Saddam Hussein had finally been captured. . . . We owe a great debt of gratitude to our troops, to the President, to our intelligence services, to all who had a hand in apprehending Saddam. Now he will be brought to justice."
She adds, "I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote." As for Iraq's prospects, she declares herself "a little optimistic and a little pessimistic . . . We have no option but to stay involved and committed."
• April 20, 2004. Mrs. Clinton tells Larry King: "I don't regret giving the President the authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." Asked whether she thinks she was "fooled," she replies: "The consensus was the same, from the Clinton Administration to the Bush Administration. It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared about the weapons of mass destruction."
• October 2005. Antiwar fervor on the left is picking up, and activist Cindy Sheehan compares her to Rush Limbaugh after Mrs. Clinton tells the Village Voice: "My bottom line is that I don't want their sons to die in vain. . . . I don't believe it's smart to set a date for withdrawal . . . I don't think it's the right time to withdraw."
• November 2005. Mrs. Clinton posts a letter to constituents that marks her first dovish turn. "If Congress had been asked [to authorize the war], based on what we know now, we never would have agreed," she writes. But invoking retired General Eric Shinseki's estimate of more American troops necessary to pacify Iraq, she demands not withdrawal but a new plan: "It is time for the President to stop serving up platitudes and present us with a plan for finishing this war with success and honor--not a rigid timetable that terrorists can exploit, but a public plan for winning and concluding the war."
• August 3, 2006. Mrs. Clinton calls for Donald Rumsfeld to resign as Defense Secretary, asking for "new leadership that would give us a fighting chance to turn the situation around before it's too late."
• December 18, 2006. Her march left gains speed. On NBC's "Today" show, Mrs. Clinton renounces her war vote unequivocally for the first time: "I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."
• January 13, 2007. From Baghdad, Mrs. Clinton responds to Mr. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq to secure Baghdad: "I don't know that the American people or the Congress at this point believe this mission can work. And in the absence of a commitment that is backed up by actions from the Iraqi government, why should we believe it?"
• January 17, 2007. Mrs. Clinton calls for capping the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, saying she will introduce legislation to do so. And while she says she won't block money for the troops, she suggests withholding funds for the Iraqi government. It is precisely such a funds cut-off to the South Vietnamese government in 1975 that led to the final U.S. flight from Saigon.
• January 27, 2007. On the campaign trail in Iowa, Mrs. Clinton demands that President Bush "extricate our country from this before he leaves office." And she promises that, if elected, she will end the war quickly.
All politicians change their minds about something at some point, but what's troubling about Mrs. Clinton's record on Iraq is that it tends to follow, rather than lead, public opinion. When the war was first debated, and she couldn't easily walk away from her husband's record against Saddam, she was a solid, even eloquent, hawk. Then for a time she laid low and avoided the antiwar excesses of John Kerry and others.
But now that the war has proven to be difficult, and her fellow Democrats are outflanking her on the antiwar left, she is steadily, even rapidly, moving in their direction. So in the space of merely 14 months and as the Presidential campaign begins in earnest, Mrs. Clinton has gone from advocating a new plan to "win" the Iraq war, with "honor," to vocally opposing President Bush's new strategy to try to do precisely that. And, oh, yes, she now wants the "surge" to be in Afghanistan instead of Iraq.
The question we'd ask is whether this is the kind of stalwart drift that Mrs. Clinton would bring to the Oval Office?
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Below is Peggy Noonan on Hillary v. Rudy. First my take on the players so far. My bias is right-wing, free market, low tax, limited government, strong defense conservative with certain, limited, 'neocon' type tendencies.
I agree with the points above on Edwards indecisiveness and Hillary on war. Obama, I think, is a good man, too far left for me, and too far left for America if people choose to consider that. Unqualified in the sense of executive experience, but not necessarily unelectable.
The top Republicans have greater stature. Quoting powerline:
"John McCain is a war hero. In addition, as a U.S. Senator he's been at the forefront of nearly every major legislative battle for well over a decade. For better or worse, his footprints are all over our election laws, the judicial confirmation wars, and the war against terrorism, to cite three leading examples."
I don't support McCain and I think they don't either. But he is qualified to be President.
Mitt Romney I just don't know. Some conservatives are turning toward him. To me, it seems his conservative views are too recent for me to trust. He does comes across as presidential.
Rudy is the front-runner. His liberal social views, different than mine, perhaps make him more electable, yet he says he would appoint non-activist judges in the spirit of Roberts and Alito. He has executive experience, national clout, a solid conservative record on tax and spend issues, and a strong persuasive view of taking the fight to the enemy. He is consistent, diplomatic and unapologetic with his views. That's better than shifting in most cases. That said, and that Rudy personally detests abortion, as a man and a father I have no idea what the phrase "a woman's right to choose" means, except that a legislating court made a ruling in violation of the judicial principles that Giuliani supports.
I am hoping to learn more from others here especially those who favor the other candidates. Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo have not been able to break through with measuralbe support. I like Hunter but have concern about a tendency toward protectionism. Brownback I believe is anti-war. For some that is a positive quality. Tancredo is too single issue oriented for my taste and on that issue I think he mixes an anti-immigration feeling with the important border security message. (I'm happy to be corrected on that or anything else.)
Later in the campaigns people complain about not having the best candidates to choose from. I am voicing my frustration right now. The only other name mentioned around that matches my views better is Newt Gingrich. I don't find him to be presidential and in his case I am not confidant he can win a general election which is more important to me than matching my views perfectly.
Maybe I am just to picky. Anyway, the score right now is Hillary versus Rudy. Rudy reaches better to the middle and so he wins if the election is held today and if conservatives show up. Of course the election isn't held today. They have nearly a couple of years to bring him down.
Here is Peggy Noonan on that particular matchup:
New York, New York
Rudy vs. Hillary in 2008?
Friday, February 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
According to polls, Hillary Clinton holds an early and significant lead among Democratic voters (43%, compared with 22% for Barack Obama, according to a Fox News poll 10 days ago). She is of course the killer fund-raiser of the race, with one of her contributors crowing this week that she'll raise more money than all the other candidates combined. So let's call her the likely Democratic nominee, even though Mr. Obama hasn't even announced yet. On the Republican side it's Giuliani time, with Fox News putting him at 34% among GOP voters and John McCain coming in second with 22%. He hasn't announced yet either, but this week he filed all the papers.
So at the moment, and with keen awareness that not a vote has been cast, it is possible to say the state of New York is poised to become the home of both major-party presidential candidates. This is not unprecedented, but it is unusual. It happened in 1904, when New York, was the home of the hero of Oyster Bay, President Theodore Roosevelt, and reluctant Democratic nominee Alton Parker, a judge on New York's Court of Appeals, who carried only the solid South. It happened again in New York in 1944, when Teddy's cousin Franklin sought a fourth term against the bland and mustachioed Thomas Dewey, the New York district attorney unforgettably labeled by Teddy's daughter, the chilly and amusing Alice Roosevelt Longworth, "the little man on the wedding cake." In 1920 both the Democratic and Republican nominees were from Ohio; Sen. Warren Harding, who seemed boring but proved sprightly, landslided Democrat James Cox, a dreamy Wilsonian who thought America wished to hear more about the League of Nations. (Illinois was the first state to enjoy dual nominees when Republican Abraham Lincoln beat Stephen Douglas, the official but not the only Democratic candidate that year.)
Right now New York, our beloved, overtaxed, postindustrial state, is the red-hot center of the political map.
These are exciting times, with rival gangs roaming uptown and down looking for money and support. The styles of the two tongs are different. Hillary's people are cool and give away nothing; they're all business. They're like a captain from an army about to crush you. Why should he bother to charm you?
Rudy's people are more like old-style New Yorkers: They are pugnacious, and if you express reservations about their guy, they give you the chin. They don't make the case or try to persuade; they tilt their chins up and try to argue you into conceding he can win. As if they think it's all on them, and if they can win the conversation, he will win the nomination.
The city, as we say in the state, is full of people who've met both candidates, know them, had dealings with them. The other night I bumped into a veteran journalist who talked about Iran. The journalist said, "I wrote Hillary and gave her good advice but she didn't write back!" I went to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech Mrs. Clinton gave last week, and the higher geopolitical meanings of the event aside, the crowd ate dinner as she spoke and didn't seem unduly impressed. They'd seen her before and would see her again.
What a boon the race is for the tabloid press and the mainstream media: If New York's at the center, they're at the center. The tabloids had fun with the formal debut, via a Harper's Bazaar interview, of Judi Giuliani. The Post famously front-paged The Kiss, a posed and mildly creepy smooch--it was bigger story in New York than the mad astronaut--and her recent reflections that the presidential race is "a journey" they can make "together." It left one observer--that would be me--saying, "Oh no, please no." In politics, in the world of political life, the proper attitude of a third wife is modesty.
Mrs. Clinton also has an interesting spouse.
Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton seem in a way to represent two different New Yorks, two different templates of what it is to be a New Yorker. Rudy as mayor: An embattled pol bickering with reporters trying to bait him. A Western European ethnic from the outer boroughs with a slight hunch to his shoulders. He does the chin too, or did. His people probably got it from him. He was the government-prosecutor son of a Brooklyn guy, a Republican in a Democratic town, a man who had ideas--convictions!--about how to cut crime and stop the long slide, and who had to move entire establishments (and if there's one thing New York knows how to make, it's establishments) to get his way. And he pretty much did, winning progress and enmity along the way. On 9/10/01 he was a bum, on 9/11 he was a man, and on 9/12 he was a hero. Life can change, shift, upend in an instant.
Mrs. Clinton is not ethnic or outer-borough. She's suburban, middle class; she was raised in a handsome town in Illinois and lived an adulthood in Arkansas and Washington. She founded the original war room, is called "The Warrior" by some of her staff, has been fierce and combative in private, but obscures it all now under clouds of pink scarves. She literally hides the chin.
Both candidates seem now almost...jarringly happy. As if they've arrived and it's good, which they have and it is. But good fortune distances. They are both rich now, and both have spent the past six years being lauded and praised. In both it seems to have softened their edges--the easy, ready smile. We'll see if it's softened their heads.
But it is significant that in Mrs. Clinton's case, for the past 30 years, from 1978 through 2007--which is to say throughout most, almost all, of her adulthood--her view of America, and of American life, came through the tinted window of a limousine. (Now the view is, mostly, through the tinted window of an SUV.)
From first lady of Arkansas through first lady of the United States to U.S. senator, her life has been eased and cosseted by staff--by aides, drivers, cooks, Secret Service, etc. Her life has been lived within a motorcade. And so she didn't have to worry about crime, the cost of things, the culture. Status incubates. Rudy Giuliani was fighting a deterioration she didn't have to face. That's a big difference. It's the difference between the New Yorker in the subway and the Wall Street titan in the town car.
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Doug:
Sounds like our politics are rather similar :-)
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The GOP Field
So who's the tax-cutting, reform candidate?
Saturday, February 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Now is the season of Republican discontent, extending even to the party's Presidential candidates. For the first time in decades, no dominant candidate has emerged and GOP voters seem to be in a Missouri state of mind: Show us what you really believe. We know exactly how they feel.
John McCain has been considered the front-runner, having lost a rough nomination fight in 2000 to President Bush. In the normal GOP habit of Presidential primogeniture, he'd be the likeliest nominee. The Arizona Senator has an inspiring personal story and a strong record on national security. His fortitude on Iraq has been all the more impressive since the war has become unpopular and threatens the media adulation he has long enjoyed. Tenacity is a Presidential asset, especially in dangerous times.
But among many Republicans, Mr. McCain is also paying a price for his years as a policy "maverick." Social conservatives hate his signature achievement of campaign-finance reform, which limits public ability to influence politicians. He also grandstanded on rules for interrogating terrorists.
Our own doubts relate to his economic instincts. He's a bulwark against spending earmarks, no question. But Mr. McCain turned against the Reagan tax-cut agenda in 2000, and he voted against the Bush tax cuts of 2003. Now that those tax cuts have proven to be a spectacular success, the Senator says he wants them made permanent. But his justification is the political one that he has "never voted for a tax increase," not that he now understands his opposition was wrong on the merits. With 2008 likely to be a tax watershed, the GOP needs a candidate who can articulate a pro-growth agenda. Maybe his estimable economic advisers, former Senator Phil Gramm and former FTC Chairman Tim Muris, can steer him right.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts Governor, has had some success exploiting conservative unease with Mr. McCain. He has shown he can win votes in a blue state, and he was successful both as a capitalist and as manager of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
However, he too is something of an empty policy slate. The former business consultant made a big deal of the health-care "reform" he steered through the Massachusetts legislature last year, and we suppose he deserves credit for trying. But he oversold the results--to the applause of the national health-care lobby--and imposed an insurance mandate without reforming the state insurance market.
As it unfolds, this law is turning out to be far from a free-market success. And so now Mr. Romney is distancing himself from it--never mind that he upbraided his critics last year for not understanding its virtues. The episode suggests a thin political skin and perhaps a too malleable policy core.
Filling out the current top tier of candidates is the anomaly of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. We say anomaly because a Northeasterner who favors gun control and abortion rights isn't supposed to have a Ralph Nader's chance in the GOP primaries. Yet today Mr. Giuliani leads in the national polls and is all but tied with Mr. McCain in New Hampshire.
Some of this is no doubt due to name recognition after his 9/11 heroics. On the other hand, maybe cultural conservatives aren't the single-issue voters of media lore. Mr. Giuliani can point to the revival of the previously ungovernable New York, and his temerity and experience in a crisis are qualities that voters look for in a Commander-in-Chief.
The competition will attack his social liberalism, and our guess is that Mr. Giuliani could help himself if he came out solidly for appointing judges like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Today's cultural disputes all end up in the courts, and what most conservatives want above all is to know that their views will get a democratic hearing rather than be pre-empted by judicial fiat.
As always, there are a pack of other potential candidates, one or two of whom could make a splash along the way. Newt Gingrich is famous as the former House Speaker and ubiquitous on Fox News. He is also a font of ideas, some of them sensible. But he will have to persuade Republicans that he can win given the baggage of his Beltway days and low favorability ratings.
There's always room for a strong anti-abortion voice in any GOP race, and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is bidding for that slot. Though little known nationally, he's done impressive, and often bipartisan, work on everything from malaria to immigration. So we are astounded by his recent remarks from Baghdad distancing himself, a la Hillary Clinton, from the war he voted for. Millions of Republicans are frustrated with the war, but if he sustains this antiwar theme someone will note that he co-sponsored the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.
All in all, this looks like the most wide-open Republican race in years. That may be a good thing if it forces the candidates to battle over ideas and revive the GOP reform agenda that got lost in the fog of the 109th Congress.
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WSJ:
Culture Warrior
Don't write off Giuliani's appeal to social conservatives.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
The book on Rudy Giuliani is that he is too liberal on social issues to win the Republican presidential nomination. Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, put it succinctly: "I don't see anyone getting the Republican nomination who is not pro-life and a staunch defender of traditional marriage."
But Mr. Giuliani is running strong in Iowa and New Hampshire polls and leading most national surveys of Republicans. He's charming crowds of conservatives everywhere he goes. So it's worth wondering if Mr. Perkins is missing an undercurrent coursing through conservative politics.
Republicans have just experienced a bruising midterm election defeat. The president is suffering dismal approval ratings, and its erstwhile front-runner for the presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain, made his national reputation as a "maverick." The Giuliani rise evident now may be more than name recognition and residual support from his stalwart leadership following the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Giuliani's support may also arise from his having successfully moved an entrenched political culture in New York City, something national Republicans have not been able to do in Washington.
Mr. Perkins has publicly predicted that Mr. Giuliani's support will evaporate once voters learn more about him. And Mr. Giuliani's track record, both political and personal, may hurt him in the primaries. He's been divorced twice, opposes banning abortion, supports gun control, and for a time as mayor lived with two gay men and (as Time magazine noted recently) their frou-frou dog, Bonnie. None of this will endear him to the party's values voters. But it also may not be what tips the scales in the primaries.
Take South Carolina. The state's influence in presidential politics has only grown since it derailed Mr. McCain's Straight Talk Express in 2000. Two weeks ago, Mr. Giuliani made a trip to the state and struck a chord by speaking to a burning issue in South Carolina--a fight over school choice. This probably won't make the national evening news, but today some 5,000 people--many of whom are black and live in poorly performing rural school districts--are expected to descend on the state capitol in Columbia to rally for school choice. After lobbying their elected leaders, they plan to leave behind chocolates for Valentine's Day embossed with the words "another voice for school choice."
Mr. Giuliani delivered his South Carolina speech to several dozen conservatives. One woman who attended told me she wonders whether electing a president who successfully took on the mob in New York is what it will take to finally break through the entrenched education political culture. Christian conservatives make up the core of the school-choice movement in the state. If they come to the conclusion that Mr. Giuliani is on their side and has the leadership qualities to achieve lasting and meaningful change, he may prove a surprisingly strong contender.
Sen. McCain will have his own problems winning over Christian conservatives. A man who won media accolades by cutting against the base of his party will be ill-equipped to win the nomination. He's recently taken lashes in the media from Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and is reviled among some in the right-to-life movement for pushing through campaign finance restrictions that have made it more difficult for them to get their message out.
Christian conservative leaders will continue to be unhappy with Mr. Giuliani. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, recently laid into the former mayor for a shifting stance on abortion, saying that a politician who personally believes the practice is wrong but who refuses to ban it is more repugnant than someone who isn't morally troubled by the termination of a pregnancy.
He's right. But there is little the president can do directly about abortion. In weighing contenders for the party's nomination, will right-to-life Republicans be more worried about Mr. Giuliani's personal beliefs, or will they find comfort in his promises to appoint judges in the mold of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who may actually overturn Roe v. Wade? If Mr. Giuliani makes a convincing case that he'll also lend his efforts to school choice and other endeavors that will help win the other culture war under way in American politics--the one against an intransient political culture that is unresponsive to the demands of the public--Mr. Perkins could turn out to be mistaken.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
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Karl Rove picked out these four segments for Republicans to work on:
Suburbanites: "The heart of our party is married couples with children, but they are also those that are most prone to be mobile in our society and hence less linked into politics."
Younger voters: "That's where you set in motion things that come to pass not in a matter of an election or two, but a matter of a decade or two."
African-Americans: "You can't claim to be a great political party if you're getting 9 or 10 or 11 percent. One of the interesting things about the 2006 election is that we appeared to make gains in the African-American community even while we were losing a national election."
Latinos: "This group is rapidly growing. We do well among them in some elections and not well in others."
Rove has a special interest in the group that demographers call "some college" -- people who, like him, attended college but did not graduate. The concerns of this group dovetail with one of his current policy passions: income distribution and education.
"Income is increasingly correlated to more education," he said. "The challenge for our society is how do we prepare every child to be ready for college if he or she decided to go to college? Our problem today is not that we don't have enough higher education opportunities. It's that we don't have enough people who are prepared to take advantage of it."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2732.html
The rest of the interview is interesting as well.
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WSJ
The Ever-'Present' Obama
Barack has a along track record of not taking a stand.
BY NATHAN GONZALES
Wednesday, February 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Finally and officially, Barack Obama is running for president. His symbolic announcement, in the Land of Lincoln, called for a new era in politics. Obama downplayed his thin federal experience while championing his record on the state and local level, and he talked about the need to change Washington, set priorities, and "make hard choices."
"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions," Obama said in his announcement speech. But a closer look at the presidential candidate's record in the Illinois Legislature reveals something seemingly contradictory: a number of occasions when Obama avoided making hard choices.
While some conservatives and Republicans surely will harp on what they call his "liberal record," highlighting applicable votes to support their case, it's Obama's history of voting "present" in Springfield--even on some of the most controversial and politically explosive issues of the day--that raises questions that he will need to answer. Voting "present" is one of three options in the Illinois Legislature (along with "yes" and "no"), but it's almost never an option for the occupant of the Oval Office.
We aren't talking about a "present" vote on whether to name a state office building after a deceased state official, but rather about votes that reflect an officeholder's core values.
For example, in 1997, Obama voted "present" on two bills (HB 382 and SB 230) that would have prohibited a procedure often referred to as partial birth abortion. He also voted "present" on SB 71, which lowered the first offense of carrying a concealed weapon from a felony to a misdemeanor and raised the penalty of subsequent offenses.
In 1999, Obama voted "present" on SB 759, a bill that required mandatory adult prosecution for firing a gun on or near school grounds. The bill passed the state Senate 52-1. Also in 1999, Obama voted "present" on HB 854 that protected the privacy of sex-abuse victims by allowing petitions to have the trial records sealed. He was the only member to not support the bill.
In 2001, Obama voted "present" on two parental notification abortion bills (HB 1900 and SB 562), and he voted "present" on a series of bills (SB 1093, 1094, 1095) that sought to protect a child if it survived a failed abortion. In his book, the "Audacity of Hope," on page 132, Obama explained his problems with the "born alive" bills, specifically arguing that they would overturn Roe v. Wade. But he failed to mention that he only felt strongly enough to vote "present" on the bills instead of "no."
And finally in 2001, Obama voted "present" on SB 609, a bill prohibiting strip clubs and other adult establishments from being within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and daycares.
If Obama had taken a position for or against these bills, he would have pleased some constituents and alienated others. Instead, the Illinois legislator-turned-U.S. senator and, now, Democratic presidential hopeful essentially took a pass.
Some of these bills may have been "bad." They may have included poison pills or been poorly written, making it impossible for Obama to support them. They may have even been unconstitutional. When I asked the Obama campaign about those votes, they explained that in some cases, the Senator was uncomfortable with only certain parts of the bill, while in other cases, the bills were attempts by Republicans simply to score points.
But even if that were the case, it doesn't explain his votes. The state legislator had an easy solution if the bills were unacceptable to him: he could have voted against them and explained his reasoning.
Because it takes affirmative votes to pass legislation in the Illinois Senate, a "present" vote is tantamount to a "no" vote. A "present" vote is generally used to provide political cover for legislators who don't want to be on the record against a bill that they oppose. Of course, Obama isn't the first or only Illinois state senator to vote "present," but he is the only one running for President of the United States.
While these votes occurred while Obama and the Democrats were in the minority in the Illinois Senate, in the "Audacity of Hope" (page 130), Obama explained that even as a legislator in the minority, "You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it's unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair and or just."
Obama's "present" record could hurt him in two very different ways in his bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination and, ultimately, the White House. On one hand, those votes could anger some Democrats, even liberals, because he did not take a strong enough stand on their issues. On the other hand, his votes could simply be portrayed by adversaries as a failure of leadership for not being willing to make a tough decision and stick by it.
Obama is one of the most dynamic and captivating figures in American politics at this time, and he has put together an excellent campaign team. He clearly is a factor in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008.
But as Democrats--and Americans--are searching for their next leader, the Illinois senator's record, and not just his rhetoric, will be examined under a microscope. As president, Obama will be faced with countless difficult decisions on numerous gray issues, and voting "present" will not be an option. He will need to explain those "present" votes as a member of the Illinois Legislature if he hopes to become America's commander-in-chief.
Mr. Gonzales is political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report.
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From http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...ontrol?mode=PF
Romney retreats on gun control
Ex-governor woos Republican votes
By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | January 14, 2007
ORLANDO , Fla. -- Former governor Mitt Romney, who once described himself as a supporter of strong gun laws, is distancing himself from that rhetoric now as he attempts to court the gun owners who make up a significant force in Republican primary politics.
In his 1994 US Senate run, Romney backed two gun-control measures strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups: the Brady Bill, which imposed a five-day waiting period on gun sales, and a ban on certain assault weapons.
"That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA," Romney told the Boston Herald in 1994.
At another campaign stop that year, he told reporters: "I don't line up with the NRA."
And as the GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2002, Romney lauded the state's strong laws during a debate against Democrat Shannon O'Brien. "We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them," he said. "I won't chip away at them; I believe they protect us and provide for our safety."
Today, as he explores a presidential bid, Romney is sending a very different message on gun issues, which are far more prominent in Republican national politics than in Massachusetts.
He now touts his work as governor to ease restrictions on gun owners. He proudly describes himself as a member of the NRA -- though his campaign won't say when he joined. And Friday, at his campaign's request, top officials of the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation led him around one of the country's biggest gun shows.
Romney says he still backs the ban on assault weapons, but he won't say whether he stands by the Brady Bill. And after the gun show tour, his campaign declined to say whether he would still describe himself as a supporter of tough gun laws.
"He believes Americans have the right to own and possess firearms as guaranteed under the US Constitution," spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom wrote in an e-mail. "He's proud to be among the many decent, law-abiding men and women who safely use firearms. Like President Bush, he supports restrictions on assault weapons, but Mitt Romney has also worked with gun owners and sportsmen to ease the gun-licensing laws in Massachusetts."
Romney appears to be stepping up his efforts to portray himself as a gun-friendly candidate, though some gun-rights activists in important primary states say his past positions will hurt him politically.
On Wednesday, Romney said on an Internet podcast, "The Glenn and Helen Show," that he hopes states would continue to ease regulations on gun owners, and he expressed enthusiasm for guns and hunting. "I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself. I'm a member of the NRA and believe firmly in the right to bear arms," Romney said.
Asked by reporters at the gun show Friday whether he personally owned the gun, Romney said he did not. He said one of his sons, Josh, keeps two guns at the family vacation home in Utah, and he uses them "from time to time." The guns are a Winchester hunting rifle and a Glock 9mm handgun, which Romney uses for target shooting . Romney also described himself as a sportsman who learned to shoot as a boy rabbit hunting in Idaho with a .22 rifle. He fondly recalled shooting quail last year at a Republican Governors Association event in Georgia.
"I . . . had a good time and actually knocked down a couple of birds," he said.
Fehrnstrom said Romney had taken steps to support gun rights as governor, including his signing of an NRA-backed bill last year that reduced a testing requirement on certain pistol-makers before they could sell guns in Massachusetts.
In 2002, even as he was pledging to uphold the state's strong gun laws, Romney still garnered a "B" grade from the NRA.
Also, in 2005, Romney designated May 7 as "The Right to Bear Arms Day" in Massachusetts to honor "the right of decent, law-abiding citizens to own and use firearms in defense of their families, persons, and property and for all lawful purposes, including the common defense."
But perhaps the most significant gun legislation Romney signed as governor was a 2004 measure instituting a permanent ban on assault weapons. The Legislature mirrored the law after the federal assault weapons ban, which was set to expire. According to activists at the time, the bill made Massachusetts the first state to enact its own such ban, and Romney hailed the move.
"These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense," he was quoted as saying. "They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people."
The bill enjoyed the support of Massachusetts gun owners because it also encompassed several measures they favored -- including a lengthening of the terms of firearm identification cards and licenses to carry. (Asked about the bill Friday, Romney described it as a "consensus measure" and a "positive step.")
But the NRA and many local affiliates do not support assault weapons bans, arguing that the arms are rarely used in crimes and have a legitimate purpose in hunting, target shooting, and self-protection. Romney's signing of that bill, despite its progun provisions, will be problematic politically, activists say.
"Why don't you just not take away [rights] from us?" Michael Thiede, president of the group Michigan Gun Owners, said last week. He said Romney's support for the assault-weapons ban and the Brady Bill will "absolutely" give him friction.
Gerald W. Stoudemire, president of Gun Owners of South Carolina, agreed, saying Romney has been "basically antigun on some issues."
"They're going to be a big scratch on his record," Stoudemire said. "He's going to have to not just get over them, but show a different direction if he's going to pick up voters."
The NRA officials who led Romney around the trade show declined to discuss his positions. "We meet with candidates all over the country at every level," said Chris W. Cox, who heads the NRA's political and legislative work.
Romney's past positions on gun control have also drawn some attention in the blogosphere, though not nearly as much as his statements in support of abortion rights and gay rights. (He's now antiabortion and takes a harder line on gay rights.) "Wait until the 2d amendment crowd gets a hold of Mitt's views on gun control," one blogger wrote on punditreview.com .
Romney was clearly trying to allay such concerns by attending the massive Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show and Conference at Orlando's Orange County Convention Center. Romney, joined by his wife, Ann, and trailed by local television stations and a few reporters, chatted enthusiastically with vendors displaying a wide variety of weapons.
"Let's see your shotguns here," Romney said to Michael F. Golden, CEO of the Springfield-based gunmaker Smith & Wesson. Romney's dark suit stood out in a sea of camouflage, but he gamely introduced himself to anyone in his path.
At one booth, he met exhibition shooter Tom Knapp , who gave Romney some hunting advice: When you miss an animal, pretend you did it on purpose, because you want the animal to breed lots of offspring (read: targets).
"That's a great hunting tip!" Romney said with a laugh.
The trade show illustrated the work that lies ahead for Romney in broadening his name recognition. Though many people knew who he was -- "I was just pitching you last night!" one man said enthusiastically -- many others did not.
"Who is that?" a woman at the Crossman gunmaker booth asked quietly after Romney walked away.
"A governor," someone said.
"Where?" she asked.
"Massachusetts -- may be running for president."
Moments later, a different woman gestured in his direction: "Is that Jeb Bush?"
"No, it's Mitt Romney," Fehrnstrom corrected.
__________________
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Not yet(!), but we will need a thread for the House and Senate races of 2008 as well. I stick this in here because the in-state politics will affect the Presidential vote and turnout in 'purple' states. Al Franken is not guranteed the nomination, but is running to unseat MN Senator Norm coleman. Powerline with its Minnesota roots will obviously be covering this closely (as they did with Keith Ellison).
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016784.php
Vox populi, vox Franken
(link for text and video) in which Al Franken made his announcement yesterday of his candidacy for the Democatic nomination to run for the Senate seat currently held by Norm Coleman. In the video Franken states that he campaigned last year for Democratic candidates "from Waseca and Wabasha up to Fergus Falls and Detroit Lakes, over to Bemidji and the Iron Range, from Duluth down to Albert Lea." He recalls what voters told him as he travelled around the state: "They told me that they’re sick of politics as usual—and they're sick of the usual politicians."
Funny thing is, that's pretty much the same statement that Al Frnaken used in announcing his satirical presidential candidacy in his 2000 book Why Not Me? There in his fictional March 24, 1999 announcement of his presidential candidacy, he envisions the creation of an electoral majority that will "let them know that politics as usual will only get you politicians as usual. (PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE.)"
Yesterday's real-life announcement of his Senate candidacy mixes recycling with shtick to kick off a campaign that promises to be even longer than the one depiicted in Why Not Me? It also promises to offer the definitive answer to the question posed in the book's title.
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Clinton fundraiser Daphna Ziman:
"Hillary Clinton is the right candidate. The nation is in deep need of a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future."
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Here comes Newt
By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Thursday, February 15, 2007
To echo the famous Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back, Newt Gingrich might be gaining on you.” Newt, consigned by many observers to Elizabeth Dole or Dan Quayle status in this GOP nominating process, appears to be moving up into contention, overtaking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and battling to be the conservative alternative to either former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or Arizona Sen. John McCain.
To grasp what’s happening, don’t think of states like New Hampshire or Iowa or worry whether it’s too early or too late. The key to following the Republican presidential nominating process this year is to recognize its essential similarity to the tennis’s U.S. Open at Forest Hills. There are quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the GOP Christmas dinner dance in Manchester, N.H., Friday, Dec. 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter) In the quarter-finals, the center and the right each sort out the nominees to choose their candidate. On center court, Giuliani seems to be gaining a decisive lead over McCain’s impoverished presidential campaign. But on the right-hand court, unnoticed by most pundits, Gingrich seems to be building a lead over Romney and a host of conservative wannabes. The ultimate winner of the Giuliani/McCain quarter-final will face the winner of the Gingrich/Romney match-up in the semi-finals.
As McCain drops in the polls — he’s down to 22 percent while Rudy is up at 34 percent in the latest Fox News poll — some conservatives seem eager for a “real Republican” to challenge for the nomination. Their first choice, former Virginia Sen. George Allen, lies a-moldering in the grave and his runner-up, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, has gone home to Tennessee.
Most observers assumed that Romney would fill the void. But he doesn’t seem to have been able to do so. It may be a racist refusal to vote for a Mormon or, more charitably, Romney’s flip-flop-flip from pro-life to pro-choice to pro-life, or it may have been his inconsistency on gay issues, but Mitt seems to be going the way of his father — out of contention. The Fox News poll, which recorded a surge to up to 8 percent of the GOP vote in its Dec. 5-6 tally, now has Romney dropping back to only 3 percent of the vote.
Enter Newt. Hungry for new ideas and desperate after losing Congress, Republican voters seem to be rallying to the only real genius in the race — the former Speaker. The statute of limitations seems to have expired on his personal scandals and Gingrich is striking a responsive chord among conservatives.
Fox News’s Jan. 30-31 survey had Newt leaving Romney way behind and challenging McCain for second place. The former Speaker’s vote share was 15 percent, giving him third place in the current standings.
Episodically, I just addressed a 450-person Lincoln Day dinner of the Lane County Republican Party in Eugene, Ore. A show of hands brought these results: Giuliani, 50 percent; Gingrich, 30 percent; McCain, 6 percent; Romney, 4 percent. A few days before, a speech to an Orlando investors group produced similar results.
But, as the slogan of the New York State Lottery goes: “You can’t win if you don’t play.” Newt’s current posture of waiting until the fall of 2007 to see how the process sorts itself out won’t work. The process abhors a vacuum. If Gingrich doesn’t move out to respond to the affection of the GOP base, one of the minor-leaguers — Huckabee, Brownback, Gilmore, Thompson, Hunter or Tancredo — will.
The irony of the GOP field at the moment is that while most Republicans are conservatives, the two frontrunners — Rudy and McCain — are moderates. And this isn’t Nelson Rockefeller’s Republican Party anymore! Gingrich is filling a real political need and if he moves out smartly and files his paperwork, takes his announcement bows, and journeys to Iowa and New Hampshire as a candidate, he might well be a contender.
Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race. To get all of Dick Morris’s and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by email, go to www.dickmorris.com
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From Newt's mailing list:
==========================
'Come to Cooper Union'
As I've mentioned to you before here in "Winning the Future," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and I are doing something different on February 28 in New York City. We're meeting at Cooper Union, the site of Abraham Lincoln's most famous pre-presidential speech, to do something about the lack of debate in our presidential debates.
On February 28 at Cooper Union, Gov. Cuomo and I will have a 90-minute, unrestricted, unrehearsed dialogue about the major challenges confronting America today.
We will also issue a challenge to the men and women running for President: Come to Cooper Union and participate in the Lincoln Dialogue Series.
Toss out the rule book, put aside the negative, partisan attacks, and come debate the issues.
Today's Presidential Debates: 32 Pages of Ground Rules
We're going to Cooper Union for a very specific reason: To remind our fellow Americans of a time when campaign debates were real debates, not a series of poll-tested, consultant-written, 30-second sound bites.
Here's how far we've come since that time:
In the 1996 campaign, the rules for the presidential debates were a full 11 pages of dos and don'ts for the candidates. But the consultants who control today's campaigns were just getting started.
By 2004, the debate rules had ballooned to 32 pages, including one rule that ordered the moderator to stop any candidate who dared to depart from the script to refer to someone in the audience.
In addition, the candidates were ordered to "submit to the staff of the [Debate] Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate."
Pen and pencils. Talk about the vital stuff of democracy!
Presidential debates are supposed to be an opportunity for Americans to get to know their choices for the leader of our great nation. But how can you get to know someone through 32 pages of rules restricting their speech?
We don't have presidential debates today, we have kabuki theatre: Maximally choreographed, minimally informative performance art by the various candidates.
Watch the Cooper Union Event Live at the Northport Community Arts Center
So what does this have to do with Joan Jackson? And what does it have to do with you?
When Joan Jackson heard that Mario Cuomo and I were going to debate at Cooper Union, her first instinct wasn't to hope that I would use the opportunity to score partisan political points against Gov. Cuomo. It wasn't even to come to Cooper Union and support me.
Joan Jackson's first instinct was to figure out how she could bring our debate to others in her community.
So she went to work. She met with the superintendent of her local public school and told him about the debate between me and Mario Cuomo. He told Joan that she could use the auditorium in the Northport Community Arts Center that is attached to the public school and extend an invitation to the whole county to view the event on their big screen. In 24 hours, she did just that. She contacted the local Republican and Democratic Party leadership and local elected officials and invited them to come. She's writing a news release for the local paper. She stood up at a community meeting and told her neighbors about the debate. The school superintendent even offered to serve cookies and punch.
(Continued below)
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What You Can Do to Get Involved
Joan Jackson is an extraordinary American, but she would be the first to tell you that she isn't unique. She's simply looking for something more meaningful and more productive than our current, negative, partisan campaign culture. And she is doing something about it.
From talking to you and reading your e-mail to me, I know that members of the Winning the Future community share this desire for meaningful, substantive dialogue. We want solutions, not sound bites.
For those of you who are looking to be more than passive spectators in a stale, empty political play, look no further than Joan Jackson. Contact your local school or community center and ask them to carry our February 28 debate live. We will broadcast the event live and on-demand via web cast on www.AmericanSolutions.com.
Then tell your friends, reach out to both Democrats and Republicans. Alert the local paper. Got a blog? Host this YouTube message from me advertising the webcast, and include a link to AmericanSolutions.com, where your readers can sign up for an email reminder.
So come on, toss out the rulebook of politics as usual. Bring the history and the dialogue of Cooper Union to your own community. And be a modern American citizen leader like Joan Jackson.
For more information, just go to Newt.org or AmericanSolutions.com. I hope you'll join us on February 28.
Your friend,
Newt Gingrich
P.S. - In case you missed it, I wanted to let you know the latest in the fight to promote English as the language of American success and cultural unity. The mayor of Nashville, Tenn., has vetoed a local measure that would have required all government documents to be in English, except where required by federal law to "protect or promote public health, safety or welfare." The mayor said he was afraid the city would be sued if he allowed the bill, which was passed by a vote of 23-14, to become law. Speaking as someone who last week in "Winning the Future" called for the federal government to print all its documents in English, I agree with what Councilman Eric Crafton, the sponsor of the bill, told the AP when he was informed of the mayor's fears: "It's almost ridiculous to the point of being absurd for the mayor to say, 'Well, I'm afraid that somebody might sue us because we want to conduct our business in English.' To me it's a lack of courage and a lack of leadership."
P.P.S. - As I mentioned on Fox News Sunday this weekend, the agreement reached between the United States and North Korea last week only rewards the bad behavior of the North Korean dictatorship. The signal it sends to other dictatorships pursuing nuclear weapons like Iran is to ignore the Americans, ignore the threat of sanctions, get your nuclear weapons, and then cut a deal later, because in the end, the democracies are going to cave. You can read my analysis here.
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CLINTON VOWS TO END U.S. ‘ARROGANCE’ AS PRESIDENT: Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed yesterday to change the United States so it’s no longer an “arrogant power” that alienates the world. “When I’m president, I’m going to send a message to the world that America is back - we’re not the arrogant power that we’ve been acting like for the last six years,” Sen. Clinton said during her first campaign stop in the Sunshine State.
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Giuliani the Conservative
And he's electable too.
BY STEVEN MALANGA
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Not since Teddy Roosevelt took on Tammany Hall a century ago has a New York politician closely linked to urban reform looked like presidential timber. But today Rudy Giuliani sits at or near the top of virtually every poll of potential 2008 presidential candidates. Already, Mr. Giuliani's popularity has set off a "stop Rudy" movement among cultural conservatives, who object to his three marriages and his support for abortion rights, gay unions and curbs on gun ownership. Some social conservatives even dismiss his achievement in reviving New York before 9/11. An August story on the Web site Right Wing News, for instance, claims that Mr. Giuliani governed Gotham from "left of center." Similarly, conservatives have been feeding the press a misleading collection of quotations by and about Mr. Giuliani, on tax policy and school choice issues, assembled to make him look like a liberal.
But in a GOP presidential field in which cultural and religious conservatives may find something to object to in every candidate who could really get nominated (and, more important, elected), Mr. Giuliani may be the most conservative candidate on a wide range of issues. Far from being a liberal, he ran New York with a conservative's priorities. Government exists above all to keep people safe in their homes and in the streets, he said, not to redistribute income, run a welfare state, or perform social engineering. The private economy, not government, creates opportunity, he argued; government should just deliver basic services well and then get out of the private sector's way. He denied that cities and their citizens were victims of vast forces outside their control, and he urged New Yorkers to take personal responsibility for their lives.
"Over the last century, millions of people from all over the world have come to New York City," Mr. Giuliani once observed. "They didn't come here to be taken care of and to be dependent on city government. They came here for the freedom to take care of themselves." It was that spirit of opportunity and can-do-ism that Mr. Giuliani tried to reinstill in New York and that he himself exemplified not only in the hours and weeks after 9/11 but in his heroic and successful effort to bring a dying city back to life.
The entrenched political culture that Mr. Giuliani faced when he became mayor was the pure embodiment of American liberalism, stretching back to the New Deal, whose public works projects had turned Gotham into a massive government-jobs program. Even during the post-World War II economic boom, New York politicians kept the New Deal's big-government philosophy alive, with huge municipal tax increases that financed a growing public sector but drove away private-sector jobs.
Later, in the mid-1960s, flamboyant mayor John Lindsay set out to make New York a poster child for the Johnson administration's War on Poverty, vastly expanding welfare rolls, giving power over the school system to black-power activists, and directing hundreds of millions of government dollars into useless and often fraudulent community-based antipoverty programs. To pay for all this, Lindsay taxed with abandon. The result: sharply increasing crime, a rising underclass inclined to languish on welfare rather than strive to uplift itself, a failing school system that emphasized racial grievance and separateness, and near-bankruptcy.
When Mr. Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, came into office--thanks to voters' hopes that as the city's first black mayor, he'd defuse New York's intense racial tensions--he wholly embraced the War on Poverty's core belief that the problems of the urban poor sprang from vast external forces over which neither they nor the politicians had much control. Under Mr. Dinkins, the city's welfare rolls grew by one-third, or some 273,000 people. By 1992, with some 1.1 million New Yorkers on welfare, the city's political leadership seemed stuck on dependency, too. Mr. Dinkins became the chief proponent of a tin-cup urbanism, constantly hounding Washington and Albany with demands and grim warnings about what would happen if they were not met.
Mr. Dinkins's political philosophy substituted can't-do fatalism for the can-do optimism that had made New York great. As crime spiked--there were 2,262 murders in Mr. Dinkins's first year, compared with fewer than 600 in 1963, two years before Lindsay became mayor--Mr. Dinkins declared: "If we had a police officer on every other corner, we couldn't stop some of the random violence that goes on," since it resulted from poverty and racism, not poor policing.
Accordingly, Mr. Dinkins wanted to turn the police into social workers. His police commissioner, Lee Brown, believed that cops should stop reacting to crime and become neighborhood "problem solvers." In an article on that "community policing" approach, the New York Times informed readers that such experiments, in Houston and in Newark, N.J., were "enormously popular"--but "neither city experienced a statistical drop in crime." Under that policing regime, New York's already high crime rate soared, prompting the New York Post to plead, in a famous headline, "Dave Do Something."
As crime and welfare rocketed up, Mr. Dinkins decided that government should promote diversity and multiculturalism--"a gorgeous mosaic," in his phrase. Though the performance of the city's schools was crumbling, so that by 1992 fewer than half the pupils were reading at grade level, the Board of Education turned its energies to two controversies unrelated to education: it tried to adopt a "Rainbow Curriculum" geared to instilling in first-graders respect for homosexuality, and it proposed to distribute free condoms in high schools to promote safe sex among students. Although many parents objected that the board was promoting values that they did not share, Mr. Dinkins supported the board on both fiercely controversial issues.
By the time Mr. Giuliani ran against Mr. Dinkins for a second time, in 1993 (his first try had failed), the former prosecutor had fashioned a philosophy of local government based on two core conservative principles vastly at odds with New York's political culture: that government should be accountable for delivering basic services well, and that ordinary citizens should be personally responsible for their actions and their destiny and not expect government to take care of them. Mr. Giuliani spoke of the need to reestablish a "civil society," where citizens adhered to a "social contract." "If you have a right," he observed, "there is a duty that goes along with that right." Later, when he became mayor, Mr. Giuliani would preach about the duties of citizenship, quoting the ancient Athenian Oath of Fealty: "We will revere and obey the city's laws. . . . We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public sense of civic duty. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this city not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us."
In New York, where generations of liberal policy had produced a city in which 1 in 7 citizens lived off government benefits, in which lawbreakers whose actions diminished everyone else's quality of life were routinely ignored or excused, in which the rights of those who broke the law were often defended vigorously over the rights of those who adhered to it, Mr. Giuliani's prescriptions for an urban revival based on shared civic values seemed unrealistic to some and dangerous to others. The head of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter described Mr. Giuliani's ideas on respect for authority and the law as "frightening" and "scary." But New Yorkers who had watched their city deteriorate were more frightened of life under an outdated and ineffective liberal agenda. Mr. Giuliani rode to victory in 1993 with heavy support from the same white ethnic Democratic voters who, a decade earlier, had crossed party lines even in liberal New York to vote for Ronald Reagan.
To those of us who observed Mr. Giuliani from the beginning, it was astonishing how fully he followed through on his conservative principles once elected, no matter how much he upset elite opinion, no matter how often radical advocates took to the streets in protest, no matter how many veiled (and not-so-veiled) threats that incendiary figures like Al Sharpton made against him, and no matter how often the New York Times fulminated against his policies.
In particular, offended by the notion that people should be treated differently and demand privileges based on the color of their skin, Mr. Giuliani was fearless in confronting racial extortionists like Mr. Sharpton. Early in his tenure, he startled the city when he refused to meet with Mr. Sharpton and other black activists after a confrontation between police and black Muslims at a Harlem mosque. And though activists claimed that Mr. Giuliani inflamed racial tensions with such actions, there were no incidents during his tenure comparable with the disgraceful Crown Heights riot under Mr. Dinkins, in which the police let blacks terrorize Orthodox Jews for several days in a Brooklyn neighborhood.
For Mr. Giuliani, the revival of New York started with securing public safety, because all other agendas were useless if citizens didn't feel protected. "The most fundamental of civil rights is the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety," Mr. Giuliani said. He aimed to do so by reinstituting respect for the law. As a federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s, he had vigorously hunted low-level drug dealers--whom other law enforcement agencies ignored--because he thought that the brazen selling of drugs on street corners cultivated disrespect for the law and encouraged criminality. "You have to . . . dispel cynicism about law enforcement by showing we treat everyone alike, whether you are a major criminal or a low-level drug pusher," Mr. Giuliani explained.
As mayor, he instituted a "zero tolerance" approach that cracked down on quality-of-life offenses like panhandling and public urination (in a city where some streets reeked of urine), in order to restore a sense of civic order that he believed would discourage larger crimes. "Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes," he explained. "But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other." He linked the Dinkins era's permissive climate, which tolerated the squeegee men (street-corner windshield cleaners who coerced drivers into giving them money at the entrances to Manhattan), to the rise of more serious crime. "The police started ignoring all kinds of offenses," Mr. Giuliani later recounted of the Dinkins years. They "became," he deadpanned, "highly skilled observers of crime."
Civil rights advocates warned that Mr. Giuliani's promise to deprive the squeegee men of their $40 to $100 weekly shakedown might drive them to more violent crime; in effect, they endorsed a lesser form of criminality, hoping that it would forestall more serious crime. The city's newspapers were happy to print threats from squeegee men, like this one: "I feel like if I can't hustle honestly, I've got to go back to doing what I used to do . . . robbing and stealing." But the squeegee-men campaign provided Mr. Giuliani with his first significant victory, showing a beleaguered citizenry that government actually could bring about change for the better. Within months, the squeegee men disappeared. "A city, and especially a city like New York, should be a place of optimism," Mr. Giuliani later explained about his policing strategies. "Quality of life is about focusing on the things that make a difference in the everyday life of all New Yorkers in order to restore this spirit of optimism."
Mr. Giuliani changed the primary mission of the police department to preventing crime from happening rather than merely responding to it once it had occurred. His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street. Mr. Bratton also changed the department's scheduling. Crime was open for business 24 hours a day, but most detectives, including narcotics cops, had previously gone off duty at 5 p.m., just as criminals were coming on "duty." No more.
The department brought modern management techniques to its new mission. It began compiling a computerized database to track the city's crime patterns and the effectiveness of the NYPD's responses to them. That database, known as Compstat, helped police target their manpower where it was needed, and in due course it became a national model. The department drove authority down to its precinct captains and emphasized that it expected results from these top managers. Mr. Bratton replaced a third of the city's 76 precinct commanders within a few months. "If you were to manage a bank with 76 branches every day, you would get a profit-and-loss statement from the bank," explained Mr. Giuliani. "After a week or so, you would see branches that were going in the wrong direction, and then you would take management action to try to reverse the trend. That is precisely what is happening in the police department."
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64% during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67%, from 1,960 in Mr. Dinkins's last year to 640 in Mr. Giuliani's last year. The number of cars stolen in New York City every year plummeted by an astounding 78,000.
Criminologists tried to dismiss this achievement by arguing that the police have little influence on crime. The crime drop, they contended, was merely the fruit of an improving national economy, though the decline preceded the city's economic rebound by several years. Others argued that New York was just riding a demographic trend, as the population of teenagers prone to break the law declined. One criminologist even suggested that Mr. Giuliani's New York would soon see another upsurge, as a new cohort of children reached the teen years. "I don't need a crystal ball," the criminologist confidently predicted. Instead, crime declined relentlessly over Mr. Giuliani's eight years, even when it rose nationally.
Critics, especially those on the left, have tried to minimize Mr. Giuliani's accomplishment by claiming that he lowered crime by letting cops oppress black and Latino New Yorkers with brute force. As evidence, they point to unfortunate incidents such as the shootings of unarmed black immigrants Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. But the data tell a far different story: Mr. Giuliani's NYPD managed to drive down crime while showing admirable restraint. From 1995 to 2000, civilian complaints of excessive force by the NYPD declined from one complaint per ten officers to one per 19 officers. Meanwhile, shootings by cops declined by 50% and were far lower under Mr. Giuliani than under Mr. Dinkins--lower in fact than in cities like San Diego and Houston, hailed for practicing community policing.
Moreover, Mr. Giuliani's policing success was a boon to minority neighborhoods. For instance, in the city's 34th Precinct, covering the largely Hispanic Washington Heights section of Manhattan, murders dropped from 76 in 1993, Mr. Dinkins's last year, to only seven by Mr. Giuliani's last year, a decline of more than 90%. Far from being the racist that activists claimed, Mr. Giuliani had delivered to the city's minority neighborhoods a true form of equal protection under the law.
Mayor Giuliani's success against crime wasn't merely the singular achievement of a former prosecutor. He applied the same principles to social and economic policy, with equally impressive results. Long before President Bush's "ownership" society, Mr. Giuliani described his intention to restore New York as the "entrepreneurial city," not only providing the climate for new job creation but also reshaping government social policy away from encouraging dependency and toward reinforcing independence.
New York had gone in the opposite direction starting in the mid-1960s, when Lindsay had drastically increased welfare rolls, believing many of the poor too disadvantaged ever to succeed and thus needing to be permanently on the dole. The Gotham welfare bureaucracy saw signing people up as its goal, while an entire industry of nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups arose to cater to and contract with the city's vast welfare system. Budget documents from the Dinkins years projected an eventual 1.6 million people on welfare. "The City of New York was actually quite successful in achieving what it wanted to achieve, which was to encourage the maximum number of people to be on welfare," Mr. Giuliani later explained. "If you ran a welfare office, . . . you had a bigger budget, and you had more authority, if you had more people on welfare."
Mr. Giuliani decided to launch a welfare revolution, moving recipients from the dole to a job. Mindful that for years the city's welfare bureaucracy had focused on signing up new recipients (Lindsay's welfare chief had been nicknamed Mitchell "Come and Get It" Ginsberg), the Giuliani administration first set out to recertify everyone in the city's own home-relief program to eliminate fraud. In less than a year, the rolls of the program (for able-bodied adults not eligible for federal welfare programs) declined by 20%, as the city discovered tens of thousands of recipients who were actually employed, living outside the city, or providing false Social Security numbers.
Mr. Giuliani then instituted a work requirement for the remaining home-relief recipients, mostly men, obliging them to earn their checks by cleaning city parks and streets or doing clerical work in municipal offices for 20 hours a week. Welfare advocates vigorously objected, and one advocate pronounced the workfare program "slavery." The New York Times editorialized that most people on home relief were incapable of work.
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Mr. Giuliani persisted, and when Congress finally passed welfare reform in 1996, giving states and cities broad powers to refocus the giant, federally funded welfare program for mothers and children, Mr. Giuliani applied many of the same kinds of reforms. He hired as welfare commissioner Jason Turner, the architect of welfare reform in Wisconsin, which had led the nation in putting welfare recipients back to work. Mr. Turner promptly converted the city's grim welfare intake offices into cheerful and optimistic job centers, where counselors advised welfare recipients on how to write a résumé and provided them with skills assessment and a space they could use to look for work.
By 1999, the number of welfare recipients finding work had risen to more than 100,000 annually, and the welfare rolls had dropped by more than 600,000. It took steadfast courage to win those gains. "The pressure on Rudy during these years was enormous," says Richard Schwartz, a Giuliani policy advisor. "The advocates and the press trained their sights on us, just waiting for something to go wrong in these workfare programs."
As part of Mr. Giuliani's quintessentially conservative belief that dysfunctional behavior, not our economic system, lay at the heart of intergenerational poverty, he also spoke out against illegitimacy and the rise of fatherless families. A child born out of wedlock, he observed in one speech, was three times as likely to wind up on welfare as a child from a two-parent family. "Seventy percent of long-term prisoners and 75% of adolescents charged with murder grew up without fathers," Mr. Giuliani told the city. He insisted that the city and the nation had to re-establish the "responsibility that accompanies bringing a child into the world," and to that end he required deadbeat fathers either to find a private-sector job or to work in the city's workfare program as a way of contributing to their child's upbringing. But he added that changing society's attitude toward marriage was more important than anything government could do: "If you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, . . . I guess the social program would be called fatherhood."
As a consequence of his rejection of the time-honored New York liberal belief in congenital black victimhood, Mr. Giuliani set out to change the city's conversation about race. He objected to affirmative action, ending the city's set-aside program for minority contractors, and he rejected the idea of lowering standards for minorities. Accordingly, he ended open enrollment at the City University of New York, a 1970s policy aimed at increasing the minority population at the nation's third-largest public college system but one that also led to a steep decline in standards and in graduation rates.
The reform of CUNY began when its chancellor complained that it was unfair to require students on welfare to work because it jeopardized their studies. Mr. Giuliani responded that it was unfair to expect middle-class kids to work their way through college by holding down jobs and going to classes while exempting students on welfare from working. While the controversy raged, several critics of CUNY pointed out that only 10% to 15% of CUNY students on welfare ever graduated, and that the system's overall graduation rate was abysmally low. Mr. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki appointed a blue-chip panel led by former Yale president Benno Schmidt and former New York City congressman and longtime CUNY critic Herman Badillo to examine the system. The panel recommended widespread changes, including tightening admissions standards and eliminating remedial courses for students at the system's 11 senior colleges.
The moves sparked a startling turnaround. Within a few years, CUNY was attracting 20% more students from New York's elite high schools (who had previously shunned it), SAT scores of incoming freshmen had risen 168 points, and the student population reached its highest number since the mid-1970s.
Mr. Giuliani wanted to work the same dramatic reform on the city's K-12 school system, but the entrenched educational bureaucracy and his lack of direct control over the school system stymied him. The best he could do was to use the bully pulpit as well as his influence over the two Board of Education members (out of a total of seven) whom he appointed. He did this so relentlessly that he ultimately pushed out two schools chancellors who wouldn't install the reforms that he believed would spur dramatic, systemic change--reforms that included using city money for vouchers to provide low-income students in failing public schools with scholarships to private schools. He never could get his vouchers, however, and when he managed to prod the board into trying to privatize five of the city's worst public schools, the board's pointed lack of enthusiasm scared off necessary parental approval, and the idea died.
Although Mr. Giuliani didn't start out as a proponent of school choice, his frustration in trying to turn around a huge school system where the teachers union and the bureaucrats worked to stymie reform made him into a powerful proponent of vouchers, which he believed would force the public schools to compete for students with their private counterparts. "The whole notion of choice is really about more freedom for people, rather than being subjugated by a government system that says you have no choice about the education of your child," he said.
Mr. Giuliani's relentless attacks on the city's educational system finally convinced most New Yorkers that it could never be salvaged unless it was under the control of a mayor responsible to voters. In 2002, the state Legislature placed the city's school system under the mayor--too late for Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Giuliani's efforts to revive entrepreneurial New York naturally focused on unleashing the city's private sector through tax cuts achieved by slowing the growth of government. Mr. Giuliani preached against New York's lingering New Deal belief that government creates jobs, arguing that government should instead get out of the way and let the private sector work. "City government should not and cannot create jobs through government planning," he said. "The best it can do, and what it has a responsibility to do, is to deal with its own finances first, to create a solid budgetary foundation that allows businesses to move the economy forward on the strength of their energy and ideas. After all, businesses are and have always been the backbone of New York City."
When Mr. Giuliani took office, the city's private sector was experiencing the worst of times. After four years under Mr. Dinkins, it had shrunk to its lowest level since 1978, losing 275,000 jobs--192,000 in 1991 alone, the largest one-year job decline that any American city had ever suffered. Not coincidentally, Gotham also had the highest overall rate of taxation of any major city and a budget that spent far more per capita than any other major city. Despite that, and despite billions of dollars in tax increases during the Dinkins years, New York could barely pay its bills, and Mr. Giuliani, immediately after taking office, faced a nearly $2.5 billion budget deficit.
Mr. Giuliani's first budget, submitted just weeks after he took office, stunned the city's political establishment by its fiscal conservatism. To demonstrate his disdain for the reigning orthodoxy, when the New York Times editorial board urged him to solve the budget crisis with tax and fee increases that a Dinkins-era special commission had recommended, Mr. Giuliani unceremoniously dumped a copy of the commission's report into the garbage and derided it as "old thinking." It was a pointed declaration that a very different set of ideas would guide his administration.
After years of tax hikes under Mr. Dinkins, Mr. Giuliani proposed making up the city's still-huge budget deficit entirely through spending cuts and savings. Even more audaciously, he proposed a modest tax cut to signal the business community that New York was open for business, promising more tax cuts later. "I felt it was really important the first year I was mayor to cut a tax," Mr. Giuliani later explained. "Nobody ever cut a tax before in New York City, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to set a new precedent."
To balance the city's budget early in his tenure, when tax revenues stagnated amid a struggling economy, the mayor played hardball, winning concessions from city workers that other mayors had failed to get. The city's police unions had used their power in Albany to resist efforts by Mr. Dinkins and his predecessor, Ed Koch, to merge the city's housing police and transit police into the NYPD. Mr. Giuliani strong-armed Albany leaders into agreeing to the merger, saving the city hundreds of millions in administrative costs and making the department a better crime-fighting unit, by threatening to fire every housing and transit officer and rehire each as a city cop if legislative leaders did not go along.
Similarly, though the city's garbage men, many of whom worked only half days because their department was so overstaffed, had rebuffed the Dinkins administration's push for productivity savings, Mr. Giuliani won $300 million in savings from them by threatening to contract out trash collection to private companies. Ultimately, with such deals, Mr. Giuliani reduced city-funded spending by 1.6% his first year in office, the largest overall reduction in city spending since the Depression.
Although Mr. Giuliani was no tax or economic expert when he took office, he became a tax-cut true believer when he saw how the city's economy and targeted industries perked up at his first reductions. One of his initial budgetary moves was to cut the city's hotel tax, which during the Dinkins administration had been the highest of any major city in the world. When tourism rebounded, Mr. Giuliani pointed out that the city was collecting more in taxes from a lower rate. "No one ever considered tax reductions a reasonable option," Mr. Giuliani explained. But, he added in a speech at the Reagan Library, "targeted tax reductions spur growth. That's why we have made obtaining targeted tax reductions a priority of every budget." In his eight years in office, Mr. Giuliani reduced or eliminated 23 taxes, including the sales tax on some clothing purchases, the tax on commercial rents everywhere outside of Manhattan's major business districts, and various taxes on small businesses and self-employed New Yorkers.
The national, and even world, press marveled at the spectacular success of Mr. Giuliani's policies. The combination of a safer city and a better budget environment ignited an economic boom unlike any other on record. Construction permits increased by more than 50%, to 70,000 a year, under Mr. Giuliani, compared with just 46,000 in Mr. Dinkins's last year. Meanwhile, as crime plunged, New Yorkers took to the newly safe streets to go out at night to shows and restaurants, and the number of tourists soared from 24 million in the early 1990s to 38 million in 2000. Under Mr. Giuliani, the city gained some 430,000 new jobs to reach its all-time employment peak of 3.72 million jobs in 2000, while the unemployment rate plummeted from 10.3% to 5.1%. Personal income earned by New Yorkers, meanwhile, soared by $100 million, or 50%, while the percentage of their income that they paid in taxes declined from 8.8% to 7.3%. During Mr. Giuliani's second term, for virtually the only time since World War II, the city's economy consistently grew faster than the nation's.
Today, Americans see Mr. Giuliani as presidential material because of his leadership in the wake of the terrorist attacks, but to those of us who watched him first manage America's biggest city when it was crime-ridden, financially shaky and plagued by doubts about its future as employers and educated and prosperous residents fled in droves, Mr. Giuliani's leadership on 9/11 came as no surprise. What Americans saw after the attacks is a combination of attributes that Mr. Giuliani governed with all along: the tough-mindedness that had gotten him through earlier civic crises, a no-nonsense and efficient management style, and a clarity and directness of speech that made plain what he thought needed to be done and how he would do it.
Like great wartime leaders, Mr. Giuliani displayed unflinching courage on 9/11. A minute after the first plane struck, he rushed downtown, arriving at the World Trade Center just after the second plane hit the South Tower, when it became obvious to everyone that New York was under attack. Fearing that more strikes were on the way--and without access to City Hall, the police department or the city's command center because of damage from the attacks--Mr. Giuliani hurried to reestablish city government, narrowly escaping death himself as the towers came down next to a temporary command post he had set up in lower Manhattan. "There is no playbook for a mayor on how to organize city government when you are standing on a street covered by dust from the city's worst calamity," one of his deputy mayors, Anthony Coles, later observed.
Mr. Giuliani understood that he needed not only to keep city government operating but to inspire and console as well. Within a few hours, he had reestablished New York's government in temporary headquarters, where he led the first post-9/11 meeting with his commissioners and with a host of other New York elected officials on hand to observe, prompting even one of his harshest critics, liberal Manhattan congressman Jerrold Nadler, to marvel at the "efficiency of the meeting." Within hours, the city launched a massive search-and-recovery operation. Some half a dozen times that day Mr. Giuliani went on TV, reassuring the city and then the nation with his calm, frank demeanor and his plainspoken talk. As the nation struggled to understand what had happened and President Bush made his way back to Washington, Mr. Giuliani emerged as the one public official in America who seemed to be in command on 9/11. He became, as Newsweek later called him, "our Winston Churchill."
In the weeks following the attacks, Mr. Giuliani became both the cheerleader of New York's efforts to pick itself up and the voice of moral outrage about the attacks. Mr. Giuliani exhorted private institutions within the city--the stock exchanges, the Broadway theaters--to resume operations and urged the rest of America and the world to come visit the city. Not waiting for federal aid, the city rapidly began a cleanup of the World Trade Center site, which proceeded ahead of schedule, and of the devastated neighborhood around the site, which reopened block by block in the weeks after the attacks. Meanwhile, the mayor led visiting heads of state on tours of the devastation, because, he said, "You can't come here and be neutral." He addressed the United Nations on the new war against terrorism, warning the delegates: "You're either with civilization or with terrorists." When a Saudi prince donated millions to relief efforts but later suggested that U.S. policy in the Middle East may have been partially responsible for the attacks, Mr. Giuliani returned the money, observing that there was "no moral equivalent" for the unprecedented terrorist attack. He attended dozens of funerals of emergency workers killed in the towers' collapse, leading the city not just in remembrance but in catharsis.
As "America's mayor," a sobriquet he earned after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani has a unique profile as a presidential candidate. To engineer the city's turnaround, he had to take on a government whose budget and workforce were larger than all but five or six states. (Indeed, his budget his first year as mayor was about 10 times the size of the one that Bill Clinton managed in his last year as governor of Arkansas.) For more than a decade, the city has been among the biggest U.S. tourist destinations, and tens of millions of Americans have seen firsthand the dramatic changes he wrought in Gotham.
Moreover, as an expert on policing and America's key leader on 9/11, Mr. Giuliani is an authority on today's crucial foreign-policy issue, the war on terror. In fact, as a federal prosecutor in New York, he investigated and prosecuted major terrorist cases. As mayor, he took the high moral ground in the terrorism debate in 1995, when he had an uninvited Yasser Arafat expelled from city-sponsored celebrations during the United Nations' 50th anniversary because, in Mr. Giuliani's eyes, Arafat was a terrorist, not a world leader. "When we're having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there," Mr. Giuliani said at the time.
These are impressive conservative credentials. And if social and religious conservatives fret about Mr. Giuliani's more liberal social views, nevertheless, in the general election such views might make this experience-tested conservative even more electable.
Mr. Malanga is a contributing editor of City Journal, in whose Winter issue this article appears.
Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City.
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One day a fourth-grade teacher asked the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up -- fireman, mechanic, businessman, salesman, doctor, lawyer, and so forth.
However, little Justin was being uncharacteristically quiet, so when the teacher prodded him about his father, he replied, "My father's an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men and they put money in his underwear.
Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he will go home with some guy and stay with him all night for money."
The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly set the other children to work on some exercises and then took little Justin aside to ask him, "Is that really true about your father?"
"No," the boy said, "He works for the Democratic National Committee and is helping to get Hillary Clinton to be our next President, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the other kids."
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WINNING THE FUTURE by Newt Gingrich
A 21st Century Contract with America
MARCH 5, 2007 | Vol. 2, No. 10
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NINE NINETIES IN NINE
You'll never guess who asked for my autograph last week? The
answer in a bit, but first I want to report on the event that I
hope will help change the political discourse in America for the
2008 campaign.
Lincoln's Inspiration at Cooper Union
Regular readers of Winning the Future will know that last
Wednesday evening, New York's former Democratic Governor Mario
Cuomo and I appeared together at historic Cooper Union in New
York City, the site where Abraham Lincoln delivered the speech
that arguably made him President. Cooper Union is situated on
the edge of Manhattan's East Village. Those familiar with New
York City know that being a conservative in the East Village is
about as lonely as one can be. Hundreds waited in line outside
the Great Hall for hours to get in. By 6:30 p.m, the 900 seats
were full.
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(Continued below)
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We came to Cooper Union for one reason -- to demonstrate that it
was possible for leaders from opposing political parties to have
a thoughtful and civilized conversation about the future of
America. We wrote about it in the New York Sun. You can read it
here. [ http://www.nysun.com/article/49402 ] And that it could be
done without the long list of rules political consultants insist
upon. In fact, there were no rules. We each spoke for 30
minutes. Then, Tim Russert from NBC News posed challenging
questions to each of us which produced a substantive
issue-driven exchange.
Speaking as a conservative, I am happy to report that it is
possible to go into the heart of a liberal stronghold with
conservative solutions and be well received. But, there are also
tremendous benefits in doing so. Here's why.
We have all become used to candidates appearing at events where
the audience is made up of ideologically sympathetic supporters.
Most candidates for president know all too well how to get cheers
of approval from their bases with well delivered poll-tested
partisan talking points. However, it would be a different
situation entirely if candidates had to consistently appear in
front of people who are not inclined to be in agreement with
them. Add to that, someone from the other party who will
challenge their positions, then add to that someone from the
media who knows how to cut through the rhetoric. Now, that is a
much more substantial challenge and one likely to produce a much
better quality of meaningful dialogue about how to meet the many
challenges facing the country.
Such a level of meaningful exchange is critical to our
democratic process. First and most importantly, it requires
candidates to know what they stand for. A candidate must know
more than talking points; he or she must know the substance of
the material. They must be able to draw on historical parallels
to support their arguments. They must know the audience and
understand something about their worldview in order to relate to
them. Candidates must be clear. They must provide real solutions
to our challenges. But even all of that is not nearly enough.
They must persuade.
Persuasion is what counts in a free society. If you cannot
persuade, you cannot succeed in solving America's challenges
because in the end, the American people must support your
solutions or nothing can get done. It's time for a new model.
Governor Cuomo and I set out to demonstrate that two political
leaders with dramatically different political perspectives can
have a constructive, intelligent, free-wheeling dialogue about
America without degenerating into petty partisan political point
scoring where no one is persuaded.
We wanted to contrast our lively exchange with the rule-driven,
consultant-strangled "debates" we've seen in the past few
campaign cycles, in which campaign consultants maximize
candidate choreography while minimizing the possibility of an
informative, challenging debate.
Governor Cuomo and I believe that the Cooper Union model is good
for America. I believe it will produce a much richer dialogue,
more informed and better candidates, will encourage solutions
and substance, and perhaps most significantly, will reengage
millions of Americans to become active participants in America's
future but who are today turned off by the trivial shallowness of
the current political process.
The "Nine Nineties in Nine" Pledge
If you believe, as I do, that there is an opportunity for a
better political dialogue now and in 2008, then I need your
help. I issued a challenge at Cooper Union to those who are
running for president asking them to take a pledge which can be
summarized as follows.
"If I receive my party's nomination for President of the United
States, I pledge to participate in nine, ninety-minute dialogues
in the nine weeks before the general election with my opponent.
In the Lincoln-Douglas style, I will agree to debate my opponent
with only a time-keeper, and to insist upon no rules. I
understand it will be just me and my solutions and my opponent
with theirs."
(Continued below)
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THE END OF HILLARY'S WHITE HOUSE DREAMS
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President has officially begun..."
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Tim Russert from Meet the Press stated in the Great Hall at
Cooper Union that he would ask every presidential candidate if
they would agree to nine ninety-minute debates in nine weeks. I
am asking you to do the same. When a candidate asks for your
support, ask them if they will take the Nine Nineties in Nine
Pledge.
Americans deserve the chance to see the candidates in an
unfiltered dialogue. They deserve to be persuaded with solutions
that stem from core beliefs. Most of all, they deserve a
presidential election process worthy of choosing the man or
woman who will occupy the Oval Office and assume the mantle of
leader of the free world.
One Candidate Takes the Nine Nineties in Nine Challenge -- Who
Will be Next?
So who asked for my autograph? Let's see if you guessed right.
Before the Cooper Union event I was walking in mid-town
Manhattan near 44th and 6th Ave. on my way to pre-tape an
interview with Dr. Jim Dobson for Focus on the Family. Someone
from behind tapped me on my shoulder and asked me for my
autograph. Reaching for my pen, I turned around and who was
standing there with his famous Big Apple smile but the former
Mayor himself, Rudy Giuliani. In the middle of the sidewalk we
spoke for 10 minutes and them something wonderful happened.
After I told him about the pledge challenge we were about to
issue at Cooper Union that night, without missing a beat, he
readily agreed to the challenge.
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So who will be the next to take the Nine Nineties in Nine
Pledge? You can help every candidate to accept by writing their
offices, calling talk radio or asking them personally. If enough
voters insist upon substance and civility in the next eighteen
months, then candidates will have no choice but to tell their
consultants "No" and tell Americans "YES", there is a better
way.
I believe we succeeded in providing one model to improve the
2008 campaign. I think those in attendance on Wednesday night
would agree. But I'll leave it up to you to decide. You can
watch the entire event on the web at www.americansolutions.com.
Let me know what you think.
Your friend,
Newt Gingrich
P.S. -- I spoke to a record crowd at the 34th annual CPAC
conference on Saturday. In the speech, I hit a number of points
including asking the candidates to take the Pledge.
(Continued Below)
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ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.
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** On the Radio **
Winning the Future with Newt Gingrich, a new series of 90-second
radio commentaries, can be heard Monday through Friday on more
than 350 radio stations during The G. Gordon Liddy Show and The
Michael Reagan Show. For a list of stations, click here:
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RELATED COMMENTARY:
The Cooper Union Model
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/ct.php?t=1222567&c=1126859509&m=m&type=3&h=09C3EE5FF472BC5BD286AABF611DA550
Come to Cooper Union
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/ct.php?t=1222568&c=1126859509&m=m&type=3&h=09C3EE5FF472BC5BD286AABF611DA550
English First, Not English Only
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/ct.php?t=1222569&c=1126859509&m=m&type=3&h=09C3EE5FF472BC5BD286AABF611DA550
Are We Our Own Most Expensive Enemy?
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/ct.php?t=1222570&c=1126859509&m=m&type=3&h=09C3EE5FF472BC5BD286AABF611DA550
More Than the Presidency
http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/ct/ct.php?t=1222571&c=1126859509&m=m&type=3&h=09C3EE5FF472BC5BD286AABF611DA550
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In ’05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: March 7, 2007
Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.
One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.
The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.
The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.
“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.”
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks.
Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees. Among those donors was Jared Abbruzzese, a New York businessman now at the center of an F.B.I. inquiry into public corruption in Albany, who had also contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that sought to undermine John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign in 2004.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas’ purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks — even in companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from legislation they advance — and indeed other members of Congress have investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit themselves.
Mr. Obama’s sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama’s political donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
NY Times
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"Consider a contrast between the two front-runners for their respective party's nomination. A strong argument can be made that the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., are well known to virtually all; on Wall Street, they would say her numbers have already been discounted for her negatives... For Giuliani, the story is quite different. A cursory glance at not just Giuliani's stands on social and cultural issues, but also his complicated marital and personal life and the circumstances around his ability to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War reveal ominous warning signals... And that is before discussing his support for gun control measures while he was mayor of New York City or mentioning that the first of his three marriages was to his second cousin and that one wife found out from a televised news conference that he was leaving her. The list could go on and on. Can he still win the GOP nomination? My guess remains no" -- political handicapper Charlie Cook, writing at NationalJournal.com.
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The LONDON TIMES ON HILLARY CLINTON
(Quite a devastating column follows. Bear in mind that this is the London Times, which certainly has no conservative partisan agenda to push. It was published Jan. 31st, 2007. Most interesting.)
Subject: Hillary Clinton's shameless political reconstructive surgery:
You can measure the scale of an American president's troubles by the number of skutniks he deploys during his State of the Union address.
Every year during his big set-piece speech to Congress, the president will digress from the main thrust of his remarks to offer fulsome praise to some member of the audience in the gallery. This person will have been carefully selected in advance by the president's speechwriters as an exemplar of some virtue and placed there for the purpose. The television producers will have been alerted in advance so that at the right moment, as the president talks about the heroics of this American Everyman, her she can rise self-consciously and receive the praise of a grateful nation.
This now obligatory part of a constitutional ritual is called a skutnik' after the name of the first person so honoured. One January evening in 1982, Lenny Skutnik, a government employee, dived into the freezing waters of the Potomac River to rescue a victim of a plane crash. Two weeks later, during his second State of the Union address, with the US mired in recession, Ronald Reagan had Mr Skutnik sit in the gallery and paid a moving tribute to his heroics.
This week, for his penultimate State of the Union, Mr Bush had a veritable galaxy of skutniks - soldiers, military people, firefighter. Whatever you might feel about the wisdom of Mr Bush's Iraq policy or the feasibility of his plans to wean Americans off petrol, you can't help but stand and cheer the good works of a decent person.
But there was something unusual about this year's constellation of ordinary American heroes, beyond the sheer numbers. Usually the skutnik is a presidential privilege. But so intense already is the competition for the 2008 presidential race that others have muscled in.
And so Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a skutnik of her own. She
arranged for the son of a New York policeman, sick with lung cancer to be there. As it happened, the man's father died that day, and the son's grief became a sad and very visible coda to the event. This little incident, the skillfully choreographed exploitation of a human tragedy, the
cynically manipulated deployment of public sympathy in service of a personal political end, offered a timely insight into the character of the politician who this week launched the most anticipated presidential election campaign in modern history.
There are many reasons people think Mrs Clinton will not be elected president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American people don't want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.
But they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician's trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.
Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as "women who stay home and bake cookies".
Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance. To grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs. Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.
And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.
After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic - the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you've established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians - to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.
Once in the Senate, she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002.
This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.
Now, you might say, hold on. Aren't all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.
All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.
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Second post of the day-- also about Hillary. Its an interview where she gets much more specific about what she would do in Iraq. Apart from the merits vel non of what she proposes, there is the matter of how it will play in her campaign strategy. Although I loathe the woman and regard her as a tremendous threat to America's freedoms and well-being, I must say that on a political level what she says here is masterful political postioning.
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WASHINGTON, March 14 - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a "remaining
military as well as political mission" in Iraq, and says that if elected
president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda,
deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi
military.
If Elected ...
Iraq
This is the first in a series of interviews with the 2008 presidential
candidates in both parties about how they would handle the issues they would
confront as president. Future articles will look at the positions of the
other candidates on Iraq and on other national security and domestic policy
matters.
In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said
the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay
off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from
sectarian violence - even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.
In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton
articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her
campaign events, where she has backed the goal of "bringing the troops
home."
She said in the interview that there were "remaining vital national security
interests in Iraq" that would require a continuing deployment of American
troops.
The United States' security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into
a failed state "that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,"
she said. "It is right in the heart of the oil region," she said. "It is
directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to
Israel's interests."
"So it will be up to me to try to figure out how to protect those national
security interests and continue to take our troops out of this urban
warfare, which I think is a loser," Mrs. Clinton added. She declined to
estimate the number of American troops she would keep in Iraq, saying she
would draw on the advice of military officers.
Mrs. Clinton's plans carry some political risk. Although she has been
extremely critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war, some
liberal Democrats are deeply suspicious of her intentions on Iraq, given
that she voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force there and, unlike some
of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, has not apologized for having
done so.
Senator Clinton's proposal is also likely to stir up debate among military
specialists. Some counterinsurgency experts say the plan is unrealistic
because Iraqis are unlikely to provide useful tips about Al Qaeda if
American troops end their efforts to protect Iraqi neighborhoods.
But a former Pentagon official argued that such an approach would minimize
American casualties and thus make it easier politically to sustain a
long-term military presence that might prevent the fighting from spreading
throughout the region.
Mrs. Clinton has said she would vote for a proposed Democratic resolution on
Iraq now being debated on the floor of the Senate, which sets a goal of
withdrawing combat forces by March 31, 2008. Asked if her plan was
consistent with the resolution, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers said it was,
noting that the resolution also called for "a limited number" of troops to
stay in Iraq to protect the American Embassy and other personnel, train and
equip Iraqi forces, and conduct "targeted counterterrorism operations."
(Senator Barack Obama, a rival of Mrs. Clinton, has said that if elected
president, he might keep a small number of troops in Iraq.)
With many Democratic primary voters favoring a total withdrawal, Senator
Clinton appears to be trying to balance her political interests with the
need to retain some flexibility. Like other Democratic candidates, she has
called for engaging Iran and Syria in talks and called on President Bush to
reverse his troop buildup.
But while Mrs. Clinton has criticized Mr. Bush's troop reinforcements as an
escalation of war, she said in the interview, "We're doing it, and it's
unlikely we can stop it."
"I'm going to root for it if it has any chance of success," she said of Mr.
Bush's plan, "but I think it's more likely that the anti-American violence
and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place, like the old
Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear
Ramadi, then maybe it's back in Falluja."
Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she believed the next president is likely to
face an Iraq that is still plagued by sectarian fighting and occupied by a
sizable number of American troops. The likely problems, she said, include
continued political disagreements in Baghdad, die-hard Sunni insurgents, Al
Qaeda operatives, Turkish anxiety over the Kurds and the effort to "prevent
Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq."
"The choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited," she said.
"And from the vantage point of where I sit now, I can tell you, in the
absence of a very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on
the regional and international front, I think it is unlikely there will be a
stable situation that will be inherited."
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(Page 2 of 2)
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly vowed to bring the war to
a close if the fighting were still going on when she took office as
president. "If we in Congress don't end this war before January 2009, as
president, I will," she has said.
Iraq
This is the first in a series of interviews with the 2008 presidential
candidates in both parties about how they would handle the issues they would
confront as president. Future articles will look at the positions of the
other candidates on Iraq and on other national security and domestic policy
matters.
In the interview, she suggested that it was likely that the fighting among
the Iraqis would continue for some time. In broad terms, her strategy is to
abandon the American military effort to stop the sectarian violence and to
focus instead on trying to prevent the strife from spreading throughout the
region by shrinking and rearranging American troop deployments within Iraq.
The idea of repositioning American forces to minimize American casualties,
discourage Iranian, Syrian and Turkish intervention, and forestall the Kurds'
declaring independence is not a new one. It has been advocated by Dov S.
Zakheim, who served as the Pentagon's comptroller under former Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Zakheim has estimated that no more than
75,000 troops would be required, compared to the approximately 160,000
troops the United States will have in Iraq when the additional brigades in
Mr. Bush's plan are deployed.
While Mrs. Clinton declined to estimate the size of a residual American
troop presence, she indicated that troops might be based north of Baghdad
and in western Anbar Province.
"It would be far fewer troops," she said. "But what we can do is to almost
take a line sort of north of - between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put
our troops into that region, the ones that are going to remain for our
antiterrorism mission, for our northern support mission, for our ability to
respond to the Iranians, and to continue to provide support, if called for,
for the Iraqis."
Mrs. Clinton described a mission with serious constraints.
"We would not be doing patrols," she added. "We would not be kicking in
doors. We would not be trying to insert ourselves in the middle between the
various Shiite and Sunni factions. I do not think that's a smart or
achievable mission for American forces."
One question raised by counterinsurgency experts is whether the more limited
military mission Mrs. Clinton is advocating would lead to a further
escalation in the sectarian fighting, because it would shift the entire
burden for protecting civilians to the nascent Iraqi Security Forces. A
National Intelligence Estimate issued in January said those forces would be
hard-pressed to take on significantly increased responsibilities in the next
12 to 18 months.
"Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources and operations,
remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq," the estimate noted,
referring to the American-led forces.
Mrs. Clinton said the intelligence estimate was based on a "faulty premise"
because it did not take into account the sort of "phased redeployment" plan
she was advocating. But she acknowledged that under her strategy American
troops would remain virtual bystanders if Shiites and Sunnis killed each
other in sectarian attacks. "That may be inevitable," she said. "And it
certainly may be the only way to concentrate the attention of the parties."
Asked if Americans would endure having troops in Iraq who do nothing to stop
sectarian attacks there, she replied: "Look, I think the American people are
done with Iraq. I think they are at a point where, whether they thought it
was a good idea or not, they have seen misjudgment and blunder after
blunder, and their attitude is, What is this getting us? What is this doing
for us?"
"No one wants to sit by and see mass killing," she added. "It's going on
every day! Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our presence
there is not stopping it. And there is no potential opportunity I can
imagine where it could. This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis
from themselves. If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had
stopped the looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority - you can
go down the lines, if, if, if - "
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/03/15/clinton-as-president-ill-let-another-genocide-happen/
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WSJ oinline today
Lights, Camera . . . Candidacy?
Fred Thompson is shaking up the GOP presidential field. And he's not even running yet.
BY JOHN FUND
Saturday, March 17, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--"Expect her to recount every moment of her ordeal," the savvy district attorney mused to his deputy. "There won't be a dry eye in the jury."
"That's a take!" says a director of the hit NBC series "Law and Order." With that, Fred Thompson, the former U.S. senator from Tennessee who has played "strict constructionist" prosecutor Arthur Branch for the past four years, walks back with me to his dressing room to talk about a new role he might soon be undertaking: surprise Republican presidential candidate.
It is a slightly surreal setting to be talking big-league politics. But not unprecedented. In 1965, Ronald Reagan held early strategy meetings on his nascent race for governor of California on the set of "Death Valley Days." In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped off a plane from a world-wide publicity tour for his last "Terminator" film and immediately huddled with advisers on his own campaign for governor. Both men effectively used their celebrity status to completely transform the races they entered.
So too may Fred Thompson. When we meet on Thursday night, it's only been four days since he appeared on Fox News to merely announce he was "looking at" running. Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, notes in amazement how "a retired senator can show a tiny bit of interest and literally shake up the race overnight."
And he is shaking up the race. Every GOP candidate is nervously watching the reaction to his possible entry. J.C. Watts, an Oklahoma congressman from 1995 to 2003, has endorsed him: "I define Fred Thompson as AC, what's AC? All class."
Fan blogs for "Law and Order" note that since the show is especially popular among women, a Thompson race could help close the GOP's "gender gap." The most pithy comment is from Craig Hammond, a former mayor of Bluefield, W.Va. He told the Bluefield News: "He's the tall timber we've been waiting for. He's the total package. He can hold the red states and pick up a few blue ones along the way."
But Mr. Thompson appears serene about all the speculation swirling around him. "Those running are all good guys, and would be good presidents," he says leaning back in a recliner. "But there are truly vital issues--from the looming entitlement crisis to nuclear proliferation--I'm not afraid to talk about. Lots of people have such a low regard for politicians that they're open to a campaign that would be completely different."
So how would a possible Thompson campaign be distinctive? "Politics is now one big 24-hour news cycle, but we seem to spend less time than ever on real substance," he muses. "What if someone harnessed the Internet and other technologies and insisted in talking about real issues in more depth than consultants would advise? What if they took risks with their race in hopes that the risks to our children could be reduced through building a mandate for good policy?"
Children are a lot on Mr. Thompson's mind--especially his own. In 2002 he lost his daughter after she failed to come out of a drug-overdose-induced coma. Already frustrated with the Senate's endless maneuvering over minutiae, he decided to retire at age 60 only two months later and change his life. In June of that year he married his second wife, Jeri (his first marriage at age 17 ended amicably in divorce in 1985). In 2003 they had their first child (a second was born last November).
"Within the space of a year and a half, I experienced the ultimate tragedy and the ultimate happiness," Mr. Thompson sighs. "I count my blessings, and I have a real focused sense of purpose now."
That brings us to some of the knocks critics have about his possible parachute drop into the "Survivor 2008" competition. Bluntly put, Fred Thompson had a reputation for being lazy in wanting to do the political chores that come with office. People openly question if he has "the fire in the belly" to really make a serious race.
"They used to say I moved slowly," he chuckles. "But I move deliberately. I won every one of my races by more than 20 points in a state Clinton carried twice."
But what about his well-known reputation for dating up a storm as a bachelor senator in Washington in the 1990s? "I plead guilty," he says. "But everyone I knew is still a friend, and if somehow they aren't I guess we'd hear about it. I'm happy with my life partner and children now."
On issues, he addresses head-on the major complaints conservatives have about his record. He was largely stymied in his 1997 investigation of both Clinton-Gore and GOP campaign fund-raising abuses: Key witnesses declined to testify or fled the country, though evidence eventually surfaced of a Chinese plan to influence U.S. politics. He won't argue with those who say he showed "naiveté" about how he would be stonewalled in his investigation. He says he's wiser now.
Many on the right remain angry he supported the campaign finance law sponsored by his friend John McCain. "There are problems with people giving politicians large sums of money and then asking them to pass legislation," Mr. Thompson says. Still, he notes he proposed the amendment to raise the $1,000 per person "hard money" federal contribution limit.
Conceding that McCain-Feingold hasn't worked as intended, and is being riddled with new loopholes, he throws his hands open in exasperation. "I'm not prepared to go there yet, but I wonder if we shouldn't just take off the limits and have full disclosure with harsh penalties for not reporting everything on the Internet immediately."
Mr. Thompson has also been criticized for failing to back some comprehensive tort-reform bills because of his background as a trial lawyer. Here he insists his stance was based on grounds of federalism. "I'm consistent. I address Federalist Society meetings," he says, noting that more issues should be left to the states. For example, he cast the lonely "nay" in 99-1 votes against a national 0.8% blood alcohol level for drivers, a federal law banning guns in schools, and a measure limiting the tort liability of Good Samaritans. "Washington overreaches, and by doing so ends up not doing well the basics people really care about." Think Katrina and Walter Reed.
Indeed, the federal government's inability to function effectively would likely be a major theme of any Thompson campaign. "Audits have shown we've lost control of the waste and mismanagement in our most important agencies. It's getting so bad it's affecting our national security."
Mr. Thompson says that while a senator he was long concerned with U.S. intelligence failures. "The CIA has better politicians than it has spies," he says, referring to the internecine turf wars that have been a feature of the Bush administration.
A key problem, Mr. Thompson notes, is a general lack of accountability in government, where no one pays any price for failure. When asked about President Bush's awarding the Medal of Freedom to outgoing CIA Director George Tenet after U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq became apparent, he shakes his head: "I just didn't understand that."
The next president, according to Mr. Thompson, needs to exercise strong leadership "and get down in the weeds and fix a civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones." He doesn't offer specifics on what to do, but notes the "insanity" of the new Congress pushing for the unionization of homeland security employees only five years after it rejected the notion in the wake of 9/11. "Should we tie ourselves up in bureaucratic knots with the challenges we may have to face?" he asks in wonderment.
The challenges, he says, are numerous. On Iraq, he admits "we are left with nothing but bad choices." However, he says the "worst choice" would be to have Osama bin Laden proven right when he predicted America wouldn't have the stomach for a tough fight. The costs of Iraq have been high, but they could be even higher "if we have another stain on America like that infamous scene from Saigon 1975 in which our helicopters took off leaving those who supported us grabbing at the landing skids."
Mr. Thompson is especially worried about nuclear proliferation. He serves as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, along with former Clinton CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb. The board recently received an unclassified briefing that convinced him three or four countries in the Middle East are "on the cusp" of acquiring nuclear weapons should the Iranians carry through with their own weapons program.
He urges continued pressure on Iran, which he says has grave domestic problems. "Iran may fall of its own weight, and we can help that by offering vocal support to dissident groups and making effective use of the airwaves to reach its people."
On domestic issues, Mr. Thompson says a major reason Republicans lost last November was that they aided and abetted runaway government spending. Yet Democrats, he contends, are incapable of following through on their pledges to be fiscally prudent. "Their political coalition needs more revenue like a car requires gasoline," he laughs. "Reagan showed what can be done if you have the will to push for tough choices and the ability to ask the people to accept them."
But Mr. Thompson says those tough choices shouldn't include the tax increases contemplated in the new budget released by Senate Democrats this week. "The phony static accounting the government uses has obscured just how successful the 2003 tax cuts have been in boosting the economy," he says. "Lower marginal tax rates have proven to be a key to prosperity now by Kennedy, Reagan and Bush. It's time millionaires serving in the Senate learned not to overly tax other people trying to get wealthy."
I note that despite his humble background as the grandson of a sharecropper and son of a used-car salesman, Mr. Thompson himself is now quite wealthy. So how would he campaign against Democratic millionaires he used to serve in the Senate with, such as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards? He smiles and says he has plenty of zingers and points he would make but it's premature to discuss them.
Mr. Thompson says he can compete with Democrats in talking plainly about the anxiety many Americans have about the economy, despite good macro numbers. "Someone who is 18 today may well have 10 employers in their career," he says. "That's completely different from how their parents lived. I would address that insecurity and help people adapt without shooting ourselves in the foot with protectionism and income redistribution. I had 10 employers before I finished law school."
Fred Thompson clearly hasn't decided whether to run for president; and he underestimates just how much the traditional fund-raising he disdains may be necessary for his long-shot campaign. But he has assets that add up to an impressive portfolio.
As Republican counsel in the Watergate hearings, he began building a reputation as a straight-shooter. It was he who asked the question that forced a White House deputy to admit that Richard Nixon had secretly recorded his Oval Office conversations.
Later in the 1970s he played a key role in exposing a Tennessee cash-for-pardons scandal; his acting career began when he won the part of playing himself in the 1985 movie version of the story. Today, his national exposure is greater than ever with a dozen of his movies playing as TV repeats. All of this month he is substituting for radio legend Paul Harvey, whose show is heard on more than 1,200 stations.
Indeed, it is his need to wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning, so he can tape three Harvey segments before returning to the "Law and Order" set for a long day of shooting, that prompts Mr. Thompson to close out our chat. "With my current schedule I might have more time to myself if I gave all this up and did start a campaign," he says as he dons a sports coat and heads for his car.
So many voters remain unsold on any of the current GOP contenders that Mr. Thompson just might trade his TV sound stage for a campaign microphone. As this is the first truly open Republican nomination fight in decades, the party might as well revel in the competition it claims to cherish in other parts of life.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.
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Messiah Complex
All the TV camera lights will be focused on Capitol Hill this Wednesday when Al Gore arrives to testify on global warming. He will make one solo star turn in the morning before a House committee and then address Senator Barbara Boxer's Environment committee in the afternoon.
More and more Democrats are becoming convinced Mr. Gore is running for president -- by not running for president. "It makes perfect sense -- get credit for being a noble crusader on behalf of the environment, build up volunteer lists and wait to see if Hillary and Obama stalemate the race in the next few months," is how one Democratic consultant put it to me yesterday.
Indeed, Newsweek magazine concludes in its latest issue: "Gore isn't running, but he is." It quotes a longtime Gore adviser who notes that Mr. Gore has been working out every day he can: "He has lost a few pounds, and Hillary can read into that what she wants."
Mr. Gore's plans for the next few months indeed resemble a nascent campaign. He will mark Earth Day next month with a college tour that ends with a giant rally in Washington. That day he will also address by satellite the 1,000 "climate messengers" he has trained to take copies of his global-warming film to civic groups and add their own commentary. In May, Mr. Gore's new book, "The Assault on Reason," will be published accompanied by a major publicity splash.
If all this goes well, Mr. Gore is positioned to wait for the big event. This fall, many Gore aides are convinced he will win the Nobel Peace Prize for this global warming crusade. "If that happens, you can bet the roof will come off in terms of pressure from the Democratic base for him to run," predicts Rich Galen, a former GOP consultant who now writes Mullings.com. "He can then enter the race and say the people drafted him into it."
Opinion Journal WSJ
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***Messiah Complex***
I always thought Bill Clinton had this notion that he was going to save humanity from itself. The great man who would fix everything.
Gore more pompous. Clinton more narcissistic. Hillary is both.
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By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: March 20, 2007
DES MOINES, March 17 — Immigration, an issue that has divided Republicans in Washington, is reverberating across the party’s presidential campaign field, causing particular complications for Senator John McCain of Arizona.
The topic came up repeatedly in recent campaign swings through Iowa by Mr. McCain and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, another Republican who, like Mr. McCain, supports giving some illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, a position that puts them at odds with many other conservatives. Both candidates faced intensive questioning from voters on the issue, which has become more prominent in the state as immigrants are playing a larger and increasingly visible role in the economy and society.
“Immigration is probably a more powerful issue here than almost anyplace that I’ve been,” Mr. McCain said after a stop in Cedar Falls.
As he left Iowa, Mr. McCain said he was reconsidering his views on how the immigration law might be changed. He said he was open to legislation that would require people who came to the United States illegally to return home before applying for citizenship, a measure proposed by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana. Mr. McCain has previously favored legislation that would allow most illegal immigrants to become citizens without leaving the country.
Beyond whatever influence it has as the state whose caucuses kick off the presidential nominating contest, Iowa has become something of a laboratory for the politics of immigration. Not only is it a place where industries like meatpacking rely heavily on immigrant workers and where a once relatively homogenous population is confronting an influx of Hispanic residents, but the presidential candidates who are criss-crossing the state are also providing forums for Iowans to express their views and influence national policy.
On Saturday morning in Des Moines, Mr. Brownback stood for 30 minutes at a breakfast with Republicans as question after question — without exception — was directed at an immigration system that Iowans denounced as failing. “These people are stealing from us,” said Larry Smith, a factory owner from Truro and a member of the central committee of the state Republican Party.
Finally, Mr. Brownback, with a slight smile, inquired, “Any other topics that people want to talk about?”
“What are you going to do with illegal immigrants who come here and become criminals?” demanded Jodi Wohlenhaus, a Republican homemaker who lives outside Des Moines.
The debate on the campaign trail is both reflecting and feeding the politics of the issue in Washington. President Bush and the two parties in Congress have been engaged in a three-way negotiation that has pitted demands from many conservatives to concentrate first on improving border security against Mr. Bush’s call, backed by many Democrats, for a guest worker program that could include a right for some illegal workers to eventually get legal status.
The issue has become much more complicated as the presidential campaign has gotten under way, exposing the Republicans in particular to voters who are angry about what they see as porous borders, growing demands from immigrants on the social welfare and education systems and job losses that they link at least in part to a low-wage labor force coming over the border.
Mr. McCain, for example, appeared to distance himself from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat with whom he formed an alliance last year on an immigration bill that stalled in Congress.
“What I’ve tried to point out is we couldn’t pass the legislation,” Mr. McCain said. “So we have to change the legislation so it can pass. And I’ve been working with Senator Kennedy, but we’ve also been working with additional senators, additional House members.”
Mr. McCain focused instead on the proposal by Mr. Pence, a conservative. “Pence has this touchback proposal,” Mr. McCain said at a news conference. “I said hey, let’s consider that if that’s a way we can get some stuff.”
Mr. McCain’s aides said his identification with Mr. Kennedy accounted for much of his political problem on the issue with conservatives. One of his rivals for the nomination, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, has taken to attacking what he calls the McCain-Kennedy bill.
Mr. McCain has found himself particularly identified with this battle in no small part because he is from a border state that is deeply divided over immigration. The issue is not likely to recede, regardless of the outcome of the debate in Washington: The Republican field of presidential candidates includes Representative Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican who has based his campaign on an anti-immigration message and who will almost certainly participate in Republican presidential debates starting this spring.
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(Page 2 of 2)
In a speech to conservatives in Washington two weeks ago, Mr. Romney said: “The current system is a virtual concrete wall against those who have skill and education, but it’s a wide open walk across the border for those that have neither. And McCain-Kennedy isn’t the answer.”
Mr. Romney did not always take that position. He was quoted in The Boston Globe in November 2005 describing Mr. McCain’s immigration initiatives as “reasonable proposals,” though he stopped short of endorsing them, the newspaper said.
A third major Republican contender, Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York, has supported measures similar to the one Mr. McCain is pressing. Mr. Giuliani has yet to campaign in Iowa and has not been pressed on his views on immigration; he is scheduled to spend a week in Iowa at the beginning of April.
Mr. McCain’s aides said they were confident that he could overcome concerns among Iowa voters if he pointed to the enforcement mechanisms he supports, arguing that only about one-third of Republican primary voters have strong-line views on immigration. “How are we dealing with it?” said John Weaver, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. “We’re facing it head-on. John’s position — and the president’s position — is widely supported by a vast majority of primary and caucus voters.”
Republicans have a tougher view than the general population on whether illegal immigrants should be deported, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this month. In that poll, 49 percent of Republican respondents said illegal immigrants who had lived in the United States for at least two years should be given a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for citizenship; 45 percent said they should be deported immediately. By contrast, among the general electorate, 59 percent said they should be allowed to apply for legal status, compared with 36 percent who said they should be deported.
The poll found that 31 percent of Republicans said immigration into the United States should be kept at its current level, 14 percent said it should be increased and a majority, 51 percent, said immigration should be decreased. Those figures were similar to the finding among the general population.
Other Republicans said they thought Mr. McCain’s identification with the push for easing immigration laws could prove to be among his greatest vulnerabilities. “Senator McCain will be hurt badly if he continues to support a bill like last time,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. “I think he’ll have a hard time defending that piece of legislation. I think it would be important for him to demonstrate that his position on immigration is not defined by the bill that he introduced last time.”
Nowhere does that appear to be more the case than here, a state crucial to Mr. McCain’s hopes of winning his party’s nomination. A front-page article in The Des Moines Register after the first day of Mr. McCain’s bus trip here focused on his defending his efforts on changing immigration laws.
Mr. Smith, the Republican Party central committee member, said Mr. McCain’s views on immigration had eliminated him as a contender in the view of many state Republicans.
“I have a hard time appreciating McCain’s position at all on this issue,” Mr. Smith said. “I feel he’s been extremely weak.”
“When I go county to county visiting 29 counties in my area, I believe almost without exception that immigration is that issue that puts fire in their eyes,” he said. “They just really are livid that we have allowed this to happen to the point it has.”
Mr. Brownback was reminded of that throughout the day on Saturday, including during his march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade up Locust Avenue in Des Moines. “We need to build a fence,” Mike Clark, 38, a pig farmer, told Mr. Brownback as he walked alongside him. “We need to get them stopped.”
Mr. McCain’s suggestion that he might be open to Mr. Pence’s legislation requiring most workers to return home risks alienating business, a powerful constituency in the Republican Party.
“The business community has always been skeptical about any requirement to make workers leave the U.S. to obtain legal status,” said Laura Reiff, of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which represents service industries. “We haven’t ruled a Pence-like touchback completely out of the question, but it would need to be an efficient, functional process.”
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I'd vote for Hillary before i'd vote for McCain.
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It's only 2 years until the election and I have held out long enough. I made up my mind and Fred Thompson is my choice. More after this comment on the last post:
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GM: "I'd vote for Hillary before i'd vote for McCain." - I don't know what to say to that except that I hope to vote for neither.
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Thompson gave his thoughts today on immigration and relations with Mexico:
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25816/pub_detail.asp
Southern Exposure
By Fred Thompson
Posted: Tuesday, March 20, 2007
ARTICLES
National Review Online
Publication Date: March 20, 2007
Editor's note: Click here to listen to the original radio commentary this transcript is based on.
We are all very well aware of the fact that we have an illegal-immigration problem in this country. As usual, we avoided the problem for as long as we could and when we couldn’t avoid it any longer we were told that, indeed, somewhere between 12 and 20 million people had somehow come into this country unnoticed.
It's like we went overnight from "no problem" to a problem so big that it now defies a good solution. It’s become one of those "there are no good choices only less bad choices" that Americans are becoming all too familiar with.
Hey guys, you're our friends and neighbors and we love you but it’s time you had a little dose of reality.
We know that the overwhelming majority of illegals come across the Mexican border. Fortunately, we’ve got someone who is all too willing to tell us what we should do about it--the president of Mexico Felipe Calderon. President Calderon doesn’t think much of our border policies. He criticizes our efforts to secure the border with things such as border fencing. He says that bottle necks at U.S. checkpoints hurt Mexican commerce and force his citizens to migrate illegally in order to make a living (and of course send money back to Mexico). He apparently thinks we should do nothing except make American citizens out of his constituents. Calderon also accused U.S. officials of failing to do enough to stop the flow of drugs in to the United States. Mexican politicians gave President Bush an earful of all of this during his recent trip to Mexico.
I think its time for a little plain talk to the leaders of Mexico. Something like:
Hey guys, you're our friends and neighbors and we love you but it’s time you had a little dose of reality. A sovereign nation loses that status if it cannot secure its own borders and we are going to do whatever is necessary to do so, although our policies won't be as harsh as yours are along your southern border. And criticizing the U.S. for alternately doing too much and too little to stop your illegal activities is not going to set too well with Americans of good will who are trying to figure a way out of the mess that your and our open borders policy has already created.
My friends, it’s also time for a little introspection. Since we all agree that improving Mexico’s economy will help with the illegal-immigration problem, you might want to consider your own left-of-center policies. For example, nationalized industries are not known for enhancing economic growth. Just a thought. But here’s something even more to the point that you might want to think about: What does it say about the leadership of a country when that country’s economy and politics are dependent upon the exportation of its own citizens?
Fred Thompson is a visiting fellow at AEI.
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A couple other comments of mine on Thompson:
He was impressive handling the Chief Justice nomination of John Roberts through confirmation. Right or wrong, he didn't hesitate or flinch when asked about pardoning Scooter Libby.
I heard him on the radio today where he called the leadership of the Justice Department "the B team" and described exacty how he would have unapologetically made the changes with the US Attorneys.
Areas I've found so far where I disagree with him: He favored campaign finance reform. He opposes tort reform. And he voted against removing Clinton from office. I think he may have softened on campaign finance regulations. I'm no expert on tort reform and politically he may have been right not to remove CLinton from office. After all they were certainly known criminals before the ''92 and 96 election so maybe the voters deserved two full terms.
No one is another Reagan, but he may have exactly what it takes to stand next to Hillary in the debates and explain the merits of a conservative philosophy with 'plain talk', grace and humor.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/03/23/rasmussen-fred-44-hillary-43/
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Go Tom!
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Quote of the Day I
"A national poll of likely voters by independent pollster John Zogby found nearly half (46 percent) said they couldn't vote for the former first lady under any circumstances... [A]nother number was even more disturbing to senior advisers in her campaign. Mr. Zogby found that among likely Democratic voters, 18 percent said they 'would never cast a vote in Mrs. Clinton's favor.' That such a large percentage of overall voters would flatly express an aversion to electing her president was troubling enough to top Democratic officials. But that she appeared to be losing support within the base of her own party set off alarm bells among her high command" -- Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent, writing in the Washington Times.
Opinion Journal/WSJ
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Well I guess learning how to salute is going to win over the military and erase decades of disdain for the people in uniform. It would be like Jane Fonda saluting for the cameras. Hypocracy for the ages. Yet she may win the election with promises of gifts to every group of constuents that she needs to win.
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
March 27, 2007
Mindful of Past, Clinton Cultivates the Military
By PATRICK HEALY
Of all the early problems Bill Clinton faced as president, few stand out to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as more frustrating and avoidable than his rocky relationship with the military, her advisers say.
During his 1992 campaign, Mr. Clinton was attacked for avoiding the Vietnam draft and organizing antiwar marches in the 1960s. After taking office, his early focus on gay men and lesbians in the military drew sharp criticism from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin L. Powell, and other officers. Even his ability to salute properly was called into question.
Mrs. Clinton, to use a phrase, has been practicing her salute. As a senator and now as a presidential candidate, she has cultivated relationships with generals and admirals, prepped herself on wartime needs and strategy, and traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I think eight years in the White House, traveling the world and seeing the United States military doing the nation’s business, and now her time in the Senate, has given her a significant appreciation of the military that maybe her husband didn’t have before the White House,” said Jack Keane, the retired general and former Army vice chief of staff who has become close to the senator.
For Mrs. Clinton, exhibiting a command of military matters is not just about learning from her husband’s experience. It could be vital to her, as a woman seeking to become a wartime commander in chief, to show the public that she is comfortable with military policy and culture — and with the weight of responsibility that accompanies life-and-death decisions.
It is also part of an effort to shed the image some voters hold of her as an antimilitary liberal, defined by her opposition to the Vietnam War and, now, by her criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq.
A Time magazine poll in July asked adults to assess whether Mrs. Clinton would keep the military strong. Asked how much that description fit Mrs. Clinton, 33 percent said a lot, 25 percent said a little, 15 percent said not much, 18 percent said not at all and 10 percent had no answer.
Some uniformed officers, too, said that the Clintons were more associated with a ’60s culture than a military one, and that only time would tell if Mrs. Clinton’s appreciation of the military would go beyond niceties and expressions of concern.
Donald L. Kerrick, a retired general and former deputy national security adviser to President Clinton, acknowledged that some people inside and outside the military were skeptical of Mrs. Clinton’s intentions and wary that she would shift federal dollars to domestic programs like health care.
General Kerrick, who is close to Mrs. Clinton, said he believed that her appreciation of the military was genuine, but that it would take time and effort for that to come across.
“If, as president, she treats commanders and troops the same way she does now, she will quickly gain their support and respect,” General Kerrick said. “Military people are very loyal to the chain of command, and to people who understand them.”
In the Senate, Mrs. Clinton has supported expanding medical benefits for National Guard members and reservists and providing aid to those with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. She has also defied liberals in her own party at times, endorsing the expansion of the Army, supporting financing for missile defense, and refusing to support a total ban on land mines.
But just as she has encountered some hostility from the left for not being a critic of the Iraq war earlier and for not renouncing her vote in 2002 to authorize it, Mrs. Clinton could also risk coming off as too hawkish to some Democratic voters for her vociferous support of military initiatives.
Some on the left ask if she is engaging again in the Clinton strategy of political triangulation: reaching out to military leaders while also trying to appease the left with her criticism of the war in Iraq. During her Senate re-election race last year, some liberals criticized her as currying favor with pro-military conservatives and independents by fiercely supporting Israel and taking a tough line against Al Qaeda and Iranian operatives in Iraq, similar to what her husband did during his presidency on social issues like welfare.
“Some days she sounds like a total hawk, and other days she’s saying, ‘I’m against the war and it’s been mismanaged,’ ” said Jonathan Tasini, who ran against Mrs. Clinton for the Senate Democratic nomination last year on an antiwar platform.
“But I don’t see how this helps her in the primaries,” Mr. Tasini continued. “So many people have turned against the war.”
Of the other main Democratic presidential candidates, only Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut has served in the military, as an Army reservist. Like Mrs. Clinton, most of the candidates rely on their service on Senate committees for their foreign policy credentials. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois serves on the Foreign Relations and Veterans Affairs Committees; former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina served on the intelligence committee; Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Mr. Dodd is a member of that committee.
Essential to Mrs. Clinton’s courtship of the military was winning a seat in 2002 on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which she had vigorously sought. In that role, she regularly meets with military officers, has traveled three times to Iraq and has attended hearings on global conflicts and the needs of the armed services.
Privately, two current military leaders who have testified before the Armed Services committee, and who by custom do not comment publicly on political figures, said they both found Mrs. Clinton conversant about the military and thoughtful in her questions.
Active-duty generals have sought her out, and she has reached out to them. Among those with whom she has built relationships are Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, and Adm. William J. Fallon, the new head of Central Command. Recently, too, James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marines, invited her to be his guest of honor at the “Sunset Parade” at the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, a high-profile tradition. (She has accepted.)
Some military analysts said that building ties with generals was only part of building a leadership image on military issues. Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, the libertarian research group, said Mrs. Clinton’s political shift to opposing the war in Iraq — combined with some voters’ skepticism about the Clintons and the military — posed a challenge for her, especially when she needs to prove that a woman is tough enough to be commander in chief.
“By surrounding herself with military brass, it reinforces an image of her as strong and hawkish,” Mr. Carpenter said. “But is that an authentic image? Would she really give dollars to the Pentagon instead of to cherished domestic programs?”
The Republican National Committee’s research staff members have already compiled a series of examples that they say show Mrs. Clinton at odds with military interests, including her Iraq war positioning and her opposition to sending additional troops there.
General Keane — whose support for sending more troops to Iraq is at odds with Mrs. Clinton’s view — and other admirers of hers see these skeptical or critical portrayals of her as playing into false stereotypes. He recalled how his own initial impression of her changed after their first meeting: It was supposed to last 15 minutes, but continued for a half hour longer as they talked about West Point and moved onto global hot spots.
John Batiste, a retired major general and former commander of the First Infantry Division, who also consults with Mrs. Clinton, said, “Very, very few politicians have any military experience, and they’re naïve — they don’t understand what it takes to develop a big picture, unified strategy to take a country to war.
“She’s the kind of person who would listen to sound military advice,” General Batiste said, “and not dismiss it or discard it. And I’m a lifelong Republican.“
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http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007178.htm
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Inserted
GM: Whenever you post a URL please give your post a unique subject heading and/or a brief description. For example, here it could be "The Image Hillary can't erase".
Thank you,
Marc
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Hillary in the news - today's talking point was 'universal healthcare'. I'm sure we'll get to that in the campaign. First I want to criticize her proposal from last week for a "Foreclosure-Timeout" in response to the trouble in the housing market. I read it first in 'The Economist' but here is a short version from NPR Morning Edition:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8951674
Democratic Hopefuls Weigh In on Subprime Loans
Morning Edition, March 16, 2007 · "With foreclosure rates at their highest level in four decades, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York is calling for a "foreclosure timeout." Another Democratic presidential hopeful — Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, the Senate Banking Committee chairman — says he will hold hearings on the subprime crisis. In recent weeks at least 20 companies who specialize in high-risk mortgages have gone bust."
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Let's walk through this. A customer with a credit issue or low down payment, who would not qualify for the lowest risk - lowest interest rate mortgage, is able to buy a house they otherwise couldn't, by paying a premium on the interest rate to compensate the mortgage company for the higher risk. It's a highly regulated business and the transaction is all legal. The mortgage company pays out let's say $189,900 for the customer to buy the house in exchange for the right to receive scheduled payments and take the first position lien on the house for collateral. Now let's say the customer with the higher risk defaults on his payments. That happens; he did have a credit problem and/or insufficient savings. The mortgagecompany is powerless except to follow the contractual and highly regulated processs of mitigating its loss with a foreclosure and take back the property to re-sell. During the long process they receive no further payments as the loan in in default. The process takes some 6 months to a year(?) while the mortgage company has no right of possession, receives no money and keeps incurring costs. Now enter new President Hillary who says they can't even do that. She declares a 'foreclosure timeout'. The customer stays in the house. Payments in default don't need to be made. The mortgage is prevented fom exercizing its right under the contract and under the law.
It reminds me of the Nixon Price Wage freeze of 1971. So, the crisis includes lenders going broke and her answer is a foreclosure-timeout. I don't know if these people hate capitalism or just don't understand it. I can't say this stongly enough, but IMO, if you favor economic freedoms and the right to enter into binding, legal contracts - these policies are exactly the opposite.
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/edwa-m28.shtml
Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer and the remorselessness of US political life
By David Walsh
28 March 2007
Last Wednesday doctors in Chapel Hill, North Carolina told Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards, former US senator, Democratic Party vice presidential candidate in 2004 and presidential hopeful in 2008, that the breast cancer originally diagnosed three years ago had metastasized to her right rib, the surrounding bones and possibly to her lungs.
The following day, John Edwards announced that he was remaining in the race for the Democratic nomination and that his wife was planning to participate actively. Mrs. Edwards told the media, “I expect to do next week all the things I did this week.”
On the human level, it is entirely natural and appropriate to feel sympathy for the Edwardses’ situation. Less than three years after her initial diagnosis, Mrs. Edwards has received news that must be, for even the most stoic individual, deeply unsettling. She must feel anxiety not only for her own future, but, even more, for the impact of her illness and its emotional consequences upon her husband and, especially, her two young children. It is within this context that the response of the Edwardses to their personal crisis is troubling and, in its own way, sheds a certain grim light on the political culture of the United States.
First, there is the speed with which the couple came to their decision to soldier on regardless. Perhaps this is really what they want, in their heart of hearts, to do. But one cannot avoid the thought that the Edwards found themselves suddenly in the midst of a nightmare scenario that was as much political as medical. If their own accounts are to be believed, they committed themselves to the continuation of the campaign within hours of learning the unhappy news. According to a piece in the New York Times, based on Elizabeth Edwards’ account of the events, as “the nurse fumbled to find the vein in her arm last Wednesday,” for additional tests (which proved negative) to see if the cancer had spread even farther, “her decision about her husband’s presidential campaign was sealed.” As she sat getting her IV, Mrs. Edwards concluded, “It’s really important that he [Edwards] run.”
That this is what she would be thinking in the midst of these medical procedures says a great deal about the dehumanizing impact of the American political process on the candidates themselves. Receiving a diagnosis of metastatic cancer is, in the most literal sense, a deadly serious matter. Elizabeth Edwards’ disease is classified as Stage 4—that is to say, incurable. Various treatments may succeed in prolonging her life by years, even decades, but every stage of the process of confronting such a condition, including having an IV inserted, is exhausting and nerve-racking. As she told the Times, “I was feeling particularly desperate.”
And yet, in the midst of personal desperation, the decision to get back on the “campaign trail” brooked no delay. Why? The ugly truth is that Edwards and his wife had, according to the rules of the American political game, no choice. They had to come an immediate decision: either announce immediately that they were staying in, or get out and cash in their chips.
The Edwards and their political advisers were well aware of one inescapably political reality: within hours of the news of Elizabeth’s cancer breaking, their financial backers would start to bail out if there existed the slightest doubt about their future plans. There would be, to be sure, tearful expressions of sympathy and solidarity. But the cash would dry up quickly.
Ruthlessly stage-managed as they are, or perhaps all the more so because of their political emptiness, American presidential campaigns are demanding, monstrous undertakings. To be considered a serious candidate, the former North Carolina senator will be obliged to raise $100 million during 2007. March 31 marks the end of the first quarter of fundraising, and, comments the Associated Press, “the presidential campaigns are working overtime to make sure they don’t get tagged as losers in the money race. ‘Money in the off year has never been more important than in this presidential cycle,’ said Michael Toner, a former Federal Election Commission chairman.”
Hillary Clinton may report that she has already raised as much as $40 million, Barack Obama may have $20 million and Edwards is expected to come in third among Democratic candidates. If he were to skip a beat, lose momentum, he would effectively be out of the race.
And so, Edward and Elizabeth had to decide immediately. Yes, it is a heartless and even brutal process. But American presidential campaigns are not without logic and purpose. It is this very process of dehumanization that whips the character of the presidential hopefuls into shape. Do they have what it takes to run the most powerful and brutal capitalist state in the world? Have the candidates been so emptied of everything decent and humane that they are prepared for what will be demanded of them once they arrive at the top of the political dung heap?
There is another aspect of this process that deserves comment. Bourgeois politicians everywhere are ambitious, but perhaps nowhere as blindly or recklessly so as in the US. Edwards and his wife are risking a great deal . . . but in pursuit of what exactly? Were John and Elizabeth Edwards the leaders or representatives of a socially significant movement, their decision to fight on, whatever the personal consequences, would appear in an entirely different and far more noble light. A great historic cause has a right to demand everything of those who place themselves at its service.
But Edwards, to be blunt about it, serves no cause other than that dictated by his blind ambition for the pedestrian glory of a high state office. The assertions by John and Elizabeth Edwards that they ‘could not let their supporters down’ are hollow. He is, at the end of the day, just another bourgeois politician.
Edwards made his name and fortune (estimated in 2003 at between $12.8 and $60 million) as a personal injury lawyer. Elected to the US Senate in 1998, Edwards served one term. He co-sponsored Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s Iraq War Resolution and also later voted for it (a decision he now says he regrets), and voted for the Patriot Act, the blueprint for an American police-state. His policies are all over the map, and one has reason to believe they are mostly regulated by shifts in the political winds. He has nothing of importance to offer the American people. Were his campaign to end tomorrow, its only legacy would be unpaid campaign bills.
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I'd agree that "Breck girl" Edwards would spin 180 if the polls went that way on any topic. The bit about the Patriot act being a blue print for a police state is beyond ignorant though."Do they have what it takes to run the most powerful and brutal capitalist state in the world?" :roll:
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The WSWS of the citation stands for "World Socialist Web Site". :-P
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Checking in here with two items:
1) Rumor that Steve Forbes is joining the Rudy Giuliani campaign at a high level policy position, per 'Pajamasa Media'; the news story so far is just that Forbes is endorsing Giuliani: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032800918.html?reload=true
Forbes advising Giuliani is great news from my point of view. In previous campaigns I found Steve Forbes to be my best choice on policy positions but not charismatic enough to carry the message or win the votes. Giuliani isn't my first choice candidate, but as things sit today, he has the best chance of winning the nomination and getting elected. He needs the best advisors possible to help nail down the specifics of his proposals and to successfully frame the arguments. Steve Forbes on tax policy makes sense IMO--
2) I recommend a long piece this week from the Chicago Tribune on Ill. Sen. Barack Obama:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-070323obama-youth,0,445780.story
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703250359mar25,1,605874.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703250359mar25,1,605874.story?page=2&coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
They pursue the angle that his real story isn't exactly as he wrote in his books. I would read these just from the point of just getting to know one of the key players entering the national stage.
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The WSWS of the citation stands for "World Socialist Web Site". :-P
The irony of "The World Socialist Web Site" advocating a totalitarian ideology while accusing the Patriot Act of being a blue print for a police state is breathtaking. :roll:
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Forbes does have a good grasp of supply side economics/tax policy. This is important for Republicans to escape the class warfare/racebaiting tactics of the Demogogue Party. As mayor, Rudy showed tax-cutting tendencies so Forbes looks like an honest fit.
There's much to like about Rudy, but his history on gun rights is downright bad. This issue IS a very important one for me. Also I see him as a RINO a certain other issues.
Still, he is an easy call over any Dem.
PS: Newt is on Hannity & Wife tonight
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Crafty, I agree with you on Rudy. Wrong to my taste on too many issues to support him in the primaries, but I will certainly join up if/when he secures the endorsement. I also oppose gun control, but if I favored it and was President, I hope I would be principled enough to propose amending rather than stomping on the constitution. Rudy has talked the talk on strict constructionist judicial appointments, but that contradicts his own position on gun control and on a mother's right to choose.
Back to tax issues, in the 2000 campaign John McCain opposed candidate Bush's tax cut proposal. Now McCain says make most of them permanent and Rudy sounds like he may go further into cutting and simplifying. And those are the moderates (RINOs). That is a step forward IMO. Still, McCain is feuding with Club for Growth (who I recently joined) over his previous anti tax cut votes. It is not just the 'no' votes, but the rhetoric that helps gives credibility and cover to the left. Specifically, McCain words and votes were cited often by the Dem here in our most recent senate race to demonstrate that she wasn't some extreme leftist.
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Club for Growth Calls on McCain to Apologize for Tax Votes
Washington - The Club for Growth called on Senator McCain to renounce his 2001 and 2003 votes against the Bush tax cuts and apologize for his vocal class-warfare-laced opposition to them.
In 2001, Senator McCain was 1 of only 2 Republicans to oppose the Bush tax cuts (Roll Call #170, 05/26/01) and 1 of only 3 Republicans in 2003 (Roll Call #196, 05/23/03). He even went so far as to adopt the class-warfare rhetoric of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats, arguing in a 2003 Face the Nation interview that “the reason why I opposed the last round was because the—what I felt was a disproportionate favoring of the wealthiest 1 percent, 10 percent of Americans. If that's continued, obviously, then I wouldn't support that.” http://www.clubforgrowth.org/
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McCain has high integrity on WW3, but the list of things I oppose him on is long and strong. To your list I would add the McCain-Feingold Act. I get red hot angry on this one. It is a total violation of the First Amendment and it is the shame of the Supreme Court that they affirmed it.
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Rudy's the One
The free-market leader of the GOP field.
BY STEVE FORBES
Friday, March 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
WSJ
Rudy Giuliani is the real fiscal conservative in the 2008 presidential race. That's why I'm endorsing him for president.
Most Americans know that Mr. Giuliani turned around America's largest city. They know he cut crime and welfare in half; they know that he improved the quality of life from Times Square to Coney Island and everywhere in between. And they witnessed his Churchillian leadership following the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
Less well known is the mayor's fiscal record. Nonetheless, conservatives will find it impressive. He built New York's resurgence not just on fundamental police work, but also on a foundation of fiscal discipline. He cut taxes and the size of government and turned an inherited deficit into a multibillion dollar surplus.
Mr. Giuliani entered office in 1994 with a $2.3 billion budget deficit handed to him by his predecessor, Mayor David Dinkins. Liberal conventional wisdom held that the only way to close the gap was to raise taxes while cutting back on basic city services such as sanitation. The new mayor rejected this advice--in fact, he famously threw the report recommending tax hikes in the trash!
Instead, he set out to restore fiscal discipline to the "ungovernable city"--and achieved results that Reagan Republicans can applaud.
In his first budget address Mr. Giuliani explained that he would "cut taxes to attract jobs so our people can work." While lots of politicians make promises about cutting taxes Mr. Giuliani delivered, overcoming the initial resistance of the overwhelmingly Democratic City Council. He ultimately prevailed 23 times, including cuts in sales, personal income, commercial rent and hotel occupancy taxes. He understood that these taxes were not revenue producers, but counterproductive job killers.
When he left office after eight years, New Yorkers had saved over $9 billion, while enjoying their lowest tax burden in decades. The private sector, which had been hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs in the years before he took office, produced over 423,000 new jobs. Meanwhile the unemployment rate was cut in half. Businesses responded to Mr. Giuliani's reforms by returning to the center of city life.
So when he talks about his belief in supply-side economics, its not just theory, it's a plan he has already succeeded at putting into action. He's seen the results of supply-side economics first hand--higher revenues from lower taxes.
Controlling government spending is another pledge often made by politicians. Conservative voters now know to be skeptical of such claims. But Mr. Giuliani has a record they can have confidence in. His first budget cut spending for the first time in the city since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s--and over the course of his administration he controlled the city's spending while federal government spending grew by over 40% and average state spending ballooned by over 60%. Mr. Giuliani always made fiscal discipline a priority: instructing city commissioners to cut agency budgets even when the deficits had turned to surpluses.
Mr. Giuliani set out to cut the size of city government, insisting that New York should live within its means. New Yorkers saw their quality of life improve with more effective delivery of services while the bureaucratic ranks were being thinned by nearly 20,000--a near 20% decrease in city headcount, excluding police officers and teachers. He increased the number of cops and teachers because he understood that public safety and quality education are what we expect in return for our tax dollars, not partisan job protection or union featherbedding. As mayor, he proved that government can be smaller and smarter--more efficient and more effective.
Rudy Giuliani can unite the Republican Party and restore our traditional claim as the party of fiscal conservatism. He has already proven he can stand up to liberal special interest groups and achieve tax cuts, even with a Democrat-controlled City Council. That's the kind of leadership we need in Washington. That's the kind of leadership that will inspire the next generation of the Reagan Revolution. And that's why America's Mayor should be America's next president.
Mr. Forbes is president and CEO of Forbes Inc. and editor in chief of Forbes magazine.
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Today's WSJ
These columns have had more than one disagreement with John McCain over the years, especially on issues that typically win the Arizona Republican accolades from the rest of the media: campaign-finance reform, global warming, detainee interrogations and tax cuts. Yet now that he is under attack from his erstwhile media "base" for refusing to repudiate the war in Iraq, we think he deserves some covering fire. The word for what he's demonstrating is character.
Presidential campaigns often have their defining media moments, for better or worse: Think of Teddy Kennedy's fumbling replies to Roger Mudd's Chappaquiddick questions in 1979, or George H. W. Bush shaking off the so-called wimp factor in his 1988 interview with Dan Rather. It's too soon to say if Mr. McCain's interview Sunday with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" will be equally defining. But it certainly illuminated the chasm that distinguishes Mr. McCain from the Beltway media that used to adore him.
The most revealing exchange came when Mr. Pelley, in all apparent seriousness, asked the Senator "at what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?"
Answered Mr. McCain: "I disagree with what the majority of the American people want. I still believe the majority of the American people, when asked, say if you can show them a path to success . . . then they'll support it." Later Mr. Pelley observed that Mr. McCain was betting his entire campaign on the success of the current "surge" strategy in Baghdad. The Senator replied that he'd "rather lose a campaign than lose a war."
It's hard not to respect that. Hard, too, not to notice that statements like those exist at a vast and principled remove from the recent Solonic utterances of other Senators who supported the war when it was popular. Such as "let's cut and run, or cut and walk" (Oregon Republican Gordon Smith, running for re-election next year), and "if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way" (Hillary Rodham Clinton, trying to appease the antiwar left as she seeks the Democratic Presidential nomination).
The difference is not merely of consistency but of conviction. Mr. McCain is making clear he understands that leadership is often by nature unpopular. He has been equally clear about the consequences of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq--"chaos" and "genocide" were among the scenarios he painted for Mr. Pelley.
He has also shown that he understands the moral obligation his vote authorizing the war entailed, which was to see it through to victory, or at least until the conclusion becomes inescapable that victory is impossible. With General David Petraeus only recently installed in Baghdad and his surge strategy not yet fully under way, Mr. McCain realizes that we are nowhere near being able to draw that conclusion.
Not surprisingly, all this has the media in a state of apoplexy, with his former liberal pals shaking their heads in phony regret that his supposed blunder in Baghdad--observing last week that a market is safer than it was only a few months ago--is going to sink his candidacy. Our view is that Mr. McCain's difficulty so far in attracting conservative voters has nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with the positions that once made him the media darling. On the contrary, his support for the war and his appreciation of the stakes is one thing that keeps his candidacy alive, at least within the Republican Party.
Later today, Mr. McCain will deliver a speech at the Virginia Military Institute about how the war in Iraq can be won. Along with many Americans, we will listen with interest and respect, not because we always agree with Mr. McCain, but because he has demonstrated that his views on the subject are serious and born of belief, not of polls. That's more than can be said for most of our political and chattering classes, and a reason to admire a politician whose newfound unpopularity coincides with his finest political hour.
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Rudy's Big Apple Baggage
Will New York politics haunt Mr. Giuliani?
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, April 13, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Here's a little nugget from the past, a tale that may offer some insights into the next stage of the GOP presidential race, and the fortunes of front-runner Rudy Giuliani:
The date is the mid-1990s, and Republicans have swept Congress with their Contract with America. A top promise is greater fiscal responsibility, and a crucial element of that is a vow to pass a line-item veto and give the president the power to weed out pork. In 1996 Republicans are as good as their word, and grant the opposition's Bill Clinton a broad new power to strip wasteful spending.
Mr. Clinton is enthusiastic, and in August 1997 uses his tool for the first time to strike down a special-interest provision tucked in a bill. That provision gives New York hospitals a unique right to bilk extra Medicaid money, and the veto is expected to save federal taxpayers at least $200 million. Quicker than a Big Apple pol can say "pork," New York officials sue, challenging the line item veto's constitutionality. That suit, Clinton v. City of New York, goes all the way to the Supremes, which in 1998 put the kibosh on veto authority.
The kicker? The guy who brought the suit and won--or, rather, the guy who helped stall one of the more powerful tools for reining in government spending--was none other than former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
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Case Closed
Tax cuts mean growth.
BY FRED THOMPSON
Saturday, April 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
It's that time again, and I was thinking of the old joke about paying your taxes with a smile. The punch line is that the IRS doesn't accept smiles. They want your money.
So it's not that funny, but there is reason to smile this tax season. The results of the experiment that began when Congress passed a series of tax-rate cuts in 2001 and 2003 are in. Supporters of those cuts said they would stimulate the economy. Opponents predicted ever-increasing budget deficits and national bankruptcy unless tax rates were increased, especially on the wealthy.
In fact, Treasury statistics show that tax revenues have soared and the budget deficit has been shrinking faster than even the optimists projected. Since the first tax cuts were passed, when I was in the Senate, the budget deficit has been cut in half.
Remarkably, this has happened despite the financial trauma of 9/11 and the cost of the War on Terror. The deficit, compared to the entire economy, is well below the average for the last 35 years and, at this rate, the budget will be in surplus by 2010.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this success story is where the increased revenues are coming from. Critics claimed that across-the-board tax cuts were some sort of gift to the rich but, on the contrary, the wealthy are paying a greater percentage of the national bill than ever before.
The richest 1% of Americans now pays 35% of all income taxes. The top 10% pay more taxes than the bottom 60%.
The reason for this outcome is that, because of lower rates, money is being invested in our economy instead of being sheltered from the taxman. Greater investment has created overall economic strength. Job growth is robust, overcoming trouble in the housing sector; and the personal incomes of Americans at every income level are higher than they've ever been.
President John F. Kennedy was an astute proponent of tax cuts and the proposition that lower tax rates produce economic growth. Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan also understood the power of lower tax rates and managed to put through cuts that grew the U.S. economy like Kansas corn. Sadly, we just don't seem able to keep that lesson learned.
Now, as before, politicians are itching to fund their pet projects with the short-term revenue increases that come from tax hikes, ignoring the long-term pain they always cause. Unfortunately, the tax cuts that have produced our record-breaking government revenues and personal incomes will expire soon. Because Congress has failed to make them permanent, we are facing the worst tax hike in our history. Already, worried investors are trying to figure out what the financial landscape will look like in 2011 and beyond.
This issue is particularly important now because massive, unfunded entitlements are coming due as the baby-boom generation retires. We simply cannot afford higher taxes if we want an economy able to bear up under the strain of those obligations. And beyond the issue of our annual federal budget is the nearly $9 trillion national debt that we have not even begun to pay off.
To face these challenges, and any others that we might encounter in a hazardous world, we need to maintain economic growth and healthy tax revenues. That is why we need to reject taxes that punish rather than reward success. Those who say they want a "more progressive" tax system should be asked one question:
Are you really interested in tax rates that benefit the economy and raise revenue--or are you interested in redistributing income for political reasons?
Mr. Thompson is a former Republican senator from Tennessee whose commentaries, "The Fred Thompson Report," can be heard on the ABC Radio network.
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From the Courthouse
to the White House
Fred Thompson auditions for the leading role.
by Stephen F. Hayes
04/23/2007, Volume 012, Issue 30
A strange thing happened a few weeks back when I went to the Café Promenade at the Mayflower Hotel for an off-the-record interview with an unpaid adviser to the non-campaign of unannounced presidential candidate Fred Thompson.
Fred Thompson showed up.
Thompson was there to have lunch with Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a powerhouse consultant with ties to the White House. The two men worked together in the fall of 2005 on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Thompson had invited Gillespie to lunch to discuss a potential presidential bid.
On March 11, just a week before, Thompson had appeared on Fox News Sunday and told Chris Wallace that he was giving "serious consideration" to running for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Ever since, advisers on other campaigns have tried to figure out how he'll affect the race if he runs.
Several patrons in the restaurant recognized Thompson. One well-dressed man with thick white hair approached him for an autograph. It's possible that this man wanted the autograph because Thompson served for eight years as a senator from Tennessee. But it's more likely that he wanted a memento of the day he ate at the same restaurant as Arthur Branch, the sagacious district attorney on Law & Order; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Law & Order: Criminal Intent; Law & Order: Trial by Jury; and Conviction, a spin-off of, well, you can probably guess. The same man returned to the table twice more. Each time Thompson put his conversation on hold and graciously tolerated the interruption.
After an hour, Thompson and Gillespie--currently chairman of the Republican party of Virginia--rose and left the restaurant. Ten minutes later, Thompson walked back in with former senator Bill Frist. They were led to a different table, but Thompson's waitress was the same. She laughed as she took his new order. Thompson says this second lunch was unplanned. Although he and Frist talk daily, the two Tennesseans met this time by chance. Finding they both had gaps in their schedules, they spent the next two hours at Café Promenade talking about a Fred Thompson for President campaign.
There is some discontent among Republicans with the current choices for the party's nominee in 2008. The complaints are well known: Senator John McCain, the maverick Republican, is too much maverick and not enough Republican. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is thought to be too willful and too liberal: He recently suggested he would allow his new wife to attend cabinet meetings and reaffirmed his support for federal funding of abortion. Mitt Romney seems pleasant and competent, but pleasant and competent doesn't beat Hillary Clinton. Senator Sam Brownback is unknown and uncharismatic. And former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is from Arkansas.
According to an adviser to one of the leading candidates, the rationale for a Thompson run is best illustrated--as so many things are--by The Simpsons. In one episode, Homer Simpson's civic-minded neighbor Ned Flanders tells a large crowd of fellow Springfield citizens that they must choose someone to lead an anticrime campaign in the town.
"Who should lead the group?"
"You," shouts a man from the crowd. The entire mob begins to chant.
"Flanders! Flanders! Flanders!"
When Flanders humbly begins to explain that he doesn't have much experience in such matters, Moe the Bartender cuts him off.
"Someone else!"
The crowd joins in.
"Someone else! Someone else! Someone else!"
One obvious advantage Fred Thompson has is that he's someone else.
In recent Republican presidential preference polls, Thompson tends to run third, behind Giuliani and McCain but ahead of Romney and the rest of the field. In a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll released last week, Thompson came in second, just ahead of McCain, with support from 15 percent of those surveyed. In late March, Thompson won a straw poll of Republicans in conservative Gwinnett County, Georgia, earning more votes than all of the other candidates combined. And Iowa Republican party executive director Chuck Laudner told the Washington Times, "He's the biggest buzz in the state."
Representative Zach Wamp, a fellow Tennesseean who is running an effort to "Draft Fred," tells me he expects 60 congressional Republicans to show up early next week at a meet-and-greet with Thompson. Mark Corallo, who has volunteered to answer press inquiries for Thompson, has been getting dozens of calls each day--not only from reporters, but from Republicans around the country who have seen his name in the newspaper and tracked him down at his private consulting firm to sign up for a Thompson campaign. Politicians are reaching out to Bill Frist to offer their support. Says Frist: "I have governors who have called me, fundraisers I've known from my days as majority leader who are ready to go."
All of this, for a candidate who has not yet announced for anything.
Last week, I went to Thompson's home in the verdant Washington suburb of McLean, Virginia, to talk to him about his prospective presidential run. We spoke for more than four hours about his life in Tennessee, his family, his acting career, his foray into politics, and his future.
I was 30 minutes late. Thompson, who was on the phone with Howard Baker, his political mentor, didn't seem to care. He hung up, extended his large hand, offered a friendly greeting, and led me to his office. We were alone. Thompson's work space looks just like what the home office of a successful politician or CEO should look like--though a little messier: a large desk, dark wood, leather furniture, lots of books and magazines and newspapers, a flat-screen TV, and box upon box of cigars--Montecristos from Havana.
The presence of the cigars and the absence of a press chaperone were clues that Thompson is taking a different approach to his potential candidacy. A campaign flack would have insisted on hiding the cigars--Senator, how did you get those Cuban cigars? Isn't there a trade embargo?--and might have dampened Thompson's natural candor. On subjects ranging from Social Security to abortion, the CIA and to Iran, there would be lots of candor over the next several hours.
And by the end of the conversation, two unexpected realities had emerged. If he joins the race for the Republican nomination, and if he campaigns the same way he spoke to me last week, Fred Thompson, a mild-mannered, slow-talking southern gentleman, will run as the politically aggressive conservative that George W. Bush hasn't been for four years. And the actor in the race could well be the most authentic personality in the field.
Thompson seems to recognize that he wins the guy-I'd-want-to-get-a-beer-with primary the moment he announces. He comes across as a regular guy--"folksy" will be the political cliché that attaches to his candidacy--and punctuates explanations of his positions with the kind of off-the-cuff homespun witticisms that Dan Rather spent a career trying to come up with.
We sat facing each other in leather armchairs, and after some small talk I asked him what life was like growing up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. He began talking, and about 30 minutes later it was already 1994 and he was about to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I'd tried to interrupt with questions here and there, but he had a story he was determined to tell.
It's a good story. Thompson was born in Alabama and lived for most of his young life in Middle Tennessee. His father sold used cars and his mother took care of the house. Neither one graduated from high school, although Thompson's father earned his high school equivalency certificate later in life. His family ate dinner every night at 6:00 P.M. "It was like clockwork," he says. Thompson was not a great student in high school. At one point, he says, several of his teachers worked together to strip him of the title given to him by a vote of his peers--Most Athletic--because his grades were substandard. His father was something of a jokester, but also when necessary a disciplinarian.
"I grew up not having anything to live up to from an economic or professional standpoint, but having a lot to live up to from a growing-up and becoming-a-man standpoint," says Thompson.
That example would be important at a young age. Thompson married his high school sweetheart at 17, and together they enrolled at Memphis State University, where he studied philosophy and political science. Thompson worked several jobs to put himself through college and support a growing family.
"I sold clothing," he says. "I sold shoes. I sold baby shoes. I sold ladies shoes. I worked in a factory."
His wife's uncle and grandfather were both lawyers, and Thompson says he wanted to live up to the professional standards of her family. The law school at Vanderbilt University had seemed an unattainable goal for an underachieving high school student from a family without means. But it was a goal nonetheless. Thompson got serious academically as an undergraduate, and won admission.
Once a lawyer, he had a brief stint with the U.S. attorney's office, then went into private practice--"hung out my shingle," he says--and volunteered to work for Howard Baker's reelection campaign for Senate in 1972. Shortly after Baker returned to Washington he asked Thompson to join him for what he thought would be a short-term project. A special committee had been established to look into the Committee to Reelect President Richard M. Nixon, and Baker, the panel's top Republican, asked Thompson to serve as minority counsel. Thompson could often be seen at Baker's side as the investigation grew from a routine oversight hearing into the proceedings that would cause a president to resign. Thompson, who wrote a book about his experiences called At That Point in Time: The Inside Story of the Senate Watergate Committee, asked the question that led to the revelation of the White House taping systems. "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?" And Thompson is often credited with feeding Baker the line that would become one of the most famous of an era: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
Thompson says he passed up several offers with big Washington law firms to return to Nashville, where he entered a private practice with two law school classmates. He took the case of Marie Ragghianti, the head of Tennessee's Parole and Pardons Board. Ragghianti had grown concerned about what she saw as a pattern of suspicious pardons ordered from the office of Governor Ray Blanton. Her suspicions were later confirmed and Blanton was forced from office in a cash-for-clemency scandal that continued until his last day.
Peter Maas, author of Serpico, turned Marie Ragghianti's story into a book creatively titled Marie and published in 1983. Director Roger Donaldson bought the movie rights and came to Nashville to interview the major players. After meeting Thompson, Donaldson asked him if he'd like to play himself in the movie. Thompson agreed.
Over the next two decades, Thompson would appear in dozens of films and television shows as a character actor, often one who personifies government strength. It is a role that seems to fit. "Literally, I don't think Fred ever acts," says Tom Ingram, a longtime friend from Tennessee who now serves as chief of staff to Senator Lamar Alexander. "He played himself in Marie, and he's been playing himself ever since."
When Donaldson needed someone to play the role of CIA director in his next film, No Way Out, he turned to Thompson. A string of movies followed: The Hunt for Red October, Days of Thunder, Die Hard 2, Curly Sue, Cape Fear, In the Line of Fire. And there were cameo appearances on TV's Matlock and later Sex and the City.
Thompson never moved to Hollywood, choosing to stay in Tennessee, where he continued to practice law and remained involved in Republican politics. When Al Gore was elected vice president, Tennessee's Democratic governor, Ned McWherter, appointed one of his top advisers to serve until the 1994 elections, when a replacement would be elected to fill the final two years of Gore's term. Thompson's name came up early, and eventually, in July 1993, he filed papers for an exploratory committee.
Thompson knew from the beginning that it would be a difficult race. His opponent was Jim Cooper, a popular conservative Democrat who had developed a national reputation as a legislative expert on health care, widely considered one of the country's most important issues. Thompson started the race well behind Cooper. He told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal that he was a moderate Republican. The reporter who interviewed Thompson described him as "pro-choice," but noted that he supported restrictions on abortion at the state level and opposed federal funding. (A 1994 story in National Review also described Thompson as pro-choice.)
In a poll taken in February 1994, 36 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Cooper, while just 17 percent supported Thompson. The Hotline, a Washington-based digest on campaigns and elections, reported the poll results under the headline: "They Know Thompson's Face, But Not His Name." It would prove to be an accurate diagnosis of Thompson's difficulties.
"For a year, I didn't scratch," Thompson says, looking back.
At the low point, Thompson met at a Cracker Barrel with Ingram. Thompson told his friend that he wasn't having any fun campaigning and was pessimistic about his chances to win. He was considering dropping out. Thompson had had it with the rubber-chicken Republican dinners and the rigors of campaigning across the state. "Fred was beleaguered by the traditional way of running for office," Ingram remembers. "He was expressing his misery over things."
Ingram had a question for Thompson: What would you do if you ran the way you wanted to run? Thompson thought for a minute, then said he'd shed as much of the campaign apparatus as possible and drive around the state in a pick-up truck. Ingram suggested he do just that, and Thompson thought it a good recommendation. Thompson would soon be known for his red pick-up truck. Cooper's campaign complained that it was a Hollywood-style gimmick designed to make Thompson look down to earth, and it surely was that. "But it was more than a device," Ingram insists. "It made Fred comfortable as a candidate. He felt liberated to just be himself."
Thompson ran on a strong small-government--even antigovernment--message. "America's government is bringing America down, and the only thing that can change that is a return to the basics," he said. "We will get back to basics and make the sacrifices and once again amaze the world at how, in America, ordinary people can do very extraordinary things." Thompson emphasized issues that would appeal to disaffected voters--making laws apply to the members of Congress who pass them; congressional pay raises; entitlement reform.
It was a message that began to resonate. Two months before the election, a poll by national Republicans put the race dead even. And as Thompson increased his advertising--allowing voters to put his famous face together with his name--he took the lead, and it grew. "Some people knew me and knew my face, but I started out 20 points behind" he says. "I just had to work at it until I raised enough money to go on television and then I went up pretty fast." Cooper asked for and was given free air-time for his ads after stations played movies starring Thompson. But it was too late.
Thompson won 61 percent of the vote, Cooper just 39 percent. Part of the explanation was that Thompson was swept along in the historic Republican tide of 1994. But Cooper would later say that he'd underestimated the political importance of Thompson's film career. "He was in so many movies," Cooper told the Nashville Tennesseean in 2002. "I should have been more worried than I was because that is a powerful way to present yourself to the public."
Thompson's new colleagues in Washington immediately tried to capitalize on his ability to communicate. Bob Dole, recently elevated to Senate majority leader, picked Thompson to present the televised Republican response to a national address by President Bill Clinton.
On Christmas Day, 1994, Thompson was a guest on ABC's This Week. Sam Donaldson opened the interview by telling viewers that while they might not know the name Fred Thompson, they might recognize his face. "I want to just show people how accomplished you are, because if they have been sitting at home saying, 'You know, I know this guy, I know this guy,' there's a reason," he said, before playing clips of the actor.
Thompson was at his most self-deprecating. "When they needed some middle-aged guy who'd work cheap, they'd call me for a little part and I'd go out there two or three weeks and knock one out," he explained to Donaldson.
Donaldson asked Thompson why he was chosen to give the GOP response to Clinton. "I want to keep boring in on this question of--perhaps you were chosen because the Republican leaders said, 'Fred Thompson is not just another pretty face.' I mean, Fred Thompson--"
"That's for sure."
Then Donaldson asked Thompson about presidential politics. "Who are the Republicans going to put up to run for the presidency in two years?"
"I think that it's going to be wide open," Thompson replied. "I think that there's at least a half a dozen people out there. There might be someone that hasn't been mentioned."
"Let me give you a name," Donaldson pressed. "Let me give you a name: Fred Thompson. Senator Fred Thompson."
Thompson found the suggestion amusing. "There's one thing, I think, for certain that I've observed around here over the period of time that I've been here, and watching all this for years, and that is when people come to town, somewhere along the line, if they do anything at all, if they're shown to be able to put one foot in front of the other, they're mentioned for the national ticket. So now you've mentioned me, and I appreciate it, so we can move on to more serious topics."
Thompson had not yet been sworn in.
In eight years in the Senate, Thompson developed a reputation for an independent streak, yet he compiled a voting record more conservative than one might expect of one who had described himself as a moderate in his first campaign. Over the course of his time in Congress he earned a lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union of 86 percent. He was not quite as conservative (using 2002 numbers) as Rick Santorum (87), Strom Thurmond (91), Trent Lott (93), or Jesse Helms (99), but more conservative than Arlen Specter (42), Olympia Snowe (52), John Warner (82), and John McCain (84).
His voting record suggests a strong belief in federalism. Thompson was frequently a lonely voice opposing the federalization of what in his view were state issues. His unwillingness to compromise on that principle even put him on the losing end of a 99-to-1 vote on the so-called Good Samaritan law, legislation that protected individuals from being sued if their good faith efforts to help someone in distress were unsuccessful. He thought it should have been left to the states.
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Thompson also served as chairman of the Senate Government Relations Committee, which he used to investigate fundraising irregularities in the 1996 presidential election cycle. Republicans had high hopes that Thompson's inquiry would add to the political difficulties of the Clinton White House stemming from its malfeasance on campaign financing.
After the hearings ended, Fox News Channel's Brit Hume described Thompson as "flying high before his hearings . . . and shot down once they started and all the way through them."
Thompson says "the congressional investigative function is not a prosecutorial function" and acknowledges that the hearings produced "mixed result in many respects." He believes the criticism stems from the fact that "few people went to jail."
As Thompson considered his future, he began telling friends that he was not certain he wanted to seek reelection in 2002. He changed his mind after the attacks of September 11. Thompson, who served at the time on the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced in late September that he would run again. "Now is not the time for me to leave," he said. "This is the way now, it's perfectly clear, for me to contribute the most." He spent the next several weeks traveling to churches throughout Tennessee talking about the attacks and the coming U.S. response to them.
At a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on October 4, 2001, Thompson sounded a skeptical note about the prospect of reorganizing the federal homeland security bureaucracy. "The government, basically, cannot manage large projects very well," he said. "Maybe we can learn from our past experience with other government agencies and other crises and things of that nature and not make the same mistakes as we go about trying to rearrange these boxes and decide who reports to who and who has what authority. And maybe we'll take the lessons that we've learned from our other management problems in particular."
Then in late January 2002, his daughter Elizabeth Panici died suddenly following a heart attack. She was only 38. Thompson's friends say he was devastated. A month later he announced that he had changed his mind--he would not seek reelection. "I simply do not have the heart for another six-year term."
At a press conference after his announcement, he lashed out at the media for their intrusive coverage of his private life. "Every public official has to understand that he or she is a public official and that's the price you pay. For the most part, that's appropriate," he said. "That's the price your whole family pays. There are lines to be drawn. I think it's extremely unfortunate and uncalled for for the local newspaper to discuss the details of this. Her death obviously played in my decision, but the details of all of that, what news value does that have? Why did she have to pay that price? Why does her little five-year-old boy have to pay that price because her daddy chose to try to serve his state and his country? It's over the line and more like the National Enquirer-type stuff than anything else."
In his final months in the Senate, Thompson concentrated his efforts on legislation that would create the Department of Homeland Security. He fought efforts by Democrats to subject the new workforce to union and collective bargaining rules that apply to federal employees more broadly. The bill passed two weeks after the 2002 midterm elections, on a vote of 90-9.
"This is the most significant thing I've been involved in and certainly the most significant thing I've had my name on because it involves the main function of government, and that is protecting its citizens."
More than four years later, munching on a turkey sandwich and sour cream and onion potato chips at his dining room table, he displays an unusual willingness to second-guess his own decision. After Thompson criticized the growth of bureaucracy under the new director of national intelligence, I asked him why the new bureaucracy under Department of Homeland Security is any different.
"Well, to tell you the truth, in retrospect, we may conclude that it wasn't any different. But it got to the point where almost anything would have been an improvement," he says. "A lot of those agencies were in and of themselves dysfunctional, so bringing them together was not going to make everybody greater. . . . But you've got to start somewhere and you can't wait until everything is just right until you start coordinating. So we were kind of jumping aboard a moving train."
It was an admirably honest appraisal of what he once pointed to as the crowning achievement of his career in Congress. As we spoke, I was struck by the fact that Thompson didn't seem to be calibrating his answers for a presidential run. On issue after contentious issue, I got the sense from both his manner and the answers he gave me that he was just speaking extemporaneously. Many of his answers would drive a poll-watching political consultant nuts.
My suspicions were confirmed when Thompson asked at one point if he could have a transcript of our interview. "I found myself talking on some subjects that I haven't really thought that much about," he explained. "Oh, so this is what I think, huh?"
* Thompson says he came to respect George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign because of his plan to reform Social Security. Congressional Republicans considered the plan a political liability, and it went nowhere. Thompson says that although it was only tinkering on the margins of real reform, it was a good start. He won't share his own plan--"I'll roll that out at the appropriate time"--but the general principle he articulates sounds like a political risk.
"It's based upon the proposition that granddad and grandmom will be willing to sacrifice a little bit if they feel like it helps their grandkids avoid financial disaster, and that their sacrifice is not going to be wasted down some government rathole," he explains. "Under most plans, most good plans, you know current retirees probably would not be affected that much at all. . . . We've been operating under the assumption in this country that it's the third rail and that if you talk about it, those people who are most concerned about retirement programs will kill you. I don't think that's true."
* He believes that elements of the CIA were out to get Scooter Libby and his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby, though not the original leaker of the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame, was convicted of lying and obstructing justice. "It makes me mad as the devil just to think about it," Thompson says. He had never met Libby when he volunteered to serve on the advisory board of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust. Is Libby innocent? Thompson answers with one word. "Yes."
Do you think there will be negative political fallout from defending the convicted former chief of staff to an unpopular vice president?
"I have no idea. I have a hard time seeing it. If I'm wrong about the temperature of the American people on this, then I'm wrong about a lot of things about the American people. And we might as well find out."
* I asked him about his vote for the Iraq war and the Bush administration's failure to explain to the American public the real story of the prewar intelligence on Iraq. I ask Thompson how it is possible that a majority of the country believes the Bush administration lied about Iraqi WMD, when the U.S. intelligence community and the world consensus was that Saddam Hussein had these weapons.
"Part of it had to do with what has become almost a knee-jerk suspicion on the part of a lot of people with regards to anybody in authority," he says. And then he directly faults the Bush administration. "A part of it has been the administration's inability to sufficiently communicate the reality of the situation. It's not just the president. . . . You have to have an organized, pervasive ability to get your message across and rebut erroneous misstatements of the history. It is amazing to me how something like this could be perceived so erroneously by so many people. Because we all
know what the facts are. We've all seen the statements and the comments of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, and the list goes on and on and on."
Thompson slips into sarcasm. "It is amazing to me how a man that they say is so dumb fooled so many real smart people. But that's what they're saying about Bush. Bush
canoodled the entire Democratic establishment. Absurd on its face, and yet some people want to believe that sort of thing."
Then he goes on to give a better defense of the White House than anything that has come out of the White House communications shop in four years.
The irony here is that intelligence services had consistently over the years understated the capabilities of enemies and potential enemies. Now, here there was unanimity among the intelligence services, some of whom are supposed to be better than ours. . . . People don't understand intelligence. They don't understand. It's seldom clear. It's often caveated. It's sometimes flat-out wrong. Different people often have different ideas. That's what a president is faced with. And some today would say that politically a president has got to have unanimity before he can make a choice. And then they say that if he has that unanimity, the president has to make that choice--at the same time talking about how deficient our capabilities are. But if those deficient capabilities produced a recommendation, the president of the United States and leader of the free world has to take that recommendation. That has been so faulty in the past. It's absurd. Presidents in the future, as always, have to make a determination based on a lot of things, and intelligence is one of them. And the president not only has the right to evaluate the intelligence that he's receiving, he has a duty to do that. He listens to the British. I mean, if history was any judge, I don't know about now, but if the Brits tell me that there's an [Iraqi] deal with Niger and our guys don't know whether there was or not, I tend to rely on the Brits. I mean, those are the calls the president's got to make, and the question is really: Which way do you want the president to lean? Caution--that it's probably not so? When bad news is delivered, he gets mixed messages, he gets various intelligence reports of various kinds. Did you want him all balled up in all of that, you know, trying to apply some kind of a scientific equation to it for fear that somebody in an intelligence committee is going to wave it around at a hearing later on or something like that? Is that what it's come to? If so, the world is going to be a lot more dangerous than it otherwise already is. You've got to exercise the authority and the responsibilities that you've been given. I mean, in this debate over intelligence and what it is and what it ought to be and how it's used and all of that, you know, [it] needs to be dealt with and laid out in a way that people can understand it. . . . The next report says somebody's got weapons of mass destruction, you know what're we going to do with that? You know, just because history--a cat won't sit on a hot stove twice, but he won't sit on a cold stove either.
* He is equally blunt about Iran. Thompson says that the actions of the Iranian regime--harboring senior al Qaeda leaders, funding and training Iraqi insurgents, supplying terrorists in Iraq with devices that are killing American soldiers--are acts of war. He stops short of calling for a military response, but seems to suggest that he would be saying something different if circumstances were different.
"Unfortunately, today it can't be considered in isolation, so you have to take into consideration our capabilities and our priorities worldwide right now. And unfortunately we're stretched too thin." Nonetheless, he says, the long-term objective in Iran is the same one that led to the Iraq war. "I think the bottom line with Iran is that nothing is going to change unless there is a regime change."
* In the days since Thompson allowed that he was thinking about running for president, his views on abortion have come under scrutiny. Thompson finds the news reports from his first run for Senate perplexing.
"I have read these accounts and tried to think back 13 years ago as to what may have given rise to them. Although I don't remember it, I must have said something to someone as I was getting my campaign started that led to a story. Apparently, another story was based upon that story, and then another was based upon that, concluding I was pro-choice."
But, he adds: "I was interviewed and rated pro-life by the National Right to Life folks in 1994, and I had a 100 percent voting record on abortion issues while in the Senate."
Darla St. Martin, associate executive director of National Right to Life, supports Thompson on those claims. She traveled to Tennessee in 1994 to meet with him. "I interviewed him and on all of the questions I asked him, he opposed abortion," she told the American Spectator's Philip Klein.
Thompson says he thinks Roe v. Wade is bad law and should be overturned, but he says he does not support a Human Life Amendment.
One of the few times Thompson was unwilling to share his thoughts came when I asked him if he thought Rudy Giuliani was too liberal to win the Republican nomination and if Hillary Clinton could make a good president. The only question he would answer about his potential rivals concerned John McCain.
Thompson was one of four senators to support McCain in 2000 and served as the national co-chairman of his campaign. So I asked him why he's not supporting McCain again.
"You know the old joke about--what about me? As self-centered as that sounds, and it is, that ought to be the way it is." He adds: "Besides, you can't predict what's going to happen anyway, with any of them. Anybody could implode. Anybody could take off."
Before his appearance on Fox News Sunday, Thompson called McCain to let him know that he would announce that he was seriously considering a presidential bid. The conversation was friendly. "If we do this," he says, "we'll remain friends and we'll be friends after this."
There is considerable talk among the other Republican campaigns that the Thompson boomlet is driven by little more than celebrity. Maybe. But history suggests that Thompson may actually be underpolling right now. As was the case when he ran for office in Tennessee, he has a very recognizable face but his national name identity is actually quite low.
Gallup conducted a survey in late March asking respondents an open-ended question: "What comes to your mind when you think about former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson?" Sixty-seven percent of Republicans responded that they had no opinion of Thompson or were not familiar with him. And yet he shows up in the top three choices of potential Republican nominees in most of the polling that includes his name. As voters come to associate that name with a familiar and well-liked face, and if they get to see the personable Thompson on TV, Thompson strategists assume those polling numbers can only go up.
When Thompson met with Bill Frist at the Mayflower Hotel, they had important business to discuss. More than two years ago, Thompson had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It is "indolent" lymphoma, a slow-growing form of the disease that is not usually symptomatic. If you're going to have one of the 33 varieties of lymphoma, Thompson says, this is the one you want. "It's easy to diagnose, easy to treat and easy to live with," Frist, a physician, confirms. But it sounds scary, the kind of thing that might spook potential primary voters if it were disclosed by an announced candidate.
"We thought we had to get it out early," says Frist, "in the sense that he's going to be announcing."
If Frist's acknowledgment that Thompson was going to run may have been a slip, Thompson's own words also suggest he's running. He says he understands "how hard it is, how difficult it is, how embarrassing it is, how intrusive it is." And he knows that as a candidate he could be subject to harsh attacks.
"That's the least of it anymore," he says. "It's not pleasant, but it's not that important anymore because you're straight with your family, you have a level of understanding and knowledge about your family, and they with you, and with the man upstairs, and that's that. You know, ain't really much past that. And it kind of frees you up in a way."
Yes, it does.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
© Copyright 2007, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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Newt's presentation with Congressman Mark Udall to EcoVision 2007 will be webcast live at www.americansolutions.com.
April 18
7:00 PM ET
www.americansolutions.com/webcast
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-- John Fund
The Comeback Kid?
It's hardly news that John McCain's second run for the White House hasn't gone all that swimmingly. Sen. McCain never expected the adulation of the conservative base, whose mistrust has only increased since 2000. What Mr. McCain did expect was the support of moderate Republicans and independents.
Today's he's encountering almost the opposite. Mr. McCain's steadfast support of the Iraq war has irritated moderates who were otherwise fond of his maverick ways, and it has also given the media a reason to turn against its darling of the 2000 race. On the other hand, conservatives may be starting to readjust their traditional love-hate relationship with the Arizona Senator precisely because they see Mr. McCain's support of the war as both right and honorable.
Mr. McCain's staunch and very public support for the war has clearly given him a boost in the Republican field -- as shown by five polls taken since his appearance on "60 Minutes" a week and a half ago, all of which have him back above 20%.
There are other good signs for Mr. McCain. In a recent CNN poll, he received 24%, just three points behind Rudy Giuliani, who was at 27%. Less encouragingly, when Fred Thompson is taken out of the mix, Mr. Giuliani jumps to 31%, while Mr. McCain remains at 25%. Because former Sen. Thompson is likely to get into the race, what these numbers suggest is that Mr. Giuliani's support is much more fickle than Mr. McCain's. Also, despite Mr. McCain's poor first quarter fundraising totals, he was second only to Sen. Barack Obama in grassroots fundraising (i.e., donors who gave $200 or less). Mr. McCain's support might not yet be broad enough to capture the nomination but it is deep.
Of course, his fortunes are tied to Iraq in a way the other candidates' aren't. The perceived wisdom is that if Iraq falls, so does Mr. McCain. Quite possible, but it's also possible that conservatives would see Mr. McCain's determination to achieve victory in Iraq as the sort of quality they want in their next president.
-- Blake Dvorak, RealClearPolitics.com
Quote of the Day
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McCain was the MSM's darling and main source of support. Now they've decided to unmake him.
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THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on April 18, 2007.
Printer-Friendly Version
All the polling and analysis of the 2008 presidential primaries neatly bifurcate their consideration into partisan categories. In the Democratic primary, Clinton, Obama and Edwards face off, while in the Republican contest, the polls take measure of Giuliani, McCain, Romney and, depending on their assumptions, Gingrich and Fred Thompson. But this analysis fundamentally ignores one of the most important elements in the looming contest of 2008: the likelihood that independents and even Republicans may enter the Democratic primary to support or oppose Hillary Clinton. So polarizing is her candidacy that the migration into the Democratic primary could be enormous, even so large as to overshadow the core Democratic partisans who always vote in their party’s contests.
In all, 24 states — including big ones like California, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois — with a combined 56 percent of America’s population permit independents to vote in the Democratic primary; 19 states, with 39 percent of the population, let anyone vote in either primary, even if they are registered in the opposite party. More importantly, among the early states, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have completely open primaries and permit voters to choose whichever primary they wish. California law is particularly odd (as is often the case with that state). Independents can vote only in the Democratic primary — not in the Republican contest. This provision virtually assures a massive influx of unaffiliated voters into the Clinton-Obama battle.
Crossovers were an important factor the last time both parties had simultaneous nominating processes. In 2000, Bush and Gore wrapped up most of the votes of the loyalists of their respective parties while challengers McCain and Bradley split the independent vote. Had either McCain or Bradley not run, it is possible that the remaining candidate would have gotten so many independent votes that he might have been nominated.
But in 2008, all the gravitational pull will be into the Democratic primary. If Giuliani is well ahead by primary season, the GOP contest could turn out to be anti-climactic. But even if the Republican primary will be fought closely, none of the candidates has the same potential to attract or repel voters as Hillary Clinton.
So which will it be? Will Hillary attract or repel independent voters? The Gallup organization recently released a composite of its polling on Hillary among independents over the past three years. It found that while Democrats hold a favorable opinion of the former first lady by 83 percent to 13, independents break in her favor by only 51 percent to 43. Republicans, needless to say, dislike her: Among GOPers the favorable rating is only 20 percent to 76.
Given these data, two factors would indicate that the crossover voting laws may spell trouble for Hillary:
If she only leads Obama by 5 to 10 points among Democrats when she has an 83-13 favorability rating, she will likely do much worse among independents.
The passion and the depth of animus against Hillary, particularly among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, may be so intense as to motivate them to participate in the Democratic primary in great numbers.
Most current polling fails to capture the likelihood of crossover voting. News media surveys generally ask Democrats what they think about the Democratic field and Republicans what they think about the GOP contenders. Since half the states do not permit independents, much less members of the opposite party, to enter the primaries, few national samples ask independents what they are likely to do. Those that do tend not to divide their samples along the lines of each state’s law; fewer still ask Republicans if they will vote in the Democratic primary. So crossover voting is a blind spot in most current polling.
All strategists and pollsters need to amend their thinking to view the primaries as the three-dimensional processes they really are.
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Dick Morris makes a good headsup about the potential for crossover vote to swing the primaries on one side or the other, but I wouldn't predict that the either race will be decided that early or that a crossover would be effective. I think both sides will be contested. I'd rank myself as very high on the dislike-Hillary scale, and I can't imagine risking a crossover and adding momentum to a Obama or Edwards campaign when both are to the left of Hillary on paper.
If the Democratic race wraps up early, moderate Dems might crossover to vote for the moderate R, but that would be a sign that they would also support him in the general election. Extreme leftists could try to help the weaker Republican. But all the R candidates seem to be pro-war which is not moderate in these times, and trying to pick the other side's weakest candidate is a losing proposition.
So it's independents that hold the balance as they so often do. Except for the war issue which could change in a year, Republican candidates seem to be positioned more to the center while the Democrats seem to be in a race to the left.
For the general election there is the possibility of a third party spoiler, depending on who feels unrepresenting when the nominations get resolved.
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Love That Loophole
Mitt Romney has an ace up his sleeve when it comes to his presidential campaign. Not only did the former Massachusetts governor raise more money than any other GOP candidate in the first quarter, but he has the potential to outspend his opponents regardless of how much money he raises.
Mr. Romney has a personal fortune that exceeds $500 million, and while he has only chipped in about $2 million of his personal funds so far, he has the option to donate far more. Even more importantly, his opponents would not be eligible for the provision in the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 that allows congressional candidates to accept contributions in excess of usual limits when facing a wealthy self-funding opponent. The so-called "Millionaires' Amendment" was inadvertently excluded from applying to presidential campaigns. "If Romney pours millions of his own dollars into the race, Republican primary opponents would have little recourse but to raise further funds in $2,300 increments, a time-consuming process," reports The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper.
In Congressional campaigns, the Millionaire's Amendment has sometimes made a big difference. In 2004, a then-obscure Illinois state senator used the provision to accept contributions as large as $12,000 in his uphill race for the Democratic Senate nomination against wealthy businessman Blair Hull. Without that financial leg up, Barack Obama might still be voting on driver's license fee bills as a state legislator in Springfield.
Mr. Romney insists he plans to raise money from his proven network of contributors and their friends. But he has the option of pouring in additional resources in advance of the "Super Tuesday" collection of 24 state primaries on Feb. 5, when close to 40% of all delegates will be at stake.
-- John Fund Political Journal of the WSJ
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The Shadow Candidates
The art of not running for president.
Thursday, May 3, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Tonight 10 Republicans go on stage to trade sound bites in a debate at the Reagan Library in Los Angeles. But a lot of media oxygen is being used up by the "noncandidate candidates"--those who might want to be president, but haven't yet officially jumped into the race.
In every election some conventional wisdom is swept aside. Be it that third party candidates can't influence the race (Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote in 1992), that sitting presidents have to wait for their opposing party to pick a candidate (Bill Clinton ran negative ads more than a year before the 1996 election and went on to be the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR in 1944) or that an Internet-based campaign can't threaten an establishment candidate (Howard Dean surged, if briefly, past everyone in 2004), conventional wisdom is only right until it turns out to be wrong. This year, the assumption that the best way to run for president is to, well, run for president might go by the boards.
Everyone agrees on the negatives of being a noncandidate. Rivals scoop up cash, campaign talent and endorsements while noncandidates sit and wait. But for the already well-known, there are advantages to being "outside the ring." While official candidates are scrutinized relentlessly for gaffes and battered by "independent" opposition groups, noncandidates can be selective in their media exposure and appear high-minded.
Playing hard-to-get also creates allure and curiosity. Today noncandidates appeal to both parties. Depending on the poll, between one-third and three-fifths of Republicans are dissatisfied with their current crop of candidates. Last month, a straw poll at the Oklahoma Republican Party's convention saw noncandidates Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich top the field with a majority of the votes between them. Democrats are more happy with their field, but persistent doubts about Hillary Clinton's electability or Barack Obama's seasoning fuels speculation that Al Gore or some other savior will enter the race.
Mr. Gingrich is touring the country touting his ideas without the scrutiny and legal constraints that an official candidate's fund-raising team would get. His aim is to offer "solutions so compelling that if voters say I have to be the president, it will happen." He will make up his mind in September, but in the meantime his audiences are larger, his influence greater and his exposure on TV even more ubiquitous.
The same is true for Mr. Gore. Only a noncandidate could get the praise and royal treatment he enjoyed testifying before Congress in March. This summer, he is both losing weight and keeping his name in the headlines by promoting his new book and environmentally themed rock concerts. Even if he doesn't win the Nobel Peace Prize this fall, he could parachute into the presidential race. He has trained thousands of people to present his global-warming film in every state, a cast of supporters who could easily be converted into campaign volunteers. A Quinnipiac Poll of three battleground states shows that Mr. Gore polls better against leading Republicans than either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama.
Mr. Thompson, whose movies and network appearances are a fixture on TV screens, is clearly being helped for now by not being part of the candidate pack. The day after tonight's GOP debate he will appear before a large GOP audience in Orange County, 75 miles south of the Reagan Library. C-Span and CNN will cover the event live. His solo act may get as many viewers as tonight's debate. Pollsters John Zogby and Doug Schoen both agree that Mr. Thompson could shake up the GOP race.
Another candidate who could transform the race is popular New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a client of Mr. Schoen's. He has already told friends he could easily spend $500 million of his own money on an independent run and could snap up middle-of-the-road voters from both parties.
Whoever runs, looking over this year's shadow candidates it is clear that they are changing the rules of American politics. "Americans love having more choices," says Peter Brown, an analyst with the Quinnipiac Poll. "They'll now even give noncandidates a real look to see if there's something there they're missing in the others."
In 2000, blogger Mickey Kaus refined the Feiler Faster Thesis, which holds that though news cycles are constantly getting faster, "people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed." This rapid pace may be transforming presidential politics. Voters aren't waiting for pundits to tell them who is running for president, and shadow candidates can run low-cost guerilla campaigns using the Internet, talk shows and word-of-mouth. "Candidates have been running so long already it opens up opportunities for late entries," says Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com. "We may not like it, but voter boredom may now be a driver of politics."
Modern presidential campaigns started in 1960 when the first Kennedy-Nixon debate established the primacy of television. This upcoming race could mark similar dramatic changes in the pace, shape and tone of elections to come.
WSJ
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Newt Analyzes the First GOP Debate
Hannity and Colmes
Fox News Transcripts
Sean Hannity Alan Colmes Newt Gingrich
ALAN COLMES: Welcome back to "Hannity & Colmes."
The Republican candidates' first debate in California is happening now, but the conservative that everybody wants to hear from tonight, right here, only on "Hannity & Colmes." Former speaker of the House, FOX News contributor, author of "Rediscovering God," Newt Gingrich joins us.
Mr. Speaker, do you wish you were on that stage tonight?
NEWT GINGRICH (R), FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: No. If anything would convince me to lean away from running, it was watching all of those guys with too little time, with too many Mickey Mouse questions from the reporters. It's exactly the wrong way to pick a president, and I think it doesn't help the country much.
Some of them I think did very well in brief moments. Senator McCain and Governor Tommy Thompson both were very, very eloquent on Iraq and offered very good ideas about Iraq. Governor Romney was very good in talking about health care, where he knows a great deal. Mayor Giuliani was very good about having controlled crime, having turned New York around.
But think about -- you know, you have 10 people up there. You have a couple of news media types being self-important. Towards the close of the debate, we get this absolutely childish question: How would you feel about Senator Clinton being in the White House? I mean, why would you waste the time of the American people and the 10 candidates when it's obvious that every single Republican is going to say that Senator Clinton shouldn't be in the White House?
Compare this for a minute, Alan, with the debate the French had last night. The French presidential runoff is Sunday. And last night, two candidates went head-to-head with almost no interference from the two moderators, and they went at each other. It was emotional; it was direct; it was aggressive.
And people had a chance to see the real personalities come out. I think, if they eliminated the moderators, and allowed the candidates to ask each other questions and kept the entire process between the candidates, it would be fascinating to see how an evening like this would evolve.
COLMES: By the way, is this why, in all the speculation about you, that you have decided, if you get in, it will be later in the process, is this example Exhibit A as to why that would be the case, so you don't have to go through this particular kind of gauntlet? And if you do get in, it will be after this part of the process?
GINGRICH: It's not a gauntlet. It's boring. Look, I have great respect for the people who are running. They're working very, very hard. They're on the road every day.
My hunch is Governor Thompson, by the time this was done, will have been in every town in Iowa 12 times. Governor Romney has done a great job of raising money. Senator McCain has been campaigning now for years and has built a huge national network. These are serious people doing serious things. You know, Mayor Giuliani, as you know, is the front-runner.
But what I'm struck with is, we as a country need to have a serious dialogue about a lot of things. This is not about Newt Gingrich. It's something, as you know, Governor Cuomo and I have talked about. Governor Cuomo recently wrote two articles talking about this and suggesting that the Democrats would be much better off to have a longer debate in an open, free form, to really talk things out.
But there's a second part of this, Alan, that really worries me. You have people sitting around in May of this year trying to describe what they would do in January of 2009. And now, let's say the world changes. Something different happens, and so somebody changes their position in September, October, November. Suddenly they'll have seven reporters, 16 blog sites, all saying, "Ah, this person switched." And you suddenly freeze people into defending positions that they took a year and a half or two years before they're ever going to be in office.
SEAN HANNITY: All right, I'm a little intrigued, because we're friends, Mr. Speaker, and you're going to hate me for going down this road, but when you said this would make you lean away more, I think people would like a little bit more definitive an answer about you.
GINGRICH: Well, I've told you, and I've told everybody that American Solutions is going to have a nationwide workshop on September 27th on the Internet, available to everybody in the country, in both Democrat, Republican, independent, and we're going to try to explain how you could change and dramatically improve government at every level. There are 511,000 elected offices in America; only one of them is the Oval Office.
But we have an amazing number of elected officials in this country. After we're done with that, we'll have a second workshop on Saturday the 29th of September. And then I'll look at it. But I am absolutely not going to think about this until then.
If it weren't for my friendship with you two and my willingness to come on tonight and talk about this, I wouldn't even be talking about the debate tonight. I mean, I think that it is so absurd to have this much attention paid to an office that doesn't get filled until January of 2009, that I really think this is exactly the wrong model for this country.
HANNITY: Well, I agree with you, and I like the debate that you mentioned in France that took place. I love the free-for-all. This is basically a joint press conference, where you end up getting like four minutes each in the course of an hour-and-a-half debate, so I think your criticism is valid. And you don't really have the substance that either one of us would like.
Do you glean anything -- the two issues that are picking news out of this debate, one has to do with Mayor Giuliani and his comments that it would be OK to repeal Roe v. Wade, it would be OK if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent, and Senator McCain saying the Bush administration had terribly mismanaged the war.
Your reaction to both of those moments, which will make all the news here tonight?
GINGRICH: Well, I mean, I do think that, if Mayor Giuliani's position tomorrow clarifies what he just said, that would be a remarkable change from what I understood his position to be. So I think that will certainly lead to several days of conversation, probably more news out of that one item than everything that happened at the Democratic debate a week ago.
In the case of Senator McCain's position, I think he has been -- you have to give him enormous credit. He has been in Iraq over and over again. He has been deeply concerned for years. He has been public about his concerned about this war.
He has served very, very ably in a very senior position in the Senate on this. He's a graduate of Annapolis. As you know, he was a prisoner of war. I mean, Senator McCain has as much authority as any person in this country to render judgment on the mismanagement of the war in Iraq, and I think it's an act of courage on his part to simply tell the truth.
I mean, I don't care how much you like President Bush or how loyal you are to the Republican Party. This is clearly not where we wanted to be and not where we thought we would be in 2003 when the war began.
HANNITY: Is that what you're saying then yourself, Mr. Speaker, that the war is terribly mismanaged? Because I know you've had criticisms, but...
GINGRICH: Look, I said, in December of 2003, publicly in "Newsweek" and on several TV shows, that we went off a cliff in June of 2003 when Ambassador Bremer changed all the plans, abandoned the Iraqi army, failed to go through with having an Iraqi governing council, took over the administration, and made it an American administration. I spoke out as -- if you go back and look at what I said at that time, I was as clear and as direct as I could be that we were on a disastrous path and it was going to cause us an enormous amount of trouble.
Recently, I testified in the Senate in front of Senator Biden's committee, and I outlined 18 additional changes over and above the surge that I thought we needed. And I'm very, very concerned, Sean. I mean, as you know, I think that being defeated in Iraq, which clearly many Democrats in the House and Senate would like to see happen, will be a terrible blow to the United States and to the cause of freedom. And I think it is very, very dangerous for us to contemplate being defeated and think that's going to make life easier.
I think it's doubly dangerous to have the Congress imposing defeat on the United States in a way that will resonate around the world. But I am also very troubled. I believe very deeply in General Petraeus, as I believed earlier in General Abizaid. I think both of them are superb people, and I think that, had their advice been followed more carefully, we'd be in dramatically better shape today.
COLMES: We can debate whether Democrats really want defeat, but I'd rather talk about the debates. I don't see it that way, and many Democrats don't see it that way.
But I want to get back to John McCain, because when John McCain said it's been mismanaged, the other part of what he said tonight was, "But now we're on the right track." Most Americans, Quinnipiac poll out today, says 31 percent don't agree with Bush's Iraq policy. Most Americans don't see it that way. So I wonder if Senator McCain hurt himself by somehow saying we're now on the right track, when many of us, most Americans, don't see a difference.
GINGRICH: Well, look, I think Senator McCain has decided that it's his duty to be honest about what he honestly believes. And I think that's actually a very courageous thing for him to be doing.
I think, on the issue of Iraq, that John McCain is not going to look at any polling. He's not going to listen to any advisors. This is a field where he has spent his lifetime serving his country. He believes in his own knowledge. He knows very, very well the senior military leaders. He has been on the ground. And I think he is telling us what he believes to be the case.
Now, I don't think he's telling us we're going to win the war next Tuesday. I don't think he's telling us that bombings are going to go away. But what he is saying is that the team that General Petraeus has assembled, the strategy that they're following, gives us a better chance of defeating the terrorists than anything we've done up until now.
And, Alan, what we have to face up to as a country is this is very hard and very painful, but the alternative may be worse. And I think that it's very important to have a conscious national dialogue about, what's the world going to look like if the Congress mandates defeat, forces the U.S. to withdraw, and we end up with the entire world seeing us as having been defeated?
COLMES: If that's what it is. You know, most of the candidates, most of the Republican candidates who either want to stay in Iraq, or support a surge, or support the continuation of this war, and I include some Democrats in this, are out of synch with what most of the American public is now saying. So how would the American public vote for somebody who wants to continue any of the Bush policies for which most Americans don't agree?
GINGRICH: Look, I think the question is, what do the American people think after six weeks of discussing the consequences of defeat? I think what we've had -- look, I've not been happy, and I've been pretty public about the fact that I think there are a lot of changes we ought to have in how the American government works. There are a lot of changes we ought to have in what we've been doing in Iraq. I have always been against using American forces in the streets of big cities, because I don't think that they're very effective as policemen. I think they should be the reinforcers of Iraqi troops, rather than enforcers.
So I'm not sitting here as a pie in the sky, let's salute and march forward stubbornly. But I am saying, it's one thing to try to find a way to be patient and determined and to ultimately find a way to victory. It's another thing to say, "Let's set a deadline. Let's guarantee that the U.S. Congress will legislate defeat," and not talk about the consequences, Alan.
All I'm saying is, let's have a national debate about what the world is going to look like a year after the United States is publicly defeated, and the terrorists publicly are in triumph, and countries around the world look at us as a country that doesn't have the will to keep its word and doesn't have the will to protect its friends. I think, after that debate, you might be surprised how many Americans say, "Well, let's go a little slow with this legislative defeat process."
HANNITY: You know, Mr. Speaker, I'm listening to you, and what you're describing is so consequential. And I'm listening to the comments of Senator McCain here tonight and what you're saying here. And I can't imagine, especially in light of the veto that took place, and, you know, the slow bleed strategy that has emerged from the Democrats, and, you know, Harry Reid saying the war is lost, meanwhile we have troops over there in harm's way that are fighting and trying to win this whole thing.
And it seems what you've hit on here is the one thing that nobody has ever thought of: What happens if we lose Iraq? What does the world think? We create a safe haven for Al Qaeda and Iran inside of Iraq, and the world is a less dangerous place. And with all the criticism -- and I guess there's a lot to go around -- it seems that nobody has thought of that and nobody is thinking about that. And I don't think anyone's stopping to do so.
GINGRICH: You know, it's as though our neighbor's house was on fire, to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt, somebody who I assume Alan would approve of...
HANNITY: At times.
GINGRICH: ... it's as though our neighbor's house was on fire, and we were getting tired of fighting the fire, and we said, you know, let's just give up. This is too hard. The house is going to burn down. And nobody has stopped to say, "Well, what if the fire spreads to our house?"
Yesterday, in Great Britain, five terrorists were sentenced to prison for life, and the judge said to them, "Do not expect to ever be back on the street, because you are ruthless, dangerous, evil men." I just want to suggest to you, the British weren't doing that as some kind of political ploy. They know that they are in a serious, long war and that the terrorists out there want to destroy us, if they can.
So all I think we have to ask is, let's have a national dialogue about, how are we going to manage the Middle East? How are we going to manage America's role in the world? Why would any of our allies trust us, if the Congress decides to legislate defeat and if we, in fact, leave in defeat?
HANNITY: Let me ask you this question.
GINGRICH: I'm not saying this is easy. I am not saying this is a happy time. I'm not saying this is a positive thing we should feel good about. I'm saying that Senator McCain tonight and Governor Thompson both had positive ideas.
HANNITY: What are the troops thinking? We're running out of time. What are the troops thinking when they hear Senator McCain, the Republican, say that? What are they thinking when they hear Senator Reid say that it's lost? What do they think when they have slow bleed strategies and other strategies emerging to cut off bullet supplies and armor? What are these guys thinking, you know, out there?
GINGRICH: There's no question -- I was just told today by somebody who has a son who's serving at Fort Bragg -- that the level of demoralization and confusion among the younger troops watching the Congress, watching the news, watching the debates, watching the maneuvering, these guys want to serve their country. They're willing to risk their lives. They sure wish the political class would get them the money, have the policy fights, but don't mess up the military while you're doing it.
COLMES: The confusion might be because of policy, not because of free speech in the United States, Mr. Speaker.
We thank you very much for being with us tonight. Thank you for your time.
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Newt Gingrich
A French Lesson for Republicans
BERLIN, Germany, May 7 -- Callista and I are in Europe this week for a conference on innovation in health care. More about our trip to Berlin in a minute, but first the big news in Europe this week isn't in Germany but in France.
I know this will seem strange to those of us who like to make jokes about the French, but the fact is that there is a great deal to be learned from the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy (a member of the ruling party) in last weekend's "change" election in France -- and Republicans had better learn it.
For those of you who haven't followed it closely, here is some background on the election.
The Background: An Unpopular Incumbent President and a Desire for Change
Incumbent French President Jacques Chirac had been twice elected, has served a total of 12 years in office, and is very unpopular. Coming into this election, people were very tired of the Chirac government and there was a sense that there had to be change.
But the opposition on the left, the Socialist Party, failed completely to capitalize on this desire for change. They nominated a candidate of great achievement, Ségolène Royal, but she proved herself to be the candidate of the status quo, not the candidate of change. She was actually committed to keeping all the bureaucracies that were failing and all the policies that were creating unemployment. She was committed to avoiding the changes necessary for a French future of prosperity, opportunity and safety.
Normally, with the incumbent conservative government so unpopular, the left would have been expected to win the election, probably by a significant margin. But the conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, won decisively because he is an aggressive, different kind of French political leader. He is a member of the Chirac government -- the Minister of the Interior. But not only is he a man who is willing to stand up and fight for what he believes in, but Sarkozy is also a man who hasn't followed the normal French path to success by going to an elite university, becoming part of the ruling elite and fitting in.
Sarkozy: A Different Kind of Frenchman
Instead, Sarkozy is just the opposite. He was born of Hungarian parents who had fled communism in Eastern Europe. That makes him the first president of France who is a first-generation immigrant. It also means his name doesn't sound very French. And his style certainly isn't very French. He is a tough, confrontational leader -- a man who has been preaching things that don't sound very much like the French establishment.
In the campaign, Sarkozy argued that the French have to work longer hours and, in order to give them an incentive to do so, that they shouldn't pay taxes if they work overtime. He called for tax cuts to encourage investment so the private sector can create jobs. And critically, Sarkozy has said that the people must obey the law, that the creation of law and respect for the law is a central part of any civilized society.
Remember, this is a jarring message for a country that routinely accepts the burning of up to 15,000 cars a year by hooligans who, according to the elites, are simply "expressing their desire to disrupt society." It's jarring for a country that was very proud a few years back to have the first mandatory 35-hour work week in history. Yet an increasing majority of the French believes that without the kind of changes Sarkozy is calling for, France's stature will disappear in a wave of lawlessness and economic decay.
A Royal Commitment to the Status Quo and a Candidate of Change
As for the opposition in the French election, much like the American Democratic Party, it is trapped by its commitment to big labor, big bureaucracy, high taxes and social values people don't believe in. Every time French voters seriously looked at Ségolène Royal and the kind of politics she represents, she lost ground. She simply couldn't make the case that left-wing Socialist policies would work.
The result was a surprising and powerful upset by Sarkozy -- a victory by a center-right reformer, a member of the unpopular ruling party, who came to personify change.
And here's where American Republicans really need to pay attention: In France, voting for change meant voting for the party in office, but not the personality in office. And voting to keep the old order meant voting for the opposition, not for the incumbent party.
If Republicans hope to win the presidency next year, they better find a candidate who is prepared to stand for very bold, very dramatic and very systematic change in Washington. Not only that, but they had better make the case that the left-wing Democrat likely to be nominated represents the failed status quo: the bureaucracies that are failing, the social policies that are failing, the high tax policies that are failing, and the weakness around the world that has failed so badly in protecting America.
Only if we have that kind of campaign do we have a reasonable chance to expect the American people will vote for effective change for a better, safer and more prosperous future -- and that they will see that effective change as being Republican.
A Franco-American Alliance for 'Green Conservatism'?
In the meantime, Sarkozy has pledged to repair relations between France and America, and we should take him seriously in his pledge. In particular, he has called on America to lead the world in addressing climate change.
This gives President Bush a unique opportunity to change the perception of his attitude toward both Europe and the environment. The President should take up Sarkozy's call for U.S. leadership on global warming by proposing a bold new initiative on market-based, entrepreneurial incentives to help in the environment. As I outline in an op-ed that appeared in Sunday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, using new technology to dramatically increase energy independence and reduce reliance on carbon isn't giving in to the left -- it's resisting the big government solutions that the left routinely imposes under the guise of protecting the environment and instead finding a more effective way forward to protect and renew the natural world.
Solutions Watch
In the news here at home, I wanted to take a moment to congratulate former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his call in a speech [video, audio] at the Citadel last week for the creation of a special force to specifically handle post-combat operations in places like Iraq.
In 1999, I served on the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century (also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission) to examine our national security challenges as far out as 2025. One of the reforms we called for was the creation of a post-combat force.
In addition, I have long argued for the creation of a much larger military. Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are all on record calling for a bigger army. The White House should answer their calls now. We can't wait until 2009.
Environmental Polar Opposites
While we are here in Berlin, Callista and I plan to stop by the zoo to see my namesake, Knut the polar bear. He's getting bigger these days, but you probably remember him from a few months ago when he was a cub recently abandoned by his mother. Some animal rights activists had declared that he should be put to death rather than be raised by humans. I'm going to see Knut, not only because of my great love of zoos and the natural world, but because I think he is a symbol of a growing divide on man's relationship with the environment. The activists who wanted Knut killed represent the radical view that humans are only destroyers of the natural world and that human needs and wants shall always be a distant second to the environment.
My view is that we are stewards of the natural world. We have an obligation to preserve and protect it, not only for future generations of human beings, but for all living things.
So long for now from Berlin. I'll report again next week on the launch of my new novel, Pearl Harbor, and the national security lessons it contains for America today.
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CD,
I don't know if I am alone but I wish Newt would run.
He is the only one who when I hear him speak I hear a visionary.
He is the only one with ideas and the leadership qualities to carry them out.
I can see why he made it to Speaker of the House. If only he can keep his ego in check...
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I think he IS running and doing so in a manner to avoid the stupdities of McCain-Feingold Act (Shame on McCain and the US Supreme Court! :x ) Also, he gets to be on TV lots and lots without triggering the obligation to air other candidates.
Newt is the only one I could support with considerable enthusiasm.
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I am closer to Newt than any of the others on the issues. He loves to say "This is not about Newt Gingrich." Once he enters the race it is about him and he has high negatives, plenty of enemies and very little crossover appeal IMO. The 1994 Republican takeover of congress was amazing. They had some great accomplishments in the majority such as capital gains rate cuts and welfare reform, while constrained by an opposing president. Other important things never got done such as reforming the budget process and rules. Tax cuts are still limited by false forecasting methods that were never ended at CBO.
Unfair as it is, I think Giuliani or even McCain might get a pass on past marital issues where Newt will forever be punished, mostly because of the timing of his in relation to the Clinton impeachment (which wasn't even about infidelity).
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CD wrote: "...stupidities of McCain-Feingold Act (Shame on McCain and the US Supreme Court!" - Agree wholeheartedly! The name alone is a clue, partnering with Feingold on campaign rules or Kennedy on education policy is a sign you are headed in the wrong direction from my point of view. Shame on Bush for signing this when he already made clear that he saw everything flawed in it.
I wish those in politics or on the court who don't like the constitution would go through the process of amending it rather than arbitrarily declaring which rights and provisions we have outgrown and are no longer operative.
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McCain is my least favorite of the leading Republicans running, but I'm posting this piece anyway written by Tim Pawlenty, Governor of Minnesota, posted at the Powerlineblog.com candidates forum. Pawlenty is co-chair of the McCain campaign and making his attempt to explain to conservatives why he supports McCain. The posts that follow Pawlenty at that forum seem to focus on disapproval with a) McCain Feingold, b) gang of 14, and c) immigration. I would add that he was a huge opponent of tax rate cuts, though his view has changed somewhat since. - DM
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Conservative Case for McCain by Gov.Tim Pawlenty (R-MN)
"The 2008 Presidential election presents the Republican Party with a new opportunity to chart its future. For the first time in decades, a sitting president or vice president will not be a candidate to lead our country.
How will Republicans respond to this challenge? Hopefully, by selecting a strong, tested national leader of uncommon courage.
History has shown that Americans elect their president based on the times and the challenges confronting our nation. America is being tested in momentous ways, both domestically and internationally.
The times are calling out one of the finest public leaders in the modern history of our country – John McCain. Like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, he powerfully expresses conservative principles in a common sense way. John McCain’s unwavering courage, candor, character, and demonstrated willingness to take visionary risks to do what is right are all in the tradition of these great Republicans.
The next president will need all of these attributes and more in confronting the challenges we face both at home and abroad.
The pressure from the left to give up on Iraq will be immense. We need a president whose life is a testament to fortitude under fire and courage in the face of challenges. John McCain is a living example of such experience and leadership.
We need John McCain to keep America safe and strong. Under President McCain, America will never surrender to the threats of extremists.
That same toughness will be required in addressing key issues at home. The Republican Party spent twelve years in control of Congress, yet failed to curtail run-away spending. For more than 20 years John McCain has been an unwavering voice on behalf of hardworking, taxpaying Americans. He has been a lonely voice for spending restraint in the nation’s capitol and the leading advocate for “earmark reform.”
We also face an impending crisis in Social Security and Medicare. As recent history has clearly illustrated, solving these issues will require almost unending political will. Senator McCain’s record makes it clear he’s not afraid to tackle these challenges.
And you wouldn’t know it by listening to the mainstream media, but John McCain has been rock-solid on critical moral issues. He campaigned hard for Arizona’s amendment to protect traditional marriage and has been consistently pro-life throughout his career.
It is often said that the best sermons are lived, not preached. Newsweek once wrote, “McCain’s character has withstood tests the average politician can only imagine … He may be the last of his kind.” I hope you will join me in supporting him."
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Blankley points out the Cans prospects look bleak for 2008. All the Cans are slipping in the polls including Guliani and McCain. Depending on how things look in September many Cans may break ranks with W. Of course our enemies know this as well,and will work diligently towards that goal. Can any serious thinker believe that radical Muslims, nad Iranians would not rather deal with the dovish Crats than Can hawks?
I couldn't agree more with Tony's (and Cheney's) hardline stance. But I am now apparantly in the minority. For fun: my predictive guess. We will get Hillary. The slight majority will adore her gifts *stolen* (IMO- according to George Will we pay more in gasoline tax than the oil companies make in profits- you won't hear that from the Hill) from those who make more and this will continue till we get another exogenous threat. Maybe then Newt will have a shot in 2012 or even 2016? As always time will tell. Two cents for other thoughts:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/tblankley.htm
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Today's NY Slimes:
===========================
Bill Clinton’s connections, and his endless supply of chits, only begin to capture his singular role in his wife’s presidential candidacy, advisers and friends of the couple say. He is the master strategist behind the scenes; the consigliere to the head of “the family,” as some Clinton aides refer to her operation; and a fund-raising machine who is steadily pulling in $100,000 or more at receptions.
So far, his roles have unfolded in private as he provides ideas to his wife and makes sure she paces herself, and as he acts as something of a field general with donors, instructing them on how to talk up Mrs. Clinton. Eventually, though, he will go public in a big way: Clinton advisers can already imagine a point in 2008 when Mr. Clinton has his own campaign plane, press corps and schedule of events in crucial states while Mrs. Clinton is barnstorming in others.
He is also galvanizing new support. At a recent gathering at Morgan Stanley, organized by Roger C. Altman, a Clinton Treasury Department official who now advises Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Clinton fielded questions for an hour from 60 major new donors about issues like her positions on Iraq and the impact of the compressed 2008 primary schedule. Mr. Clinton also recently filmed a five-minute video, which is being sent to new and old allies, narrating her biography and lavishing praise on her.
“He is the great security blanket for her campaign: Democrats listen to him with intensity, and he can assure her and her staff that he can get her message out,” said Jerry Lundergan, chairman of the Kentucky Democratic Party, who recently played host to Mr. Clinton at a four-hour fund-raiser for the campaign.
But for all the value Mr. Clinton adds to the campaign, there is internal recognition of the potential pitfalls of his involvement. Early on, the Clintons concluded that the former president would not participate in staff conference calls, nor would he call Mrs. Clinton’s aides directly, advisers say. Instead, he would circulate his advice through Mrs. Clinton; Mark Penn, her chief strategist; and a couple of others. The idea has been to keep the lines of authority clear, and also to avoid the messiness and leaks that marked his White House.
Indeed, Democrats close to Mrs. Clinton remain keenly aware of his foibles and blind spots. In private, these allies are blunt: He has disappointed her before, most painfully with Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment. He can be undisciplined, and his love for the cut and thrust of politics could unleash that side, especially if he believes her campaign is in trouble.
“When you’re dealing with the Clintons in ’08, you essentially have two candidates — her and him — and he’s going to have to have a Boy Scout report card given his history,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian, who is not affiliated with any campaign. “He can definitely help her, but that also means he can hurt her.”
That concern was crystallized by a question that arose at the Republican presidential debate this month: “Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?” The question underscored the sheer oddity of the Clintonian package deal redux.
Friends say the couple has learned from the mistakes of his 1992 race and has avoided again promoting a two-for-one bargain (which, in her camp’s view, cut against the tradition of voting based on a candidate’s merits alone). Campaign advisers also say that Mr. Clinton is simply too busy with his charitable work to be a full-time candidate spouse at his wife’s side.
At the same time, the advisers say, Mr. Clinton and the campaign view 2008 as a chance to get right what they saw as a mistake in 2000, when Vice President Al Gore shied away from deploying Mr. Clinton.
For example, two friends said Mr. Clinton had told them a victory for Mrs. Clinton in Arkansas in the general election was a personal mission of his. (Mr. Gore lost Arkansas in 2000, as Senator John Kerry did in 2004.) And he is cashing in chits for her that Mr. Gore, post-impeachment, never asked him to do. In March, for instance, Mr. Lundergan opened his home in Kentucky to Mr. Clinton for a fund-raiser as a favor after the couple helped raise money for the state party in 2005 and 2006. (Mr. Clinton carried Kentucky in 1992 and 1996, while Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry did not.)
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is not a do-over of Gore 2000 for Mr. Clinton, their advisers say, but the couple did decide early on that Mrs. Clinton would treat her husband and his administration’s record as assets, rather than distance herself from him in the interest of standing in her own light.
======
Page 2 of 2)
“We don’t want to make the Al Gore mistake — trying to separate Hillary from the president, or not sending the president out because you think he’s not well liked or because he might be a better speaker than Hillary,” one senior campaign adviser said, who spoke about internal campaign strategy on the condition of anonymity. “Voters would think we were acting phony.”
For now, Mr. Clinton is purposely staying out of the spotlight because he believes it is important for voters to get to know Mrs. Clinton better, friends of the couple say. He believes that the American public will like her the more they see her — “warm up to her” is the phrase that several friends attributed to Mr. Clinton.
“He’s not just sitting in Chappaqua watching the game on TV and calling everybody in the campaign with advice,” said Melanne Verveer, a close friend and adviser of Mrs. Clinton. “He brings enormous strength and assets but is in a very secondary role.”
Yet he continues to adjust to that new role.
“He’s grappling with it a bit now, how he properly plays the role of subordinate,” said a former senior aide to Mr. Clinton who still speaks with him regularly. “His foundation work gives him real focus. And he wants this for her, so badly. He feels he owes it to her on so many levels, for bringing her to Arkansas in the early ’70s and upending her career and everything since.”
The Clintons mostly talk about strategy, not campaign management, advisers say. He receives polling data from Mr. Penn, who was his pollster in 1996, and the two men speak regularly. He sometimes looks over drafts of Mrs. Clinton’s major speeches, and he gives her feedback on her performances.
When need be, she also knows how to cut him off. In preparation for a Senate debate, she more or less ordered him out of the room when he began coaching too much, Democrats close to the Clintons say. During a policy discussion awhile back about New York issues, when Mr. Clinton began to pontificate, she told him that he did not exactly know what he was talking about and to hush up.
Advisers say his advice to her can be boiled down to a few broad themes. He urges her to remember that the biggest person gets elected (in other words, the one who rises above political pettiness) and that the most optimistic candidate wins. He has encouraged her to talk about average people who work hard and play by the rules, classic Clintonian language. And she has, using those phrases and other themes in talking, for example, about regular Americans who are “invisible” to the Bush administration. (Advisers say Mr. Clinton did not devise the invisible line.)
He has also favored town hall forums as better venues for her than formal policy speeches, where she can seem cold and stentorian. And he has advised her to walk beyond the podiums with a microphone on her lapel.
In the campaign’s current plan, Mr. Clinton will not appear regularly at large public events for Mrs. Clinton until the fall, though the timing largely depends on how well she is doing, advisers say. He is adding more income-generating speeches than usual to his personal schedule now, so he has more free time in the fall and in 2008 to campaign for her, advisers add. Still, they note that Mr. Penn has not mapped out which states Mr. Clinton would visit during a general election campaign, if Mrs. Clinton wins the nomination, but that both men see Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Virginia as Republican-leaning states that Mrs. Clinton might contend in.
Instead, Mr. Clinton is raising $100,000 to $200,000 a night at a steady stream of fund-raisers. He had two last Tuesday, in Greenwich, Conn., and in a New York City suburb, and he is expected to attend more than a dozen more through the end of June, probably raising millions of dollars from his political network.
This spring, for instance, as Mrs. Clinton prepared to raise money in Philadelphia, no one was better positioned to provide a lucrative entree than the city’s former mayor, Edward G. Rendell, now the governor of Pennsylvania. Yet Mr. Rendell, a Democrat, was on the sidelines of his party’s presidential primary race.
Then the phone rang.
“It was President Clinton asking if I’d help, and I told him I’d give the go-ahead to a lot of my fund-raisers to join in her event,” said Mr. Rendell, who has not endorsed a candidate. “Philadelphia owes a great deal to his presidency, and we’re good friends. It was an easy call for me to take, and it was an easy call for me to make.”
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May 18, 2007
12:48pm EDT
WSJ
PEGGY NOONAN
The Man Who Wasn't There
Fred Thompson isn't yet running, but he's running a great campaign.
Friday, May 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Having watched the second Republican debate the other night, it's clear to me the subject today is Fred Thompson, the man who wasn't there. While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear--boxers, briefs and temple garments.
He is running a great campaign. It's just not a declared campaign. It's a guerrilla campaign whose informality is meant to obscure his intent. It has been going on for months and is aimed at the major pleasure zones of the Republican brain. In a series of pointed columns, commentaries and podcasts, Mr. Thompson has been talking about things conservatives actually talk about. Shouldn't homeowners have the right to own a gun? Isn't it bad that colleges don't teach military history? How about that Sarkozy--good news, isn't it? Did you see Tenet on Russert? His book sounds shallow, tell-all-y.
These comments and opinions are being read and forwarded in Internet Nation. They are revealing and interesting, but they're not heavy, not homework. They have an air of "This is the sound of a candidate thinking." That's an unusual sound.
Most illustrative was what started this week as a small trading of barbs with provocateur Michael Moore, whose general and iconic dishabille is meant to show identification with the workingman, though in America workingmen bathe. Mr. Moore was back from Cuba, where he made a documentary on the superiority of Castro's health care system. Mr. Thompson suggested Mr. Moore is just another lefty who loves dictators. Mr. Moore challenged Mr. Thompson to a health-care debate and accused him of smoking embargoed cigars. Within hours Mr. Thompson and his supposedly nonexistent staff had produced a spirited video response that flew through YouTube and the conservative blogosphere. Sitting at a desk and puffing on a fat cigar, Mr. Thompson announces to Mr. Moore he can't fit him into his schedule. Then: "The next time you're down in Cuba . . . you might ask them about another documentary maker. His name was Nicolás Guillén. He did something Castro didn't like, and they put him in a mental institution for several years, giving him devastating electroshock treatments. A mental institution, Michael. Might be something you ought to think about."
You couldn't quite tell if Mr. Thompson was telling Mr. Moore he ought to think more about Cuba, or might himself benefit from psychiatric treatment. It seemed almost . . . deliberately unclear.
Right now Mr. Thompson has the best of both worlds, an air of fearlessness and nothing on the line. He hasn't committed. He's not in. He can take a chance and be himself because he's not afraid, and he's not afraid because he has nothing to lose.
He says he'll get in if enough people ask him to. If they don't, he'll go someplace else and do something else. It's not as if his speech fees would go down.
Why would he run now? Because he thinks there's no one of greater stature on the field. Because he thinks he's got a better, shrewder read of the base than the rest of them. Because he's at an age where you throw the dice or know you never will. Because he thinks the one essential to modern presidential leadership, the one thing you must have now, in the age of terror, is the ability to communicate, and he reads himself as the best communicator. And because he's at a point in his private life where it's possible for him. He's got a wife who's got his back and two kids who've given him a second chance. Even in great careers it's the private life that's hardest to get right. He feels he has.
People speak of Mr. Thompson's movie-star looks. But he's not beautiful, he's heavy and gray. What he has is bearing. He has the manner of someone who thinks a great deal of himself, and thinks it after long personal pondering of his good points, bad points, high points and low. He may or may not be correct in his conclusions, but I suspect they are part of his draw. I suspect people pick them up.
Is he anything beyond a standard Republican conservative? Will he have anything beyond a Mideast policy that consists of win in Iraq, support the surge, and oppose any timetable? Does he stand for any strategic thinking apart from what John McCain unconsciously but aptly characterized as "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran"? On domestic issues, can Mr. Thompson go beyond standard conservative thought? I happen to be standard conservative myself, but sometimes old things need to be made new, the obvious needs to be made fresh.
Here are some things Mr. Thompson has going for him. He had eight years in the U.S. Senate, and then left in 2002 instead of sticking around and getting all the muck on him. He has a conservative record but a moderate persona. He seems nonradical, non-let's-follow-the-banner-over-the-cliff. He's a Southerner but modern. He has a great voice. (Voices matter. Ask Obama, who has one. Ask Hillary, who doesn't.) He comes to a field that may soon start to feel tired. That to some extent already does. His relatively late entry suggests--suggests--his motives are serious, not just ego-related.
But Mr. Thompson's challenges are real, too. He'll have to show he's serious--that he's in it for big reasons and in it to the end. He'll have to knock down the "low energy, gadfly, hops from thing to thing" charge, which has persisted so long that one assumes there's something in it. He'll have to show he's not just a rote, pro forma conservative--a dumb conservative--but someone who knows times change, horizons shift. He has to show he has run something, or can run something. Romney ran a state, Giuliani a city. Mr. Thompson has run what--a career? Big whoop.
Most importantly for him, and for all the Republican candidates for that matter, Mr. Thompson will have to answer this question: What is he running to do? Why should the Republicans get another eight years, or four years, after all the missteps they've made? Isn't conservatism, or Republicanism, or whatever you call it, just tired? Isn't it over? Isn't America just waiting for whatever will take its place?
Why shouldn't liberalism get a shot? Could they mess up more? Why should we trust Republicans with foreign affairs?
If Fred Thompson can answer these questions, he'll be showing he's something new, and not just the newest candidate, or the latest face.
Reports this week said an announcement could come in June.
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Newt is on O'Reilly tonight:
===================
An email missive from Newt:
An Immigration Shipwreck
in Sight
The announcement last week that the White House and a group of senators have reached an agreement on "comprehensive immigration reform" should have the same effect that the word "iceberg" had on the passengers and crew of the Titanic.
This proposed agreement is a disaster of the first order, and it would severely cripple America for the foreseeable future.
You can tell how bad this bill is by the Senate Democratic leadership's announced goal of trying to pass it before the Memorial Day weekend.
Remember, this bill has not yet been finished. Senators and their staffs were still negotiating over the weekend and many key items were still in confusion. So here's what we have to do:
TODAY'S ACTION ITEM:
CALL YOUR SENATORS AND LET THEM KNOW HOW ANGRY YOU WILL BE IF THEY PASS A BILL BEFORE IT HAS BEEN PRINTED AND PUT ON THE INTERNET AND EXPOSED FOR THE COUNTRY TO READ AND UNDERSTAND.
75 Reasons to Oppose the New Immigration Bill
When the FBI arrested six terrorists in New Jersey two weeks ago it turned out that three of them had been in the U.S. illegally for at least TWENTY years.
These three had crossed our unprotected border and had been living in New Jersey.
But here's the even more outrageous part: The police had filed 75 (SEVENTY-FIVE!) charges against them, including drug possession and possession of drug paraphernalia.
In 75 interactions, the police never once learned that these three people were here illegally.
The government failed twice: First, by failing to secure the border, and second, by failing to determine that these people were here illegally. The result was that more than five years after 9/11 we were saved from a mass killing at Fort Dix only because of the patriotism and courage of a clerk at an electronics store.
Compare the 75 charges made against the would-be Fort Dix terrorists with how we rounded up German spies in World War II. In June 1942, it took a total of 15 days to track down and arrest eight German spies who landed in Florida and New York from submarines. We executed six of them and gave one life in prison and the other thirty years. We were serious about winning that war. Go here for a more detailed comparison and a list of the 75 charges against the Fort Dix terrorists.
Faced with this level of failure of bureaucracy, how could anyone believe for a minute that this new immigration bill will work? The fact is it can't and it won't. It will rely on the same failed bureaucracy and produce more years of failure.
We Have Been Here Before
In 1986, I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill. We were promised that in return for amnesty for far fewer than three million illegal immigrants we would get:
Control of the border;
Enforcement of laws requiring employers to know someone is here legally before hiring them; and
No more amnesty and no more tolerance of illegality
The government broke its word on every one of those provisions.
We eventually amnestied three million people who had broken the law, and we sent a signal to the world that it is okay to break the law and come to America.
Now, 20 years later, we are told to trust Washington while we amnesty 12 to 20 million more people who have broken the law.
A Tax Amnesty Too?
When its supporters refer to the new immigration bill as "comprehensive," they must mean comprehensively outrageous.
The Boston Globe reported this weekend that the new bill will not require illegal workers to pay back taxes.
If this is true, the bill is an assault on every law-abiding, patriotic American who has been obeying the law, working legally and paying his taxes.
Every taxpaying American should insist that any bill involving any condition for illegal workers having any future in America should require them to do three things when it comes to taxes: 1) Admit how long they've been here (under threat of immediate deportation if they lie); 2) admit whom they worked for (who, after all, had also been breaking the law and avoiding paying taxes); and 3) pay any back taxes and penalties they owe.
There Is a Way to Deal With Illegal Immigration -- This is Not It
I have written extensively about good solutions for our current immigration mess in Winning the Future and elsewhere. Click here for more information.
Undermining America's Young Men and Women in Uniform
No one should doubt how much damage the Democrats are doing to America and to our young men and women in uniform with their political maneuvering in Congress.
In Atlanta Friday night, a doctor in the National Guard who had just come home from serving in Mosul briefed me on the damage he had seen to American morale and the confusion among young soldiers as the Democrats continue to play games with the supplemental appropriations and talk about legislating defeat in the war our troops are trying every day to win.
How would you like to be risking your life on the point in Iraq knowing some politician back home was undermining everything you are trying to do?
Call your House and Senate members and tell them to quit undermining our troops in the middle of a war and get the money to the troops without any more games or delays.
(I discussed Iraq with Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday. You can watch it here.)
On the Radio
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Leading the Majority - Winning the Future's Talk Radio Show
Friday at 2:00 PM ET on RighTalk.com after Paul Weyrich's "The Right Hour."
Each Friday on Leading the Majority, Rick and Vince interview opinion leaders and policy experts. Be sure to tune in or you can listen to last's weeks show now. [Click Here to Listen]
Rick Tyler is Newt's spokesman and Vince Haley directs Newt's policy research.
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Gingrich rips the Bush Administration
(First, a poll update: Rasmussen has Romney passing McCain, just slightly,for second place of the Republicans.) http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/2008_republican_presidential_primary
Gingrich picks a fight with the White House. If interested, read The New Yorker article "Party Unfaithful - the Republican Implosion" for context. I understand the strategy of separate from Bush, but I don't follow him on all the details. Basically he attacks Rove for a bad strategy in 2004, but in 2004 Bush added 25% to his 2000 vote and held the house and senate. To me it would make more sense to criticize everything they did after successful reelection. As we look back now at the Gingrich congress, there is plenty of open criticism between Newt, Delay and Dick Armey, among others. Unfortunately, each point has some validity IMO. (I see Newt as a policy and strategy expert; I don't see him as a future President.)
--
Excerpt from the article, regarding Newt: "...he blames not only Iraq and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice”—of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy”—and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.
The only way to keep the White House in G.O.P. hands, Gingrich said, would be to nominate someone who, in essence, runs against Bush, in the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right cabinet minister who just won the French Presidency by making his own President, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/04/070604fa_fact_goldberg
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Bush could have run on tax cut success or on getting another shot at re-making social security, but the issue of the day was war, and backbone on war was the weakness of his opponent. Bush needed to win on that question in order to ever have any say on the rest.
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I can't agree with most of it. Bring in and keep more foreigners? ( Don't we have enough people not born here coming in?) Provide financial support to schools who encourage minorities and girls to go into science? (Why not just put all white men into jail and get it over with. Or what about giving financial support for schools that encourage boys to go into arts and literature?) Establish a 50 billion energy fund by taxing oil companies? (Why not just pay for it with the gasoline tax already present?) Tax incentives to pay for broadband access? (Why, people who can't pay for a monthly fee for broadband already don't pay taxes.)
***Increase federal research and development budgets 50 percent over the next 10 years at the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Defense Department.***
Ok, maybe this I could agree with this one.
What kind of leadership is this?
She will definitely turn us into Europe. Maybe I could just hit the lottery and move into the mountains and not listen to the news anymore once she is president.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070601/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_silicon_valley_2
AP
Clinton outlines technology plan
By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 23 minutes ago
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -
Hillary Rodham Clinton wooed Silicon Valley campaign donors and voters Thursday with a plan to create more high-paying jobs and maintain U.S. dominance in technology.
ADVERTISEMENT
The New York senator and Democratic presidential hopeful said she's trying to increase the number of so-called H1B visas aimed at highly educated workers. Silicon Valley companies use H1Bs to sponsor thousands of software engineers from Russia, India, China and other countries, but many must return home when their temporary work permits expire.
"If you think you have a skills shortage now, project it out a decade and we're going to be in real trouble," Clinton said to applause from more than 200 executives attending a half-day CEO Summit by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. "We need to guide immigration reform to attract and retain foreign-born students who want to work in the United States."
If elected, Clinton said, her administration would provide financial support to schools that encourage girls and minorities to study "STEM" subjects: science, technology, engineering and math.
Clinton's plan would:
• Increase federal research and development budgets 50 percent over the next 10 years at the
National Science Foundation, the
Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Defense Department. She would triple the number of NSF fellowships and create an award structure to encourage working engineers and scientists to teach classes and mentor students in public schools.
• Establish a $50 billion "Strategic Energy Fund" that would create a research agency focused on reducing the threat of global warming. The R&D windfall and energy agency would be funded in part from closing tax loopholes and ending subsidies to oil companies, she said.
• Provide tax incentives to increase the number of U.S. homes with broadband Internet connections.
The senator — who spent the morning raising money at a private fundraiser — largely avoided the subject of the
Iraq war. Her support of the war was expected to draw protesters at another private fundraiser Thursday evening.
Executives attending Clinton's speech said she hit the right tone with Silicon Valley power brokers. Executives in the nation's technology hub — where 53 percent of all engineers are foreign-born — worry many workers will return to India, China and other countries developing tech sectors.
"We are clearly on common ground," Adobe Systems Inc. CEO Bruce Chizen said.
Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, said the organization doesn't endorse candidates and invited all presidential hopefuls to address members. Republican candidate John McCain (news, bio, voting record) spoke to an SVLG forum several weeks ago.
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I loathe Hillary Evita Clinton, but I think she is correct to agree with those who favor reforming the H1B visas to faciliatate immigration by the highly educated.
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Crafty,
I don't understand why we can't get enough of our own people here to become highly educated. Why do we have to import them?
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IMHO, that is a separate question-- and if we wait for its answer, we will become a nation of hamburger flippers in the meantime.
Perhaps worth noting in the case of the Chinese is that they are allowed to have only one child. Therefore that child receives the undivided attention of both parents.
Whatever the reason, our high tech sector desparately needs these people and our country desparately needs a strong high tech sector.
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Whatever the reason, our high tech sector desparately needs these people and our country desparately needs a strong high tech sector.
What is the evidence that our high tech sector desperately needs these people?
-milt
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Woof Milt:
In a very unprofitable period of my life, :cry: I followed surfed the peak of the NAZ boom and crashed and burned along with it. During this time I followed the Gilder Technology Report and related readings. My impressions on this issue were formed during that time. As can be seen from some of the threads on the SCH forum here, I retain an interest.
Marc
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Woof Milt:
In a very unprofitable period of my life, :cry: I followed surfed the peak of the NAZ boom and crashed and burned along with it. During this time I followed the Gilder Technology Report and related readings. My impressions on this issue were formed during that time. As can be seen from some of the threads on the SCH forum here, I retain an interest.
Marc
Woof,
Fair enough, but I get the idea that the only ones interested in importing these extra workers are high tech investors and executives that want to cut labor costs.
-milt
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Milt,
I agree with your suspicions. It is akin to "we need all these South of the Border illegals because they are filling jobs we Americans won't do".
To think these people are not taking jobs from Americans is till I see otherwise an urban myth. It's cheaper labor for business and Repubs and cheap votes for Dems.
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If we want to keep a fcukin' genius like Simon Cao (formerly of Avanex) here in the US and not running off to set up a cheaper operation in China where he can find a ton of people who a fcukin' brilliant workaholics for pennies a day, it behooves us to have it not too hard to bring them here.
PS: We are getting a bit afield from the subject of this thread. If we want to continue this conversation please continue on the Immigration thread.
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Crafty,
I understand what you are saying and
Well yes that's the argument that is made. And I would submit this has *obvious validity*. For example we made exceptions after WWII to obtain brilliant minded scientists like Von Braun. [ot: I just saw a cable show that (sadly as far as I feel) we allowed not only people who were swept up by the Nazi tidle wave but advid supporters and architects into the US as well.] Von Braun of course was great to have for us a nation.
I still am not convinced that Cao cannot apply for or receive citizenship like everyone else.
There is no shortage of Asian/Middle Eastern American doctors from my vantage point! They are here by the tens of thousands at least in the NYC metro area. I don't see how they could be practicing with a license if they were not legal.
If Cao is so smart he can marry a Chinese American girl? I have a South African niece. It took work, a lawyer, money, time and sweat but she is an American Citizen now.
Like Schwarzenegger.
Was GG protesting this about Cao? GG was the same guy who was proclaiming on his website (in the late 90's) that the export and stealing of military secrets to China was a bogus complaint. He typed on the message board more or less that the Chinese could figure this out anyway so what's the big deal. But if I had to choose I would keep Cao and send Gilder to China.
To set my opinion straight GG is obviously a genius. And he seems an honorable man. He invested his own money with us on his stock picks and his business. He made and lost money with us subscribers to his newsletters. I wonder how many other gurus do this. He was right about the telecosm just off by an unknown number of years. But some of his political ideas are based in fantasy and naivity like some his investment ideas - like "listen to the technology" as the key to investing success. He called Intel, ATT, and Microsoft a bunch of dinosaurs. Maybe they can be viewed that way froma technology point of view but they are not going away.
Somewhat off the topic: I notice Cao left Avanex before it crashed to one dollar a share. Or did someone at the immigration office lose their shirt in Avanex and get him deported? Sorry for my wiseguy remarks here. I lost a lot on Avanex. I take responsibility but it is hard not to be annoyed.
As always I appreciate the divergence of views and being able to express them here.
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AGAIN:
"PS: We are getting a bit afield from the subject of this thread. If we want to continue this conversation please continue on the Immigration thread."
This is in the interest of thread coherency. This thread is about "The 2008 Presidential Race". So would you please repost your response on the Immigration thread and I will delete it here.
Thank you.
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Towards a 21st Century Governing Majority
I am giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute this Friday that is so central to where America needs to go if we're going to win the future for our children and grandchildren that I wanted to preview it for you today. I also want to urge you to find out more at the AEI website and to watch it at American Solutions, where you can sign up to get an e-mail reminder here.
We are still more than 500 days from the 2008 elections, but one thing is clear: There will be a future governing majority, and its three key principles can already be defined. What is not clear, however, is whether this next governing majority will be led by Republicans or Democrats.
First, New Deal Democrats, Then Reagan/Contract With America Republicans
From 1932 to 1980, the Democrats clearly led the governing coalition. Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford all operated within the world created by the New Deal and FDR.
Then in 1980, President Reagan broke with that pattern and launched a substantial shift in the core principles of American public policy. Under Reagan, defeating the Soviet Union replaced containing it, cutting taxes replaced government redistribution, and pride in American civilization replaced the left's hostility toward American values.
The 1994 Contract with America deepened and extended the Reagan initiative. The Contract expanded the Republican governing majority through welfare reform, the first tax cut in 16 years, a balanced budget for four consecutive years, paying off $405 billion in debt and enacting term limits for committee chairmen. Republicans controlled the House for more than two years for the first time since 1928, and Republican control of governorships and state legislatures was deepened.
And Then Came Six Years of Republicans' Failing to Perform
The last six years, however, have been a different story. They have been too often punctuated with examples of performance failures that have effectively ended the current attempt at forging a Republican governing majority.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff encapsulated this inability to get the job done when he recently said that the disastrous new immigration bill "bows to reality." In other words: It's too hard, so why not concede defeat and give up securing the border and enforcing the law.
But we hire leaders to change reality to fit our values, not to change our values to fit their failures.
I don't know what "reality" Secretary Chertoff lives in, but the reality of the vast majority of the American people is one of growing distrust of their leaders and growing disgust with the ways things are being done in Washington.
We value limited, effective government, but the reality we get is the failed response to Hurricane Katrina.
We value lower taxes and living within our means, but the reality we get is out-of-control spending on congressional pet projects.
We value enforcing our laws, but our reality is a Senate-sanctioned order to keep local police in the dark about the legal status of those they arrest.
We value protecting our homeland, but our reality is a federal bureaucracy that allows a man with multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis to enter the country -- after a U.S. border guard ignored a warning that he was so dangerous he had to be approached wearing bio-protective gear. And our reality is the discovery of three terrorists in New Jersey who had been in the U.S. illegally for 23 years and charged 75 times by the police without being identified as having no legal right to be in the United States in the first place.
The Principles of a New Governing Majority
It is quite clear that the next governing majority -- a 21st Century governing majority -- will be required to have the following three major characteristics to be a successful and lasting majority.
Represent the Values of the People: It will represent the vast majority of the American people in their key values and beliefs (see below for some examples);
Be Accountable to the Standards of the People: It will insist on a government that is metrics-based, constantly measuring results and changing strategies, policies, bureaucracies and personnel until it actually succeeds in meeting the values, expectations and demands of the American people. A 21st Century government will join the best of the private sector in offering more choices of higher quality at lower cost and with greater convenience; and
Protect the Lives of the People: It will insist on protecting America and her allies from the threat of the irreconcilable wing of Islam as well as resurgent Russian aggressiveness and the challenge of Chinese economic and scientific development.
Which Party Will It Be?
While either party could become the next governing majority, each has some major hurdles to becoming that majority.
The Democrats are in a better tactical position, because they are the opposition party at a time of public disenchantment with the performance of the Republicans in government.
But the values of the Left, the interest groups of government and the grip of the 20th Century systems of bureaucracy make it nearly impossible for the Democrats to propose effective solutions to how we govern ourselves. It is a better-than-even possibility that Democrats can win the presidency in 2008 but a very limited possibility that they could propose the kind of change that would be necessary to form a governing majority.
Republicans Are in a Bad Tactical Spot, But a Good Strategic One
The Republicans have a bad tactical situation, but they are strategically in an easier place than Democrats. Once Republicans get out from under the current performance problems, they could more easily adopt the favored policies of the vast majority of Americans and advocate the transformation of government and the protection of the United States from a broad set of dangers.
It is unlikely that any new Republican attempts to create a natural governing majority could evolve rapidly enough to be offered as a compelling choice to the American people in the 2008 election. But the election of Sarkozy in France shows that it is possible to produce a decisive national decision in favoring of moving toward more conservative reform -- in spite of the performance failures of the incumbent from the same party -- when combined with an ideological failure on the left and an offering of bold solutions and bold leadership from a newly defined right.
'That Government of the People, by the People, and for the People Shall Not Perish From the Earth'
My speech Friday at the American Enterprise Institute will address this battle to create America's next governing majority in the context of President Lincoln's charge at Gettysburg:
"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
The speech will examine:
How government of the people is in danger of being replaced by an iron triangle of tax-funded incumbents, interest group lobbyists and powerful bureaucracies;
How government of the people and by the people is being threatened by the anti-free speech law of McCain-Feingold and other anti-citizen efforts to strangle public dissent; and
How government for the people is being replaced by government for the bureaucracies, government for the public-employee unions and government for the trial lawyers.
Restoring 'Government of the People': Making English the Official Language of the United States
The opposition in Congress to making English the official language of the United States is a near perfect example of the failure of the current leadership in Washington to adopt a deeply held value of the American people. Eighty-five percent of Americans want the federal government to join with 30 states in making English the official language of the United States, and yet our elites consider the adoption of this value as a distraction or worse.
Consider last night's Democratic presidential debate. When asked for a show of hands, former Alaskan Sen. Mike Gravel was the only candidate to express support for English. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama said that the question "is designed precisely to divide us" and that "when we get distracted by those kinds of questions, I think we do a disservice to the American people." If 85% of Americans support English as the official language of government, the only division is between Sen. Obama and the American people.
New York Sen. Hillary Clinton responded that she supported English as the "national" language but not the "official" language of the United States, since making English the official language would prevent the printing of foreign language ballots for U.S. elections.
It seems that only liberals can possibly see 85% support for a deeply held American value as divisive and only liberals think it is acceptable to express support for English as long as it does not actually have any meaning, such as ending the printing of foreign language ballots for U.S. elections.
Only a Mass Movement Can Break the Power of the Entrenched Special Interests
The power of the entrenched special interests in Washington, in many state capitals, and in city and county government is such that only a mass movement comparable to the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, and the Lincoln Republicans and Progressives could break the hold of the entrenched power structure.
Three are three reasons to believe this mass movement is growing:
First, the gap between the values of the elite on the left and the values of the vast majority of Americans is growing wider. Ninety-one percent of all Americans favor the right to say "One Nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Eighty-nine percent believe American workers should have the right to a secret ballot election before being forced to join a union. Ninety-three percent believe Americans should know the price and quality of healthcare before making a decision about it. Eighty-five percent believe English should be the official language of government. The list goes on and on. Certainly, any 21st Century governing majority will be center-right in its values and policies.
Second, the gap between the world that works (largely but not entirely private sector) and the world that fails (largely but not entirely government bureaucracy) is growing wider and wider. In the 21st Century private sector, we routinely expect MORE choices of LOWER cost with HIGHER quality and GREATER convenience. But in government we continue to be told about higher taxes, slower implementation, greater error rates and "hard choices." A 21st Century governing majority will be allied with the American people in insisting on the delivery standard of the world that works being applied to the government systems that currently fail.
Third, as the world visibly grows more dangerous, the natural desire of the American people to be protected will reassert itself. The implementation failures in Iraq combined with the Bush Administration's inarticulateness have led to a temporary resurgence of the "Peace at Any Price" Left. But this will rapidly disintegrate as the problems of the modern world persist. Cyber attacks on Estonia, Chinese activities in space, Russian assertiveness against Lithuania and Poland, Iranian seizure of American hostages, the six terrorists in New Jersey and the four terrorists who were planning to blow up the jet fuel at JFK airport in New York are early indicators that any future governing majority will have a very strong national and homeland security component.
I will explore all these ideas in my speech at AEI on Friday, June 8. I hope you'll join me. And then, all these concepts will be expanded into practical, workable solutions in the American Solutions "Solutions Day" workshops on September 27 and 29. It's going to be the start of a great and meaningful adventure. I hope you'll choose to be a part of it.
NEWT GINGRICH
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Thanks for the Newt speech. I would like to read it closer and offer my comments later.
Here is a new Obama speech. Near as I can tell he is going after the Edwards' 'Two Americas' theme. He says he has new ideas, but blames American poverty on the war, and mainly supports expanding federal programs in order to 'strengthen the family'. In the end it all comes back to what I would call socialized medicine. Also, by my read, he is saying he has God on his side, then mentions Pat Robertson in the next breath.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/quiet_riots_in_america.html
(Post was too long; read the speech at the link, if interested.)
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Fundamental Change Needed in Washington
Fox News Sunday
Fox News Transcripts June 3 2007
Chris Wallace Newt Gingrich
CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: Well, joining us now, someone who's always interesting and often controversial. But these days, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is directing his fire not at Democrats but at problems within his own Republican Party.
Mr. Speaker, welcome back to "Fox News Sunday."
NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER: It's good to be with you.
WALLACE: Let's start with your interview in The New Yorker magazine this week. And I want to quote from it at length. Let's put it up. "Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter presidency when nothing seemed to go right."
And later, there's this. "Not since Watergate," Gingrich said, "has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. Let me be clear: 28 percent approval of the president, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent -- that's a collapse."
Jimmy Carter? Watergate? Collapse? Are things really that bad?
GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, nothing that I said in The New Yorker disagrees with things I said as early as December of '03 when I talked about having gone off the cliff in Iraq, things I said all through '04 in trying to get the Bush campaign team to shift from attacking Kerry personally to forcing a genuine choice over values and policies, to concerns I raised in December of '04, January and February of '05, about how they were approaching Social Security reform, through what happened at Katrina.
I mean, so what I said in The New Yorker may be compressed, but in fact, it is things that for the last three years I've talked -- I've warned all last year that I suspected we were drifting into a catastrophic defeat. I don't see any other way to read '06 except it was a defeat.
And if we don't have a serious, open discussion of where we are, I don't see how we're going to change.
Just take this week. An American with tuberculosis shows up at the border. We're in the middle of a debate over immigration and controlling the border. He shows up at the border. The computer says do not let him enter and only deal with him in a hazardous suit.
And the border patrol currently is so ill-trained, or the immigration service is so ill-trained, that the guy lets him in -- looks at him with his eyeballs and says, "you know, I don't think he looks sick," and lets him in.
You learn that there are three illegal terrorists in New Jersey who were in the U.S. for 23 years illegally, intercepted by the police 75 times in the last six years, and it was never indicated that they were here illegally.
You go through this list. You say to yourself this government -- I mean, not just the president. This is not about the presidency. The government is not functioning. It's not getting the job done.
WALLACE: But you compare George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter, which, as you well know, is fighting words among Republicans.
GINGRICH: Look, the functional effect in public opinion is about the same. Now, Republicans need to confront this reality.
If you were at 28 percent, 29 percent, 30 percent approval, and if things aren't working, and now you have a fight which splits your own party -- and this immigration fight goes to the core of where we are. If you read Peggy Noonan's column last Friday, which was devastating -- and I think it resonates with where the base of this party is right now. The base of this party is looking up going, "What are we in the middle of -- why are we ramming through an omnibus Teddy Kennedy bill, and attacking Republicans who criticize it, and calling us," for example, as one senator did, "bigots, when all we're saying is this government couldn't possibly implement this bill?"
There's no evidence at all that this government is capable of executing this.
WALLACE: We're going to get to immigration in a second. But White House spokesman Tony Snow pushed back at your comments this week.
GINGRICH: OK.
WALLACE: And let's take a look at them. Here they are.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: When it comes to presidential politics, you know that the first rule is if you're running even in your own party, the first thing you do is you try to differentiate your product, and you always use the president as somebody that you're sort of measuring yourself against.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: He says you're trying to carve out a place in the Republican debate by knocking the president.
GINGRICH: Look, Tony Snow is a great friend, and I admire him a great deal, and it's a nice try. In 1988, no one running for president on the Republican nomination tried to differentiate themselves from Ronald Reagan.
There's a lesson there. Ronald Reagan was enormously popular. The fact is that -- forget presidential politics. We as a country over the next 1.5 years half have to do dramatically better.
You just had a report from Iraq that's very sobering. You have a comment from General Sanchez that should alarm every American. You have the report today of the terrorists being picked up in New York who were trying to blow up the jet fuel.
And by the way, one of those terrorists was picked up on the way to Iran for a conference on Islamic behavior around the world.
WALLACE: Basically, what do you think is wrong with George W. Bush?
GINGRICH: Look, I think that he means very, very well. I think he's very, very sincere. But I don't think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he's trying to implement things. And I think that's why you ended up with, "Brownie, you're doing a great job," when it was obvious to the entire country at Katrina that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had collapsed and was not capable of doing any job at that point.
And I think as a result, the administration has very, very high goals -- Democracy throughout the Middle East -- and very weak bureaucratic support for those goals, and the result is an enormous mismatch in just sheer implementation.
And this is, in the end, a practical country. Americans want their government to work.
WALLACE: You say that this president doesn't solve anything.
GINGRICH: He doesn't methodically insist on changing things. I mean, again, take the example last week. If somebody with tuberculosis, who is actually in the computer system, can't be stopped at the border; if you have three terrorists in New Jersey who have been here illegally for 23 years -- and the Senate, by the way, voted to sanction cities and counties not asking if you're illegal, an amendment to this -- what I think is an absolute disaster of immigration legislation -- you have to look at that and say, "We're not serious."
I just did, as you know, a novel on the second world war. I was out recently at Pearl Harbor and looking at the Missouri and looking at the Arizona, and they're sitting right next to each other. And the Missouri was our answer to Pearl Harbor.
We built an entire navy. We built an entire air force. We created the atomic bomb. We mobilized 16.5 million people in uniform. We won the entire war in less than four years.
Now, you look at the ruthlessness, the aggressiveness, the energy that we put into that war, and here we are 5.5 years after 9/11, and the fact is I would argue we're losing the war around the world with Islamist extremists and they are, in fact, gaining ground.
WALLACE: Let's talk about what may be the biggest problem that conservatives have right now with President Bush, and that is his support for comprehensive immigration reform.
Mr. Bush said this week that critics like yourself on the right are misrepresenting the plan. Let's watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: If you want to scare the American people, what you say is, "The bill is an amnesty bill." It's not an amnesty bill. That's empty political rhetoric trying to frighten our fellow citizens.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: Empty rhetoric trying to frighten the American people. Your response?
GINGRICH: Well, the bill explicitly grandfathers in somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people. We don't know the number because the government has no idea how many there are -- again, an example of incompetence.
The government doesn't know within a million how many people will be grandfathered in.
They're all, in effect, made permanent temporary workers the day the bill is signed. They have to go through one day of filling out a form. There is zero possibility the federal government will be able to process those forms.
And it's simply, I think, disingenuous. I'm assuming that the president and his staff understand what this bill does. And if they do, what the president said is disingenuous.
This bill, in effect, grandfathers somewhere between 12 million and 20 million people. We don't know who they are. It would have grandfathered the three terrorists in New Jersey.
WALLACE: But some conservatives say, "You know, there's a lot to like in this bill." There is tougher border enforcement in the bill. Let me just ask the question. There is tougher border enforcement in the bill -- that it creates a temporary guest worker program, that it puts an end to the chain migration of families in.
Isn't a bill with those features better than no bill at all?
GINGRICH: No, because this bill creates a brand new system that gives between 10 million and 20 million people guaranteed access to the United States without any recourse.
I was in Dallas doing a book signing two weeks ago, and a federal prosecutor walked up to me, career bureaucrat, civil servant, not a political appointee, and said to me, with anger, the most effective tool they have in dealing with illegal gang members is deportation.
This bill would, in effect, guarantee 30,000 illegal gang members that they can stay in the U.S. by the following. You sign a paper that says I promise not to be in the gang anymore. Now, that is so out of touch with reality.
WALLACE: But the Bush administration -- and I know Commerce Secretary Gutierrez has said this, "Look, we're not going to deport 12 million to 20 million people."
GINGRICH: No.
WALLACE: Let me finish. It isn't going to happen. And so as a result, if you do nothing, if you stay with the system you have now, the 12 million people are going to stay here, and what you have is amnesty. It's just silent amnesty.
GINGRICH: Yes, but what they're saying, in effect, is we either have to do nothing or we have to do something fairly dumb.
Now, why can't we do a series of small, smart steps? Why couldn't they -- I'll give you another example. Democratic Governor Napolitano of Arizona wrote a column this week pointing out that they are cutting the number of National Guard supporting the border before they have actually met their goals at the border.
So the average American looks up and says, "Why can't you control the border tomorrow morning? Why can't you enforce the law?" I mean, you don't have to deport anybody. All you have to say is to American businesses, who are American citizens, "Obey American law or face economic penalties."
Now, the morning you do that, you begin to dry up the market for hiring people illegally.
Why couldn't you make sure that there was a fairly easy way to verify somebody was legally here so that, as rapidly as you do with an automatic teller machine with your credit card, you're able to know that you're hiring somebody legally?
Those things drive people -- you don't have to deport anybody. All you have to do is make it dramatically harder to get in the U.S. and dramatically harder to hire people illegally.
WALLACE: Let's turn to 2008. You suggest that the only way that a Republican in this current political climate is going to win the presidency is to run against President Bush the same way that Nicolas Sarkozy was just elected president of France running against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, even though he was a member of Chirac's cabinet.
Do you really think the Republicans will nominate someone who is running against George W. Bush?
GINGRICH: No, I don't think you need to run -- in fact, I don't think you should run against President Bush. I think most of his major decisions have been very sincere, and most of them are decisions the average American actually would endorse.
I think what you do have to do is run in favor of radically changing Washington and radically changing government. And I think that all you have to do is look at the examples I've given you today where the government simply fails.
Look at New Orleans today and you can't possibly believe this is an effective federal program. And so I think...
WALLACE: But if you're not running against the president, you're certainly running against his record.
GINGRICH: Well, what Sarkozy said was that without -- he never attacked President Chirac. He never took him on at all. He said simply, "We have to have dramatically bigger changes."
I think the average American will tell you they want Washington changed very dramatically, and that doesn't always involve the president.
Eighty-two percent of the country believes we ought to have a dramatic change in earmarks in the Congress, for example. And I think 85 percent of the country believes English ought to be the official language of government. Those are not necessarily involving President Bush.
WALLACE: We've got a couple of minutes left. Fred Thompson all but announced this week that he is running for president. Are you satisfied with his credentials? Does the Republican field now have a true conservative?
GINGRICH: Well, first of all, there are several candidates who each bring their own unique strengths to this, and in terms of offering a very bold, dramatic vision, Governor Romney would be capable of it. I think Mayor Giuliani would be capable of it. I think Fred Thompson will be capable of it.
These are solid people. And over the next three months or four months, we'll see what they do. My entire focus -- despite Tony Snow's comment, my entire focus is on creating a solutions day on September 27th.
I'm going to be giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute this Friday outlining the scale of change I'm describing. It is not pro- or anti-Bush. It is beyond the current presidency.
And it argues that in order for us to be effective, in order for us to apply the World War II standard of effectiveness, we have to have very relentless, dramatic change in American government.
WALLACE: Let me ask you, because the question a lot of people are asking is, "Is there still room for Newt Gingrich in the race?" You have been dropping a lot of hints recently, and let's put them up on the screen.
Two weeks ago, you said, "It is a great possibility" that you'll run. Then a few days ago, you said, "I'll probably end up running."
Mr. Speaker, it sure sounds like you want to get in this race.
GINGRICH: Well, I think when you see that there's nobody yet -- and we're giving all of our material from American Solutions to every candidate in both parties.
But when you look at -- for example, all the Democrats' proposals on health care sadly represent more big government, more bureaucracy, more Washington controls, which is a denial of the whole underlying reality of...
WALLACE: Right. I wouldn't expect the Democrats to adopt your strategy, but how about the Republicans?
GINGRICH: I would have to say that you have to look -- and I'm waiting -- I mean, I'm not out here trying to crowd anybody on anything. I'm simply suggesting we need to have some very bold proposals for fundamental change, and so far I don't see much of that.
I see some encouraging signs, but I think the key question is, is somebody prepared to stand up and say that the American people deserve fundamental change in Washington, and to outline a set of those fundamental changes that are big enough that people look up and say, "That's what I want."
WALLACE: And if you don't see that, you're getting in?
GINGRICH: I think after September 29th -- we're going to have two days of workshops on September 27th on the Internet and again on September 29th, available to anybody in the country, Democrat, Republican, independent.
After those two days of solutions-oriented approach, I'll start looking at it, you know, on September 30th.
WALLACE: Mr. Speaker, come on back and tell us what you decide.
GINGRICH: All right.
WALLACE: Thank you, as always, for coming in.
And we also want to note that you have a new book out, which you mentioned -- you can see it up there on the screen -- called "Pearl Harbor", a historical novel. And good luck with that, sir.
GINGRICH: Thank you.
http://www.newt.org/backpage.asp?art=4527
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Can't get any more obvious then this. If one can't land a guy to take care of their needs then one can always count on the government to take care of their *issues*. Who better to make sure government does this than H. Clinton? Of course she married Bill to get her needs - fame, fortune, and most of all political aspirations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061102216_pf.html
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Can't get any more obvious then this. If one can't land a guy to take care of their needs then one can always count on the government to take care of their *issues*. Who better to make sure government does this than H. Clinton? Of course she married Bill to get her needs - fame, fortune, and most of all political aspirations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061102216_pf.html
Boy, sounds like somebody here has some "issues" of their own with women.
I think you're referring to this part of the article
Clinton is drawing especially strong support from lower-income, lesser-educated women -- voters her campaign strategists describe as "women with needs."
I wonder what "needs" the campaign strategists mean exactly. By mentioning income and education, the article implies that it means welfare or some kind of money. I'm guessing that reproductive rights are of much more concern to these women, and that they see a woman president as more likely to fight for those rights.
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Lower income lesser educated women tend more often to be single mothers of illegitimate children who are struggling financially. I doubt they are voting some idealistic view concerning abortion.
Comon Rogt,
Of course they want benefits - bought and paid for by the government. What issues do you think a woman of lower economic lower education is thinking about? If they gave a rats behind about Iraq they would be voting Obama or Edwards.
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Woof CCP,
That these women are mostly single mothers struggling financially means the abortion issue affects them more than other groups. Upper-middle class women seem to be more vocal about the issue, but any restrictions on abortion rights are bound to affect them much less than women of lesser financial means.
But even if Hillary's appeals were all about financial benefits for these women, what would make this any worse than every other group (defense contractors, banks, drug companies, religious organizations, etc.) that's lobbying for what amounts to financial benefits or favorable legistlation? The comments in your earlier post made it out like women actually voting in their own self-interest (which of course they'd only do because they couldn't find a man who'd "meet their needs") only proves what a bunch of gold-diggers they really are.
Rog
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Tis a rare event, but I have some sympathy for Rog's point about corporate welfare, etc.
When I was running for Congress in the 36th District in 1992 (winner was Jane Harman) I would tell a story about how a friend and I were sitting in a restaurant and three people at the neighboring people came over and handed us their bill. "What is this?" I asked. "We had a vote." they answered, "You are paying for us."
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Jumping in with my 2 cents, I would put a distinction between single women and single moms. I doubt single women who are childless are less educated or much poorer than male counterparts. I found CCP's title to be provacative: "girls can marry a guy to take care of them - or vote for the Hillary". Not speaking for him, but it could be interpreted generously to mean that some women find a man of equal or similar income to her own, they take care of each other, live well as we know it, travel, buy and furnish a nice home, raise children, invest, pay for college, heath care, cars, insurance, retirement, etc. Single women as a group see more of a state role in financial security, particularly in health care and retirement security even if they have high incomes.
Single moms might be most likely to appreciate laws that force businesses to give time off with pay for childbearing as well as likely to support programs such as child support enforcement, welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing, WIC, free school lunches,and most safety net programs There are plenty of exceptions I'm sure; I am a single Dad raising a daughter and my personal views certainly don't fit that description.
The conservative argument as I see it is that assistance skews the incentives and removes responsibility from individuals. As an inner city landlord, I have seen families hide the father to qualify for a program and had pregnant applicants point out how their income will go up after the next baby is born. Where you find multi-generational poverty, you tend to find women who see government as the provider of security more than the (missing)husband/father and you tend to see the man who passed on that responsibility filling his time and energy with less desirable activities. Crime and prison statistics seem to bear that out.
Yes, a single woman might be more likely to support current abortion law that requires no input whatsoever from the unborn's father. I have no data but doubt that pro choice passions trump pocketbook issues for most ordinary, single women.
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The US Constitution defines the role of government. Feeding, housing and providing healthcare aren't the job of gov't. Uncle Sam isn't your daddy and mommy.
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Rog,
Your right of course. We all tend to vote our interests. How much we vote in the "national interests" is certainly a good question.
I certainly do resent people who vote for pols whose quest for votes is appealing to them by promising to take more from me to bribe them with. Am I being unreasonable?
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Anybody know anything about Dr. Ron Paul?
Caught this clip and thought he had some interesting things to say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyCoDbFVaJ8
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The US Constitution defines the role of government. Feeding, housing and providing healthcare aren't the job of gov't. Uncle Sam isn't your daddy and mommy.
Let them eat cake?
-milt
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SB Mig:
On many points I am in substantial agreement with Ron Paul. Indeed I voted for him for President when he ran for the Libertarian Party some 20 odd years ago. I even agree with him that substantial portions of the Republican Party do not acknowledge the blowback issue and engage with it in intelligent discussion.
Where I disagree with him, and it is an important disagreement, is that I do not see blowback as the principal fundamental cause of the current gathering storm of world-wide war. I see the fundamental problem as one of a world-wide movement of literally hundreds of millions of religious fascists and their sympathizers.
Marc
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Rog,
Your right of course. We all tend to vote our interests. How much we vote in the "national interests" is certainly a good question.
I agree. Obviously there are a lot of different opinions on what the "national interests" are.
I certainly do resent people who vote for pols whose quest for votes is appealing to them by promising to take more from me to bribe them with. Am I being unreasonable?
Does that apply to corporate welfare too, or just the kind of welfare that helps poor people?
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Marc,
Thanks for the response.
Dr. Paul's name seems to be popping up everywhere and I figured that someone on this board would have some straight forward opinions/information about him.
Miguel
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Dr. Paul's name seems to be popping up everywhere and I figured that someone on this board would have some straight forward opinions/information about him.
I did notice that of all the Republican candidates, he was the only one willing to rule out using nuclear weapons against Iran.
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I'll go further and add that I think RP adds a lot to the campaign and that the Republican Party will be better off for the difficult and unpleasant questions that he raises.
Here's this about Sen. Hillary Evita Clinton:
Hillary removes Mother Teresa photo
The Clinton campaign removed a photograph of Hillary Clinton with
Mother Teresa from a campaign video after a complaint from the late
nun's religious order, a Clinton spokesman said.
"Sen. Clinton was proud to have worked with and known Mother Teresa,"
said Clinton spokesman Phil Singer. "Her order asked us to remove it
from the video, so we did."
The head of a politically conservative Catholic group, Fidelis, said
he brought the video to the attention of Sister Nirmala, Teresa's
successor at the Superior General of the India-based Missionaries of
Charity. Fidelis president Joseph Cella called it "wholly
inappropriate, disrespectful and disturbing that Hillary Clinton
shamelessly exploited Mother's image as a political tool."
"Hillary in effect, was the face of America, in Africa, in India..."
the ad says; the original version used the picture as the words "in
India" were narrated.
Cella said that in his letter to Nirmala, "We pointed out that the
use of Blessed Teresa's image was particularly inappropriate and
disturbing given Sen. Clinton's staunch support of abortion both here
in the United States and abroad. Mother Teresa tirelessly fought to
protect unborn children, while Hillary Clinton staunchly supports
abortion on demand in all nine months of pregnancy, including partial
birth abortion and taxpayer funding of abortion."
Clinton's spokesman, Singer, stressed that the photo was removed at
the behest of the missionary order, not of any other group
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Milt,
No, let people work. I know that's a crazy concept but it's amazing how much better free markets work rather than socialism. Free people making choices in their lives without a confiscatory nanny-state was one of those core concepts in the formation of the American experiment.
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Rogt,
***Does that apply to corporate welfare too***
I hear this phrase a lot. What exactly does this mean? What is considered "corporate welfare"?
I am not sure giving tax breaks to companies is necessarily "welfare".
Does it mean money is taken from taxpayers and doled to corporations for votes (or campaign contributions)? Or the concept that giving corporations a tax break is thus indirectly reducing the piece of the tax income pie that goes to others of lesser means?
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CCP, I'd like to answer that from my perspective and Rog can add his own. I think it is one of the great issues where right and left could agree and work together to eliminate it. In usage I think corporate welfare means any break whatsoever that any business gets that isn't available to all others. Examples might be incentives to drill for new oil or tax credits to buy insulation or solar panels.
In the realm of regular welfare, you might count cash payments and even non-cash subsidies as welfare, but probably not an education or health expense deduction. In that sense I think I see what CCP might be getting at, that the term isn't particularly precise or analogous.
In a perfect world it would be nice to get rid of all preferences and then tax every dollar of income at a proportionally lower rate. I'd like to see us move in that direction. On the individual side, the mortgage deduction is a good example. It certainly is well intended and claims great results - we have record high rates of home ownership. At the same time it encourages debt and means that every other dollar has to be taxed at a higher rate.
The opposite viewpoint IMO is expressed in any one of Bill Clinton's State of the Union speeches. Basically he gave us 40-60 minutes each year of non-stop ideas for targeted tax break after targeted tax break on top of an already train-car sized tax code.
If I wrote the next tax code, I would try to fit it onto one side of a cocktail napkin. (Free trade agreements should be shorter.)
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Rather than define it, I'll give you an example: The sugar industry is protected by tariffs from international competition. The Caribean area is full of countries who could sell us sugar at something like 20% of the cost (working from memory on this one, but the disparity I know to be huge). This is to "save American jobs". I have seen studies which assert the cost to the US economy is a couple of hundred thousand dollars per job "saved". This is corporate welfare, yes?
Paying farmers for not growing crops is corporate welfare, yes?
etc.
I will note that I favor having the tax code take pollution into account. Pollution is a violation of the free market principal that all the costs of a transaction should be born by the buyer and seller and not innocent third parties. I favor orienting the tax code towards taxing these external diseconomies and ending other taxes.
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Doug, Crafty thanks.
***free market principal that all the costs of a transaction should be born by the buyer and seller and not innocent third parties***
Well in the case of sugar I guess if we don't impose a tariff then "innocent" Americans lose their jobs. Is it their fault Caribbeans have a lower cost of living and will and can work at much lower wages? Or subsidizing farmers may be in the national interest.
Not that I agree with either of these statements I just made but I don't agree with it being that cut and dry either.
I guess if we fully embrace globalization we basically ship all professional and service jobs overseas that are not absolutely needed here. Of course this benefits others in the long term greater than us - unless we profit form the growth elsewhere with investment. We are seeing risks all over. Countries of peoples who hate us. They try to beat us at our own game. They try to beat us through subversion. They try to beat us with gorilla warfare. They try to beat us with nuclear weaponry (or the pursuit of it).
One Indian immigrant told me that the Indians are hungrier than American born. That is the reason for their success.
An Iraqi *boasted* to me his son on Wall Street "works harder than the Ameicans".
One could rightly hold that this is one good reason to get such motivated people to come here from other countries. A big plus for Latino immigrants is that there are many children of Latinos who volunteer for our military. I am grateful.
Has anyone ever heard of an Asain Indian volunteering to fight for America?
Just a bunch of thoughts. I digress.
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"Well in the case of sugar I guess if we don't impose a tariff then "innocent" Americans lose their jobs. Is it their fault Caribbeans have a lower cost of living and will and can work at much lower wages? Or subsidizing farmers may be in the national interest."
When consumers are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per job "saved" other jobs elsewhere, and in greater number, are destroyed. The net result is a negative.
As for subsidizing farmers, I think it also a poor and counter-productive idea. Read PJ O'Rourke's chapter on the Dept. of Agriculture in his "Parliament of Whores" and you will never see this issue in the same way.
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You can't tax a business, big or small. You can try, but all you do is pass on the tax to the consumer. No nation has ever taxed it's self into prosperity.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/06/16/video-the-only-man-who-can-save-america-talks-rudy-fred/?print=1
Ron Paul is a loon.
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GM:
I've already stated my areas of agreement and of disagreement with RP.
Do you disagree with him on:
a) Free minds & free markets?
b) Right to keep and bear arms?
c) Lower taxes?
d) Sound currency?
e) Defending our borders, while avoiding a national ID?
Yes you and I disagree with him on important matters regarding Islamo-Fascism's War on the West, but why does that make him a loon?
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Crafty,
He's good on multiple issues, but wrong on the global jihad. He gets into loon territory when he panders to the 9/11 "trufers". I'd vote for Joe Liberman even though he's wrong on so many things because he's understands the global jihad. I used to vote on guns and law and order, now winning this war trumps all.
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http://www.michellemalkin.com/archives/007568.htm
Michelle Malkin rip's into Paul's "Truther" pandering.
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You can't tax a business, big or small. You can try, but all you do is pass on the tax to the consumer.
They can try passing it on to the consumer, but they won't sell as many units when they increase the price.
-milt
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Which harms the poorer would-be consumer the left allegedly cares so much about.....
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Which harms the poorer would-be consumer the left allegedly cares so much about.....
What does this have to do with whether or not a business can be taxed?
-milt
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Because the tax "intended" for the business gets passed on to the consumer, most seriously affecting those on the lower end of economic status.
http://www.answers.com/topic/regressive-taxation?cat=biz-fin
Regressive Taxation
Tax burden that falls more heavily on those with low income. Contrast with Progressive Tax, Proportional Taxation.
Example: Sales tax on grocery products is considered regressive taxation because a poor individual must pay the same amount as a wealthy person. Ad Valorem taxes on housing are often regressive because those with low income spend a higher proportion of their income on housing than do the wealthy.
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Because the tax "intended" for the business gets passed on to the consumer, most seriously affecting those on the lower end of economic status.
I'm not buying it. I could just as easily say that my income taxes are "passed on" to my employer in the sense that they have to pay me more than they would otherwise in order to cover that extra amount I have to pay the government.
Anyway, I'm not sure what this has to do with "The 2008 Presidential Race" anymore. :-) There's got to be a "taxes" thread or something we could move this to.
-milt
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Agreed.
It is http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1023.0
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Here is a short podcast audio of Fred Thompson taking on Harry Reid regarding comments and policies in Iraq. Not exactly a fair fight IMO. Besides calling Harry Reid on the carpet, he is obviously practicing his aim for Hillary where the same points would apply. Click the link at Powerline and click play. Just takes a couple of minutes.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/017975.php
For a negative story on Fred Thompson, see George Will from last week: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19140623/site/newsweek/page/2/
Will says Thompson is 99% charm, 1% substance. I disagree. I think it's the opposite. He has been speaking out very frankly on the key issues of the day. Will's only example that Thompson lacks substance:
"Thompson expressed a truly distinctive idea about immigration. Referring to the 1986 amnesty measure that Reagan signed into law, he said: "Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women and children around the world."
Maybe that quote and context is inarticulate or he failed to explain his thought, but I think plenty of people can see a potential connection between unchecked entrances and our next catastrophe.
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http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/2008_republican_presidential_primary
Fred takes the lead from Rudy.
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That page is not opening for me GM. Nonetheless, this is big news.
A friend sent me this:
===============
Someone went through the trouble of summarizing some of Ron Paul
positions. I find it to be an interesting quick read, whether one agrees with the
author or not.
The Conservative Case Against Ron Paul
By John Hawkins
Friday, June 15, 2007
Even though he's not one of the top tier contenders, I thought it might be
worthwhile to go ahead and write a short, but sweet primer that will
explain why so many Republicans have a big problem with Ron Paul. Enjoy!
#1) Ron Paul is a libertarian, not a conservative: I have nothing against
libertarians. To the contrary, I like them and welcome them into the
Republican Party. But, conservatives have even less interest in seeing a
libertarian as the GOP's standard bearer than seeing a moderate as our
party's nominee. In Paul's case, his voting record shows that he is the
least conservative member of Congress running for President on the GOP
side. So, although he is a small government guy, he very poorly represents
conservative opinion on a wide variety of other important issues.
#2) Ron Paul is one of the people spreading the North American Union
conspiracy: If you're so inclined, you can click here for just one example
of Paul talking up a mythical Bush administration merger of the U.S.,
Canada, and Mexico, but you're not missing much if you don't. Reputable
conservatives shouldn't be spreading these crazy conspiracy theories and
the last thing the GOP needs is a conspiracy crank as our nominee in 2008.
#3) Ron Paul encourages "truther" conspiracy nuts: Even though Ron Paul
admits that he does not believe in a 9/11 government conspiracy, he has
been flirting with the wackjobs in the "truther movement," like Alex Jones and
the "Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth." Republican politicians should
either ignore people like them or set them straight, not lend credence to their
bizarre conspiracy theories by acting as if they may have some merit,
which is what Ron Paul has done.
#4) Ron Paul's racial views: From the Houston Chronicle, Texas
congressional candidate Ron Paul's 1992 political newsletter highlighted portrayals of
blacks as inclined toward crime and lacking sense about top political
issues.
Under the headline of "Terrorist Update," for instance, Paul reported on
gang crime in Los Angeles and commented, "If you have ever been robbed by
a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."
Paul, a Republican obstetrician from Surfside, said Wednesday he opposes
racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context
of "current events and statistical reports of the time."
..."Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal
justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black
males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," Paul said.
...He added, "We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a
man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have
been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big,
strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
Paul also asserted that "complex embezzling" is conducted exclusively by
non-blacks. "What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that
it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing
so is racist? Why isn't that true of complex embezzling, which is 100
percent white and Asian?" he wrote."
Ron Paul has since claimed that although these comments were in his
newsletter, under his name, he didn't write them. Is he telling the truth?
Who knows? Either way, those comments don't say much for Paul.
#5) A lot of Ron Paul's supporters are incredibly irritating: There are,
without question, plenty of decent folks who support Ron Paul. However,
for whatever reason, his supporters as a group are far more annoying than
those of all the other candidates put together. It's like every spammer,
truther, troll, and flake on the net got together under one banner to spam polls
and try to annoy everyone into voting for Ron Paul (which is, I must admit, a
novel strategy).
#6) Ron Paul is an isolationist: The last time the United States retreated
to isolationism was after WW1 and the result was WW2. Since then, the
world has become even more interconnected which makes Ron Paul's strategy of
retreating behind the walls of Fortress America even more unworkable than
it was back in the thirties.
#7) Ron Paul wants to immediately cut and run in Iraq: Even if you're an
isolationist like Ron Paul, the reality is that our foreign policy isn't
currently one of isolationism and certain allowances should be made to
deal with that reality. Yet, Paul believes we should immediately retreat from
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and let that entire nation collapse into genocide and
civil war as a result. Maybe, just maybe, Paul's motives are better than those
of liberals like Murtha and Kerry, who want to see us lose a war for
political gain, but the catastrophic results would be exactly the same.
#8) In the single most repulsive moment of the entire Presidential race so
far, Ron Paul excused Al-Qaeda's attack on America with this comment about
9/11: "They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for
10 years."
In other words, America deserved to be attacked by Al-Qaeda.
This is the sort of facile comment you'd expect to hear from an
America-hating left winger like Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky, not from a
Republican running for President -- or from any Republican in office for
that matter. If you want to truly realize how foolish that sort of
thinking is, imagine what the reaction would be if we had bombed Egyptian or
Indonesian civilians after 9/11 and then justified it by saying "We
attacked them because those Muslims have been over here."
#9) Ron Paul is the single, least electable major candidate running for
the presidency in either party: Libertarianism simply is not considered to be
a mainstream political philosophy in the United States by most Americans.
That's why the Libertarian candidate in 2004, Michael Badnarik, only
pulled .3% of the vote. Even more notably, Ron Paul only pulled .47% of the vote
when he ran at the top of the Libertarian ticket in 1988. Granted, Paul
would do considerably better than that if he ran at the top of the
Republican Party ticket, but it's hard to imagine his winning more than,
say 35%, of the national vote and a state or two -- even if he were very
lucky.
In other words, having Ron Paul as the GOP nominee would absolutely
guarantee the Democratic nominee a Reaganesque sweep in the election.
Summary: Is Ron Paul serious about small government, enforcing the
Constitution, and enforcing the borders? Yes, and those are all admirable
qualities. However, he also has a host of enormous flaws that makes him
unqualified to be President and undesirable, even as a Republican
Congressmen.
Mr. Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Conservative Grapevine and
Right Wing News. He also writes a weekly column for Townhall.com and
consults for the Duncan Hunter campaign.
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2007/06/15/the_conservative_case_against_ron_paul
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/06/18/new-stak-attack-does-silky-pony-know-theres-a-war-on/
Roasted Silky Pony, anyone?
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Fred Thompson's Remarks to Policy Exchange in London
By Fred Thompson
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Thank you very much. Charles Moore, Anthony Browne, Dean Godson, distinguished guests: I appreciate the cordial welcome to London. I always look forward to visiting the United Kingdom, and this time around I couldn’t ask for a better host than the Policy Exchange.
We have a few policies back home that we’d like to exchange, and think tanks like this are the place to come. After just five years, the Policy Exchange ranks among the best, and the fine reputation of your work has reached Washington as well. I congratulate all of you, and I thank you for the hospitality.
Your kind invitation brings me here just as Great Britain prepares to greet an incoming prime minister.
Back in the U.S., we’re able to watch the House of Commons’ “Prime Minister’s Question Time,” which Mr. Brown will now endure. I’ve thought that America needed a weekly question and answer period between the President and Congress. But in the past few months I’ve decided it isn’t such a good idea.
Your system also allows a change in the head of government at a moment's notice. Even your general election campaigns are mercifully brief.
Of course we believe in long presidential campaigns in the U.S. Most American politicians are afraid they won’t be considered serious candidates until they’ve made a promise a hundred times and spent a hundred million dollars. Though every now and then you still get some slow-poke who takes his time before announcing.
I congratulate Mr. Brown, and I wish him well as the 53rd prime minister of the United Kingdom. And if you’ll allow me a word about the 52nd … we’ll miss him. There are disputes of party here that are strictly British affairs. But sometimes the better points of statesmen possibly are seen more clearly at a distance.
We are profoundly grateful for the friendship of the British people, and in America we’ll always remember Mr. Blair as a gallant friend, even when it did him no good politically.
When we in the States take the measure of your leaders, their party affiliation doesn’t really count for a whole lot. It’s been this way for a while now, at every moment when it mattered. It was true in the days of Churchill and Roosevelt … of Thatcher and Reagan … and Blair and Bush.
Differences of party and domestic policy are incidental, compared to the bigger considerations that define Britain and America as allies. On both sides of the Atlantic, what matters most are the commitments we share, and the work we are called to do in common. This work is based upon the principles we hold – primarily, the right of free people to govern themselves. We also believe that the rule of law, market economies, property rights, and trade with other nations are the underpinnings of a free society.
When historians of the modern era speak of the great democracies, of civilization and its defenders, that’s us they’re talking about – we and our democratic friends across Europe and beyond.
In the long progress of the world toward liberty, it was not by chance that this lowly province of the Roman Empire became a great teacher of democracy and the model of self-government. And it wasn’t just luck that turned a troublesome British colony into the inspiration for all those who seek freedom. There is a reason why Britain and America were thrown together as partners in this world. The things that unite the American and British peoples? They don’t change with the names of leaders or with the passing of years.
It was Harold MacMillan who best summed up the shared experiences of British and American leaders in the last century. In his later years, Lord Stockton was asked what he considered the greatest challenge in all his years as a statesman. And in that English way, he put it in a word: “Events, my dear boy, events.”
Events often have a way of intruding upon the plans of free people. As a rule, people in democratic societies prefer to take care of the business of life. They raise families. They work and they trade. They create wealth and they share it. Above all in free societies, we live by the law – and, at our best, we look after one another, too. Yet in every generation, “events” can be counted on to change the plan, sometimes in tragic ways.
Often the cause of our grief is a misplaced trust in the good intentions of others. In our dealings with other nations, people in free countries are not the type to go looking for trouble. We tend to extend our good will to other nations, assuming that it will be returned in kind. No matter how clear the signals, sometimes in history even the best of men failed to act in time to prevent the worst from happening.
The United States and the United Kingdom have learned this lesson both ways – in great evils ignored, and in great evils averted. We learned it from a World War that happened and, in the decades afterward, from the World War that didn’t happen.
We must conclude that the greatest test of leadership – in your country or mine, in this time or any other – can be simply stated. We must shape events, and not be left at their mercy. And in all things, to protect ourselves and to assure the peace, the great democracies of the world must stick together. We must be willing to make tough decisions today in order to avert bigger problems tomorrow. We must be prepared to meet threats before threats become tragedies.
These are not considerations relevant only to the people of Great Britain and the United States. The relationship between the United States and all of Europe is valued by both sides and has benefited the world. NATO has not only been an effective tool for our efforts, it symbolizes our commonality.
Changes in leadership on both sides of the Atlantic will give us new opportunities. Often in the history of nations, leaders rise to meet the times. These times require those with the wisdom and courage to see past the next election cycle.
The United States and our European allies must begin to forge a new understanding that matches the times we live in. This must be an understanding based upon candor if we are to come closer to agreement as to the nature of the challenges we face.
I have great hope for such a new understanding among NATO allies. We would never want to look back on a campaign we’d undertaken to realize we’d fallen short for lack of commitment or material support. Today our enemies do not doubt our military strength. They do question our determination. Our efforts will require ongoing dialogue based upon mutual respect and mutual interests.
For many Americans, there is a concern that even among our friends, some people are instinctively uncomfortable with U.S. power. Some on the Continent speak of the need for Europe to balance U.S. influence. Americans worry that this sentiment could, over time, lead to an uncoupling of the alliance. And if constraining U.S. power is that important, would our European friends be comfortable with other powers serving as a counterweight to the United States?
Some who seek to check U.S. power believe that legitimacy may only be conferred by international consensus as represented by the UN Security Council. They ask, “If a country can invade another nation for its own good reasons, what is the logical stopping point?”
The American response is to ask how, then, does one justify non-Security-Council-sanctioned actions, such as Kosovo? What are nations allowed to do when the UN cannot muster the political will to act? How many countries must be involved in an action before legitimacy is conferred? Is it just European countries that count? And, how do we deal with problems in concert when many of us don’t agree on the extent or nature of the problem?
For our part, we in the United States must make a better case for our views and our actions. It is possible that things that are perfectly obvious to us may not be so obvious even to those who wish us well. We must be willing to listen and we must be willing to share our intelligence to the maximum extent appropriate.
We must be prepared to make our case not just privately, but to the people of Europe and the world in order to build political support for cooperation. The world is not stronger if America is weaker – or is perceived to be weaker. The same is true of Britain and truer still of our NATO alliance. And we must be capable of making that case.
In return, it is fair to expect that our allies will not put their trade and commercial interests above world security. It is also fair to ask that Europeans consider the consequences if they are wrong about the threat to the Western world.
Many in Europe simply have a different view from that of the United States as to the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism. They think that the threat is overblown. That despite September 11th, and July 7th and other attacks in Europe and elsewhere, America is the main target and therefore the problem is basically an American one. The fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq at a particular point in time resolves the matter for them. Also, they see no meaningful connection between terrorist groups and countries like Iran.
Admittedly, even some in America think that the threat is overblown, and that if we had not gone into Iraq, we’d have no terrorism problem.
However, most Americans feel differently. We understand that the Western world is in an international struggle with jihadists who see this struggle as part of a conflict that has gone on for centuries, and who won’t give up until Western countries are brought to their knees. I agree with this view. I believe that the forces of civilization must work together with common purpose to defeat the terrorists who for their own twisted purposes have murdered thousands, and who are trying to acquire technology to murder millions more.
When terrorists in their video performances pledge more and bigger attacks to come, against targets in both Europe and America, these are not to be shrugged off as idle boasts. They must be taken at their word.
When the president of Iran shares his nightmare visions before cheering crowds, those are not just the fanatic’s version of an empty applause line. The only safe assumption is that he means it. If we know anything from modern history, it is that when fanatical tyrants pledge to “wipe out” an entire nation, we should listen. We must gather our alliance, and do all in our power to make sure that such men do not gain the capability to carry out their evil ambitions.
Of course, diplomacy is always to be preferred in our dealings with dangerous regimes. But I believe diplomacy, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, is more than “note writing.” The words of our leaders command much closer attention from adversaries when it is understood that we and our allies are prepared to use force when force is necessary.
The campaign in Afghanistan is a prime example of this, both as a largely successful effort against a terrorist state and as a logical extension of the mission of NATO, which now reaches far beyond the boundaries of Europe.
As in Iraq, the effort has involved great sacrifice from the brave sons and daughters of Britain. By their valor, and by the sustained action of NATO in Afghanistan, we have shown our seriousness of purpose against terrorism … an ability to move beyond the military models of Cold War days … and a capacity to shift tactics and technology to fight an enemy who defends no state and observes no code.
Even in the midst of all the divisiveness with regard to our actions in Iraq, the United States, Great Britain and our coalition should be proud of what we have averted. Imagine Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons in power today successfully defying the international community and free to pursue weapons programs.
Of course political realism is back in the ascendancy since the difficulties in Iraq. It’s true that we have learned that geography, history, and ethnicity are important factors to consider in making decisions regarding today’s enemies.
We’ve also been reminded of the importance of preparation, of alliances, and the continuing support of our people.
But that does not change the fact that we sometimes must address events in far-away places that endanger our people. Or that we believe in universal values that do not allow us to ignore wholesale human suffering.
Realism? Yes. But also idealism, which is what makes us different from our enemies.
We should also remember that beyond the War on Terror, there are other threats we must meet together that extend well into the future. One way or another, the challenges we face today will recede. Other challenges to our shared interests and security have not been waiting patiently in line for our attention.
Some cannot yet be seen, but it is obvious that our energy needs for example are not going away. Disruptions in energy supplies, sharp price increases and thuggish behavior by energy suppliers are threats to all democracies with growing economies. Also, rapid military build-ups by non-democratic nations should be of concern.
More and more, if things go wrong in disputes that were once considered just regional problems, there will be no “over there” or “over here.” We’ll all be affected. Globalization is not limited to economic matters. As we go through these perilous times, we must keep firmly in mind the things that bind us together, not disagreements.
We’ve been through a lot together, our two nations – and not just in the storied exploits of our parents’ generation. Though there are many moments in British political history from which leaders today can take instruction, there is one in particular that I’ve always admired in the career of Sir Winston Churchill.
It was when Neville Chamberlain died in November 1940. In memorializing in the House of Commons his longtime adversary, Churchill pronounced the bitter controversies put to rest. He said, quote, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”
In the end, he reflected, “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.” We are “so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.”
Maybe it’s the actor in me that admires this scene so much. It’s a moment that no script-writer could improve upon. I am struck by its spirit, the magnanimity and generosity of the man … the willingness to let old arguments go, and move on to great objectives held in common.
We in this alliance have had our own share of hopes mocked and plans upset. And now it is time to shake off the disappointments, to let go of controversies past, and to press on together toward the great objectives. To ensure security for our people. To be a force for stability in the world. To remain the stalwart friends of freedom.
For our part, we in the United States have never had occasion to doubt the fortitude and faithfulness of the British people. As much as ever, we count ourselves lucky to call the United Kingdom our closest ally, and we are proud to call you our finest friend.
Thank you.
Fred Thompson is an actor and former Senator. His radio commentary airs on the ABC Radio Network and be blogs on The Fred Thompson Report.
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Tough, but vulnerable - a pretty good LA Times article on why Democrats are leaning toward Hillary. I'm just the messenger here; I won't be voting for Hillary.
Excerpt: "Scars can become marks of distinction, and for those assessing her, some of Clinton's darkest White House moments now add to her character. Murphy and others saw her failure to overhaul healthcare less as an indication of flawed political judgment than as valuable preparation for a rematch."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brownstein13jun13,0,2765403.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
The tough, but vulnerable, front-runner
Hillary Clinton's experience puts her on top of the Democratic field, but her own caution could bring her down.
June 13, 2007
Detroit — AFTER WATCHING Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) juggle pointed questions before nearly 1,000 union members here Saturday, it was easy to imagine how she might pull away from her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination. But it was also possible to see how she might stumble on the way.
Clinton's performance at the town hall meeting — part of a series that the AFL-CIO is conducting with the Democratic candidates to help determine whether it will endorse one of them this fall — was solid but not gripping. She sounded expert on some answers but evasive on others. And she didn't erase all doubts. Yet most people in the crowd were impressed — in ways that suggest Clinton's early lead in the polls rests on a solid foundation of confidence in her qualifications.
As the first woman to be a serious contender, Clinton might have confronted skepticism about her credibility as commander in chief, especially during wartime. But that's the dog that hasn't barked in the Democratic race. Primarily because of her years as first lady, it appears Democrats view her as more prepared for the presidency than her (male) rivals.
That's evident in national polls comparing Clinton with her top opponents, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll asked Democrats which candidate was the strongest leader, could best handle a crisis and had the best experience for the presidency. On all three questions, more respondents picked Clinton than Obama and Edwards combined. Women preferred her most, but men also favored her on those tests.
Those personal assessments, more than any policy position, buttressed Clinton's support at the town hall meeting too. Harry Murphy, an African American who organizes for Unite Here, the textile and hotel workers union, said that although Obama "needs to get his feet a little wetter," he believes that Clinton "is tested … [and] already knows the system." Clinton's admirers see her as not only experienced but tough. Margaret McCormick, a teacher who was visiting from Louisville, Ky., liked Edwards' message but was leaning toward Clinton because "when Hillary's backed into a corner, she does not give an inch." Joe Mazzarese, a United Auto Workers organizer, expressed the thought more pungently: "If I was going to get in a fight, even in a war, I'd want her on my side."
Scars can become marks of distinction, and for those assessing her, some of Clinton's darkest White House moments now add to her character. Murphy and others saw her failure to overhaul healthcare less as an indication of flawed political judgment than as valuable preparation for a rematch. Even more striking was this observation from Elaine Crawford, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local that hosted the meeting: After watching Clinton hold her balance during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, she's certain Clinton can manage anything the presidency throws at her. "That was a personal glimpse of how she handled herself under tough personal pressure," Crawford said. "So I wouldn't be afraid of her making those tough decisions for the country."
Clinton also effectively portrayed herself as a fighter for those in need — an argument that resonated especially with the blue-collar women listening. And she benefited from residual good feelings about her husband's presidency among Democrats, drawing applause at almost every reference to the 1990s.
Yet Clinton still excels more at the prose than the poetry of politics; there was more energy in the room when she arrived than when she left. Several in the crowd worried about whether she can win a general election — partly because they doubt that America will elect a woman, but mostly because they fear that Republicans will reprise old scandal allegations against both Clintons.
Some of these activists also questioned whether she (and her husband) sufficiently represent the party's liberal base. Usually that sentiment manifests in skepticism about her stance on Iraq, but here it translated into a barbed question about her service, from 1986 to 1992, on Wal-Mart's board of directors.
The most worrisome sign for Clinton at the meeting was her own caution. Asked whether she would support higher automotive fuel economy standards — an overdue idea that the autoworkers have joined the auto companies in fighting — Clinton implied that she would but never directly answered. Nor, while talking tough on trade, did she ever acknowledge how much the American auto companies' miscalculations have contributed to their decline. Both answers contrasted badly with Obama, who, during a recent Detroit speech, forthrightly endorsed better fuel economy and chastised the companies for building too many cars consumers disdained.
With such timidity, Clinton risks sharpening one of her detractors' best weapons — the charge that calculation, not conviction, is her compass. Front-runners dislike risk, but in her case, the riskiest move may be playing it safe.
Ronald Brownstein, LA Times
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I'm just the messenger here; I won't be voting for Hillary.
Good thing you reassured us! ;)
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WSJ's Political Journal:
Money Talks, Even If It Doesn't Run
In the end he may not run, but New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg certainly roiled political waters yesterday with his announcement he was leaving the Republican Party to register as an Independent.
For the next seven months you can expect a lot of teasing from Team Bloomberg as he evaluates whether or not to run. He will likely make up his mind after the Tsunami Tuesday primaries next Feb. 5, when both major party nominees are likely to be known.
"If John McCain gets beaten to the right -- which is possible in a conservative Republican primary -- and if Democrats elect someone through a primary who Democrats generally view as unelectable, there's a large segment of the American electorate that is looking for something different," Bloomberg strategist Kevin Sheekey told Politico.com last year, in a clear reference to Hillary Clinton as the "unelectable" Democrat. Mr. Sheekey is apparently convinced there are enough alienated voters to make up "36% of the vote in enough states to give you an electoral win." Money, of course, wouldn't be a problem -- Mr. Bloomberg has hinted to friends he could easily spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a presidential race.
In reality, winning a majority of the Electoral College is tricky for an independent under the best of circumstances, a consideration that ultimately may convince Mr. Bloomberg to keep his billions in his pocket. If he does run, whom does he hurt most?
The biggest ding would be to Democrats, who would suddenly find themselves having to defend safe blue territories such as New York and California (86 electoral votes between them). Other states that lean Democratic, such as New Jersey and Connecticut, would also be in play. For their part, Republicans would be forced to compete more intensely in a few states they usually carry, such as Florida (chock full of New York migrants). But it's unlikely Mr. Bloomberg would have much appeal in the South or Midwest GOP strongholds. "How much of a cultural fit can a five-foot, seven-inch culturally liberal Jew from New York City with a Boston accent be in Kansas City?" asks one GOP consultant.
That said, Mr. Bloomberg will no doubt enjoy the next seven months as the entire national press corps speculates on his possible moves and provides him with endless media coverage. Mr. Bloomberg may end up getting all the attention he wants without having to spend his fortune running for president.
-- John Fund
Et Tu, Bloomie?
Yesterday wasn't a good day for GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. First came word that President Bush was appointing former Iowa Congressman Jim Nussle as his new budget director, replacing the retiring Rob Portman. Mr. Nussle had been the top strategist for Mr. Giuliani in the key Iowa caucuses but now will be sidelined from politics.
Then came word that Thomas Ravenel, South Carolina's state treasurer and the campaign chairman for Mr. Giuliani in that key early primary state, has been suspended from office and indicted by a federal grand jury on distribution of cocaine charges.
To top everything off, the surprise move to register as an Independent by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man Mr. Giuliani campaigned for in 2001, couldn't have been good news for Team Rudy. Should Mr. Bloomberg run for president, it is almost certain he would diminish Mr. Guiliani's contention that he could win the White House for the GOP by putting states such as New York into play.
A new Quinnipiac Poll makes it unclear just how much of a chance Mr. Giuliani would have in the state both he and Hillary Clinton call home. It shows Senator Clinton with a solid 52% to 37% lead against Mr. Giuliani in a two-way race. With Mr. Bloomberg thrown into the mix, Mrs. Clinton leads by 43% to 29% with 16% opting for Mr. Bloomberg as an independent. Most ominously, Mr. Bloomberg actually ties Mr. Giuliani among key independent voters -- each man gets 23%.
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Of Tax Cuts and Terror
New York's former mayor makes his case to be Reagan's heir.
BY BRIAN M. CARNEY
Saturday, June 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
"I think the American people in November 2008 are going to select the person they think is strongest to defend America against Islamic terrorism. And it is not going to focus on--as some of the media wants it--just Iraq. I think Americans are smarter than that."
Thus did Rudy Giuliani summarize the rationale for his presidential campaign at a meeting this week with the editorial board of the Journal. Next year's election will be about national security, not about Iraq narrowly defined.
In an hour-long conversation in our offices in lower Manhattan, the former New York City mayor sat facing away from the view of Ground Zero below, but 9/11 was very much in the front of his mind. A few minutes into the interview, he paused midsentence, gestured over his shoulder and looked down at his hands. "Coming down here just fills me with memories," he offered. "I can't come here without thinking about what happened that day."
Mr. Giuliani has been accused of playing the 9/11 card for political gain, and he did not shy from discussing his role after the terrorist attacks on that day and its effect on his worldview. But he defied the caricature of a man who intends to beat the 9/11 drum all the way to the White House.
His views on foreign and domestic policy were cogent and delivered with the take-it-or-leave-it confidence that is as refreshing to his backers as it is infuriating to his opponents, both now and when he was mayor. "Leadership," he told us, "is first figuring out what's right, and then explaining it to people, as opposed to first having people explain to you what's right, and then just saying what they want to hear."
Mr. Giuliani is often referred to as a "moderate" Republican, which is true if it means simply that he doesn't follow the party line on certain issues, such as abortion. But there is very little else about him that qualifies for the label. "I am," he told us, "by all objective measures the most fiscally conservative candidate in the race." On domestic policy, he says he wants to shrink the government's share of the economy and increase the private sector's. Tax rates "should be lower" and our health-care system ought to be "move[d] away from the paternalistic model" that we have now.
This is not big-government conservatism. George W. Bush, he tells us, "was not good on spending," although he adds that Congress wasn't very good on spending, either. "I think that it's one of the primary reasons [the Republicans] lost Congress in 2006."
When it comes to the war on terror, "defending America" means "remaining on offense." More particularly, it means "using the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance and interrogation techniques that are legal but aggressive." Of Guantanamo Bay, he says, "I don't think we should close Guantanamo."
These, then, are the talking points. But in order to discover whether there was more to his national-security credentials than merely being "America's mayor" on 9/11, we pressed him on how a President Giuliani would handle a current foreign-policy crisis such as Iran. His answer revealed a discursive style that was on display throughout the meeting, and which can only be demonstrated by quoting from his reply at some length.
He started by explaining how he understands the problem, before getting around to how it ought to be handled: "Well, I think that if we've learned any lessons from the history of the 20th century, one of the lessons we should learn is [to] stop trying to psychoanalyze people and take them at their word.
"If we had taken Hitler at his word, Stalin at his word, I think we would have made much sounder decisions and saved a lot more lives. I don't know why we have to think that [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad doesn't mean what he says. Therefore, the more cautious, prudent way to react to it is, he means what he says.
"The second thing is . . . we shouldn't be surprised that he's emerged in Iran. Iran has been like that since the Ayatollah took over. So, they are an irresponsible regime."
With that by way of preamble, he answered the question: "America's approach should begin with the clear statement that we will not allow him to become a nuclear power. And everybody should know that, including your allies, that that's not a solution American will tolerate, because it would be too dangerous for us to put nuclear weapons in the hands of people who say the things he says and have done the things they've done."
OK, but it's one thing to say we will "not allow" a nuclear Iran, it's another to be prepared to do something about it. Does not allowing him to become a nuclear power include taking military action against Iran, if necessary? The answer comes quickly: "Whatever is necessary."
So, what are the odds that we can avoid military confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program? "It all depends on their evaluation of the American president. If they think that they have an American president that's going to be ambiguous and worry about this stuff--kind of a John Kerry type who is going to worry what Europe thinks--they're going to be more likely to take advantage of it."
Call it peace through strength. "If," on the other hand, "they believe that an American president will utilize any steps necessary to stop them from becoming nuclear, there is a much better chance that the sanctions will work, because you have leverage--and in a strange way, I think that a much better chance the sanctions will work because our allies, or semi-allies [like Russia and China], will have an incentive for making them work, because they don't want that [military action] to happen."
Asked whether he thinks the Bush administration is doing enough to address the Iranian situation, he says he "probably would prefer somewhat stronger language. What I really want to know is what's the bottom line--and I don't know the answer to that." He argues that, in this case, making the administration's bottom line public and explicit would help bring the Iranians around because they could no longer delude themselves that they might get away with going nuclear without paying a high price.
So much for Iran. How does Mr. Giuliani rate the current administration's handling of Iraq? "The plan for how to stabilize Iraq certainly wasn't a good one. And then there wasn't a quick enough reaction to the facts on the ground that showed you that it wasn't a good one. So I kind of look at that as, if you come into office and it's still there, you've got to try to straighten it out and you have to try to learn from it in the future." He's not a cut-and-run man, in other words.
The current fashion in Iraq war criticism is to say that America can't make any headway unless the Iraqis come to a political accommodation with each other, so America should step aside until that is accomplished. Mr. Giuliani looks at it through the lens of his time as mayor, and believes that America has to provide security before anything like a functioning society or government can emerge.
"Maybe having been a mayor I can see some of this better. By that I mean, if you've got to create a democracy, democracy is only a theory that doesn't mean very much when people live in fear. I used to say that about crime in New York, that the most important civil right is being safe. . . . It doesn't matter if you have other civil rights if you can't go out at night. . . . So if you're going to create an election in Iraq when the infrastructure of that society has crumbled--which means people can't go to work, people can't go out, more people are being killed than used to be the case, right in front of you--then democracy is a theory down the road, but your life has disintegrated. I don't think we saw our responsibility clearly enough at the beginning to keep up the infrastructure of Iraq."
It's too soon to ask any candidate what they would do about Iraq if elected--we know too little about what the state of play will be in January 2009. But when asked what his response is to those Republicans who are concerned that continuing to support the war will cost them seats in the Senate in November 2008, his answer is concise: "I'd tell them that getting this right is much more important than winning Senate seats."
On the home front, it's no surprise that Mr. Giuliani, a law-enforcement man for decades, believes we need the Patriot Act, the NSA wiretapping program and the rest of the war-fighting architecture that has been built up under President Bush. But when you dig a little deeper, Mr. Giuliani, a public servant nearly all of his adult life, sounds a lot more like the CEO president that George Bush was billed as than Mr. Bush has proved to be. He seems to think less in terms of "initiatives" than in terms of quantification, analysis and information. "I'd want an evaluation about how accurate are we [in identifying threats]. Are we 70%, 80%, 90% accurate? Can we sit down, and do we have on paper the leading groups? Do we have the primary actors? Are we evaluating whether our intelligence is improving? How effective are we being in finding them?"
This focus on methods carries more weight coming from Mr. Giuliani because of the results he achieved using it to bring down crime in New York City. Identify the problem, quantify it, isolate it and fight it. He admits that, as a private citizen, he doesn't have enough information about how much of this we're doing right now. But it's illustrative of his way of thinking about problems that what he thinks we need are metrics by which to measure all these things.
Likewise on government reform. He announced in a speech earlier this week that he would plan to replace only half of the 300,000 civil servants due to retire over the next decade. In his visit to the Journal's offices, he said he'd like to see every government agency try to identify ways to be more efficient every year. "You task them with--sort of like [former GE CEO] Jack Welch's approach, to always get rid of the bottom 10%--you task them every year to find 5%, 10% in savings, or 15% or 20% . . . It's to save money, but it's also a discipline that has them going to their agency and figure out what is not efficient--what isn't working. We haven't done that since Reagan."
Mr. Giuliani likes to quantify. In place of a platform, he has 12 "commitments," which he has printed up on a card (they are also on his campaign Web site). He freely admits that, political reality being what it is, he would consider it a victory to "achieve seven or eight of them."
Mr. Giuliani invoked Ronald Reagan's name repeatedly, and always as a model. There is an element of political calculation in that--Mr. Giuliani is trying to reassure the so-called cultural conservatives that if they liked Reagan, they'll love Rudy. But can he overcome the perception that he's a culturally liberal, pro-choice New Yorker who's to the left of his own party on a number of issues? He says that his differences with the party on cultural issues are "sometimes exaggerated for political purposes."
On Roe v. Wade, he says, astutely, "I don't answer that because I wouldn't want a judge to have to answer that. I don't consider it a litmus test." But he may give the pro-life crowd jitters when he adds, "I think a conservative strict constructionist judge could come to either conclusion." He suggests that the real test should be intellectual honesty, and to that end he cites D.C. Circuit Appeals Court Judge Larry Silberman's recent opinion on the Second Amendment, affirming a constitutional right to bear arms. This is a nice piece of political turnabout--to respond to a question about his stance on abortion by citing favorably the most important pro-gun-rights decision in recent history.
To return to the subject at hand, we ask him who on the Supreme Court now meets his standards for intellectual honesty. "[Samuel] Alito, [John] Roberts--I would have appointed either one of them," he offers. He's said as much before. But he continues: "[Antonin] Scalia clearly does [meet the standard], and [Clarence] Thomas. I would have appointed any one of the four of them."
Speaking of justice, Mr. Giuliani has been more circumspect than some of his rivals on whether he would pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. And he repeated again that he wouldn't pardon Mr. Libby "right now." On the other hand, Mr. Giuliani advanced a pretty good argument that he should never have been tried. "Perjury has to be material--it has to relate to what you're investigating," he offered. "If someone goes in front of a grand jury and tells a lie about an insignificant fact, it's a lie but it isn't perjury. There's all kinds of lying that isn't criminal . . . If the investigation is about a non-crime, when you know who did it, how could anything be material to it?" That sounds an awful lot like an argument for a pardon, even if Mr. Giuliani seems to think the time may not be right.
There's no denying that Mr. Giuliani's campaign is built around the war on terror--or, as he prefers to call it, "the terrorists' war on us." He views the 2008 election as a turning point in the conflict, and, naturally, thinks he's the man to steer things in the right direction.
"I think that the president we elect in 2008 will determine how long it takes to prevail against the terrorists," Mr. Giuliani says. "If you select somebody that is going to go back on defense, it's going to take a much longer time and there are going to be more casualties. If you select a president that's going to remain on offense, and even improve on it, it isn't going to be easy, but it's going to mean less casualties, faster." It's not an easy or comforting message, but Mr. Giuliani is not in the comforting business. Whether it's a message the country wants to hear is something the voters will let us know.
Mr. Carney is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. A full transcript of the interview is available here.
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Political Journal of the WSJ:
Goon Squad
The Democratic Party oak has grown, in part, from Acorn, a feisty, union-backed activist group that last year registered 600,000 low-income and minority voters and helped propel Democrats to victory in several states. Today, in recognition of Acorn's power, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich are attending the group's presidential forum in Philadelphia.
You'd think Acorn's shadowy methods, which last year led four of its Kansas City, Mo. workers to be indicted and plead guilty to submitting false voter registrations, would give Democratic candidates pause. But instead the Senate Judiciary Committee has gone into overdrive to hold oversight hearings questioning the Bush Justice Department's decision to file the indictments just before the 2004 election.
Regardless of the timing of Justice's decision, something is clearly rotten with Acorn. Prosecutors in King County, Washington (Seattle) may soon charge Acorn workers in another voter registration scandal in 2006. The group also engaged in questionable practices during the state's disputed 2004 governor's race, which was finally awarded to the Democrat by just 139 votes -- far fewer than the number of votes proven to have been cast illegally.
Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for King County's prosecutor, said a decision on an indictment should come this month. "We're dealing with possible criminal charges with regard to fraudulent registrations," he told McClatchy Newspapers. Several Acorn employees apparently filled out multiple registration forms in similar handwriting. After suspicions were raised, King County elections workers sampled 400 of the Acorn registrations. According to McClatchy: "Only two had valid phone numbers, and in both cases the people reached by phone had not done the registrations, elections staffers said."
The case has even prompted mild-mannered Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed to urge action. Last October, he contacted the King County Prosecutor by email and called attention to the voter-registration violations: "Many cases, like this, have been referred to Prosecutors and ignored. I'd appreciate it if you would have your office go after this. We need to show that we're tough on voter fraud. Right?" The next day, Mr. Reed sent another email to the state's elections director pressing his case: "We need some good examples of being touch (sic) on voter fraud to help regain some confidence and trust in the system."
For his part, Acorn leader Wade Rathke dismisses criticism of his group's activities as "major league political harassment . . . crazy words." Today, he will be lining up his troops as Hillary Clinton gives marching orders on how the left can win the 2008 election. Here's hoping that someone keeps an eye on Acorn as it prepares yet another blitzkrieg electoral effort next year.
-- John Fund
Dogged
Mitt Romney finds himself engaged in crisis management over a previous episode of crisis management. As described last week in a Boston Globe profile, Mr. Romney demonstrated his leadership skills by placing Seamus, the family dog, in a cage and strapping it to the roof of the Romney station wagon for a 1983 family vacation to Ontario. When Seamus committed a mishap that dribbled down over the car windows, Mr. Romney calmly paused and hosed the car down before proceeding with the trip, according to the Globe's account.
At a campaign stop in Pittsburgh last Thursday, Mr. Romney tackled the swelling controversy head-on, telling an audience that Seamus "enjoyed" riding atop the car and "scrambled up there every time we went on trips." He added: "PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air."
PETA, otherwise known as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had accused the former Massachusetts governor of dog "torture." Bloggers also have latched onto the story. Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox adjudicates: "The details of the event are more than unseemly -- they may, in fact, be illegal."
Mr. Romney's campaign probably will not mind the media preoccupation with Seamus if it causes reporters to overlook his forthcoming fundraising results. The campaign quietly told supporters last week to expect his second-quarter numbers to show a decline when released in the next few days. Mr. Romney whupped the Republican field during the first quarter, but attributed the latest drop to more days spent on the campaign trail in the second-quarter. He also let supporters know he had dipped into his own riches to write another multi-million-dollar check to his own campaign. That howl you're hearing from Romney headquarters may have more to do with the polls and cost of campaigning than with media fascination with Seamus-gate.
-- Taylor Buley
Adios, Amigos
This past weekend, every major Democratic candidate attended a gathering sponsored by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials for a Democratic presidential candidate forum. And the Republican forum? Cancelled. Only Rep. Duncan Hunter of California agreed to show.
The move is one of many recent Republican maneuverings to distance themselves from an appearance of having a weak stance on the immigration issue. Blame the techo-populists of talk radio and the blogosphere who sunk the Senate's immigration bill. Sens. Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, for example, recently voted to kill the bill that they themselves had co-authored.
"The Republican candidates have blown off Hispanics in Florida," noted state Rep. Juan Zapata, a Republican who helped bring the NALEO event to the state. Added state Rep. Julio Robaina, also a Republican: "I'm somewhat offended because this is about Hispanics, not about politics."
True, NALEO may be a predominantly pro-big government organization, but Republican Hispanophobia is a major miscalculation. The event is the nation's largest gathering of Hispanic elected officials, local party representatives and event organizers. Not to mention it was held at the all-American venue of Walt Disney World. Meanwhile, the GOP abandoned the field to a parade of Democratic hopefuls, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, who decried the idea of a border fence ("crazy!" said Mr. Edwards) -- and implied at every opportunity that the GOP was simply anti-Hispanic.
John Bueno, NALEO's outgoing president, told National Public Radio: "Latino voters are getting smarter, they're getting more organized and there's going to be repercussions, I think, coming form the Latino voters for elected officials that are not listening to them."
-- Taylor Buley
Quote of the Day
"[An] epic moment in Democratic politics came May 21 when Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist signed legislation moving the Sunshine State's presidential primary to next Jan. 29.... Florida has put virtually all Democrats not named Hillary in a difficult spot. Because the Democratic vote in Florida is concentrated in just four major media markets (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Tampa-St. Petersburg), a full-scale primary campaign in the state can be waged for as little as $7 million, which is less than Howard Dean spent on the 2004 Iowa caucuses. But it will be difficult for any Democrat to compete with Clinton in Florida -- even Barack Obama, who may be able to outspend her -- because of her strengths among older and Jewish voters, two demographic groups that tend to vote heavily in Florida primaries" -- Walter Shapiro, Washington bureau chief for Salon.com.
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Congressman Ron Paul wasn't invited to a Des Moines forum on Saturday of GOP presidential candidates sponsored by Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance. No matter: The Texas Republican decided to hold his own gathering in the hall next door, in the same building as the exclusionary event. "They choose not to invite us to some of their parties, but we threw a bigger and happier party," Mr. Paul told 500 fans, an impressive turnout in Iowa and about equal the number of attendees at the GOP debate.
Mr. Paul's name is often excluded from campaign polls despite what appears to be widespread support from the techno-right. He's the only candidate listed among the top searches on Technorati.com, and often beats out Paris Hilton as the most talked about topic on the blogosphere. Rumors also suggest that when this quarter's fund-raising totals are announced, he may have pulled in $4 million -- a lot more than some bigger-name Republicans in the race.
In excluding Mr. Paul, Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Christian Alliance excluded a candidate who shares many of their positions and who stirs up genuine thoughtful interest in audiences. But then the entire presidential effort of the two Iowa conservative groups hardly covered itself in glory. The organized debate was further diminished when Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson all declined to participate. All in all, Iowa is rapidly losing political significance, a development sped along by the decisions of puffed-up groups like the sponsors of Saturday's presidential forum.
Political Journal of the WSJ
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Newt sketches out a campaign theme:
Sarkozy's Lesson for America
Washington Post July 5 2007
Newt Gingrich
The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we've been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing.
Two books guide my thoughts these days. One is "Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century," by the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The second is American: "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," by Amity Shlaes. Together they form a map for the crossroads.
Start with the will to change. Most American politicians have lost that. Or, if they have it, they are hostage to advisers who don't have the will to change.
France has a reputation as a country averse to change. But President Sarkozy translated his general exhortation about the need to change and the importance of work into a simple and direct policy proposal: All overtime will be tax-free.
Sarkozy had the courage to campaign on the theme that "the French will have to work harder." Imagine trying to get that past an American campaign consultant. In effect, he repudiated the French left's passion for income transfer and trumped it with a passion for pursuing happiness.
The elites hated that repudiation, but it won the French election. France proves change is possible in a country whose special interests are even more entrenched than ours are.
And what about the second part of the challenge -- knowing what should be done? The great lesson of the past six years is that it is impossible to solve America's problems within the failed reactionary bureaucracies and redistributionist policies of the left.
Republicans were punished in 2006 for their own failure to run the system effectively. They were also punished for failing to develop a new system -- that is, to push for a Sarkozy-scale disruption of the old order. They didn't really even know what was wrong.
Citizens had to choose between a left enthusiastically raising taxes to run failing bureaucracies and a right passively attempting to avoid tax increases while bureaucracies decay and policies fail around it.
But there is a more powerful alternative to this. It could be very popular and economically effective. It is a return to the old liberalism that was so important in America before the New Deal. This is a liberalism we share with Britain: Whig-style free-market liberalism.
The "forgotten man" was a term coined by a great conservative pro-market, pro-growth professor named William Graham Sumner. In an 1883 essay, he asserted: "As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine . . . what A, B, and C shall do for X."
Sumner wanted to know about C, the one he called "the forgotten man." As Shlaes explains, "[t]here was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C, his forgotten man, to the cause." Sumner wrote of the forgotten man: "He works, he votes, generally he prays -- but he always pays -- yes, above all, he pays."
Much like Sarkozy today, Sumner wanted to center society's policies on making that productive person more productive. He understood that a social contract that encouraged work led to a brighter future. But the meaning of that phrase forgotten man changed, as Shlaes demonstrates.
Franklin D. Roosevelt bought out constituencies in 1935 and 1936, spending billions on popular projects that created jobs. Nineteen thirty-six was the first peacetime year that the federal government was larger than state and local governments combined -- and it set a trend. The Depression was real, but it also was a pretext for this action.
By helping his groups of forgotten men, Roosevelt created another forgotten man, the individual left out by the groups. That forgotten man was the forgotten man of productivity, not redistributionist pity.
Shlaes's book is historical -- she is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But the implication for today is that the interest groups are the problem. This is where we must begin -- and get back to the individual.
Washington now is like the corrupt Tory England that the Whigs reformed. Whig liberalism brought growth. Our own Jeffersonian forerunners, the Founding Fathers, also rejected the Crown and understood the importance of small government.
Sarkozy shows us how a courageous leader could translate Shlaes's call to liberalism into the boldest campaign in our lifetime.
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Richard Viguerie goes after Fred Thompson as a phony conservative:
http://www.conservativesbetrayed.com/gw3/articles-latestnews/articles.php?CMSArticleID=1827&CMSCategoryID=19
Extensive interview with Ron Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
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Why isn't Clinton going after hedge funds? Well because they are big donors and they got Chelsea a job:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-04-clinton-job_x.htm?csp=34
The conflicts of interests just never ends:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DickMorrisandEileenMcGann/2007/07/14/is_hillary_hedging_on_hedge_funds
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I'm second to few in my loathing for the Clintons, but is Morris here avoiding mentioning the concept of the Capital Gains tax? Is he suggesting the individual cap gains should be taxed at the same rate as income?!? Does anyone know what rate corporations pay on cap gains?
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Replying to a couple of recent posts here:
"Is he (Dick Morris) suggesting the individual cap gains should be taxed at the same rate as income?!?" - I think he is comparing her to the further left positions of Obama and Edwards. Also, I think 50 states tax capital gains same as ordinary income (a crime IMO); the states were laughing to the bank when the fed rate was cut.
"Does anyone know what rate corporations pay on cap gains?" - 35% vs. 15% individual: http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/kerpen200604110850.asp
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Commenting on the Richard Viguerie piece attacking Fred Thompson as no conservative leader:
First evidence shown is his former support for McCain Feingold, terrible legislation. He now agrees at least parts of that were a mistake. To me that was already the biggest issue that I disagree with Fred on, so the criticism provides no new light and skips intentionally the fact that he has had second thoughts.
Viguerie admits Thompson is more conservative than Giuliani, McCain or Romney. From a conservative point of view, isn't that the point. He goes on to show how Thompson with his moderate friends can't be painted into a far-right corner. Isn't that the rest of the point - winning.
Thompson isn't pro-life enough? He's running against Giuliani - prochoice. Then against Hillary Clinton most likely. The President's role in this is to appoint good justices. Seems to me both Giuliani and Thompson would do that. Thompson played a leading role with the John Roberts confirmation.
A ho-hum career in the senate. Yes, each vote can be picked apart. Likewise for Hillary and Obama. Great senators have different skills and strengths than great Presidents. Thompson didn't find a permanent place for himself in the senate even though he could have easily won another term. At 8 years he is still on par with his likely opponents.
I noticed the anti-Thompson opinions have picked up since both Rasmussen and Zogby show Thompson slightly edging Giuliani in their latest polls. All before announcing. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/republican_presidential_nomination-192.html
I find that Thompson has quite a gift for expressing conservative views unapologetically. Viguerie says he doesn't have prominent conservatives in his inner circle. In that case, like Reagan, it must be Thompson himself writing his own very clearly articulated conservative views.
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Notes the dates of this interview with RP:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OenXhQvgYwo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPOo2-Ywges&watch_response
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Of course the NY Times is always a suspect source, but here is a longish piece on Giuliani and his time as mayor of NY with regard to race relations:
===================
Giuliani and Race; NY Times
Those were grim days for race relations in New York City, the early 1990s. There were nearly 2,000 murders each year, blacks and whites died in high-profile racial killings, and a riot held a divided Brooklyn neighborhood in thrall for three dangerous nights.
The Long Run
The Race Factor
This is the first article in a series on the lives and careers of the 2008 presidential contenders.
On Jan. 9, 1994, another match landed in this tinderbox: a caller reported a burglary at a Harlem mosque. The police ran in, and Nation of Islam guards threw punches and broke an officer’s nose.
The mosque’s minister, accompanied by the Rev. Al Sharpton, drove downtown to register their outrage with the police commissioner, a street theater ritual grudgingly tolerated by past mayors.
Except the new mayor — Rudolph W. Giuliani, fresh off his November victory over the city’s first black mayor, David N. Dinkins — decreed that no one would meet with Mr. Sharpton. No more antics, no more provocations.
“I’ve taken a golden opportunity to act like a sensible mayor rather than a mayor who will be moved in any direction,” he said. “I’m an observer of the last 10 years of this city, and I hope to God we don’t continue in that direction.”
More than any other Republican running for president, Mr. Giuliani has confronted the question of race, that most torturous of American legacies.
His 1993 mayoral campaign slogan, often repeated, of “one city, one standard,” emphasized his view that no ethnic or racial group should expect special treatment. And he spoke with a stunning bluntness about what he saw as the failings of the city’s black leadership.
His handling of the mosque fracas set the tone. In the years to come, Mr. Giuliani would rebuff not just the histrionic Mr. Sharpton but nearly every high-ranking black official in the city, even those of moderate politics: congressmen, a state comptroller, influential ministers.
But grabbing hold of the race dial proved easier than turning it to his will.
“I never thought Rudy Giuliani was a racist,” said Fran Reiter, one of Mr. Giuliani’s deputy mayors. “But he was obsessed with the notion there were certain groups he couldn’t win over. And he wasn’t even going to try.”
Black leaders, Mr. Giuliani said in 1994, had to “learn how to discipline themselves in the way in which they speak” if they expected to chat with him. The city’s welfare-state philosophy, he said later, was racist and “enslaved” black New Yorkers.
“We in this city went through years and years of subdividing people, and that became the most important thing, the subdivision people belonged to,” Mr. Giuliani said.
Certainly he knew such words resonated with white voters who formed the backbone of his electoral coalition. What is less certain is whether a man raised and schooled in a white world understood the force with which his harshest words rained down on black New Yorkers.
New York City is 45 percent white and 27 percent black, according to 2000 Census figures.
“He was not patronizing, he was not naïve and I admired that,” said Michael Meyers, president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, who once advised him. “But he could play on the edge of old racial antipathies.”
Mr. Giuliani’s policies, too, stirred anger. His decision to drive down the welfare rolls by cutting benefits and tightening eligibility standards and his deep cuts in social agencies infuriated many. Black voters applauded the drop in crime, but rough police tactics often inflamed tensions.
Mr. Giuliani did not respond to repeated requests made in the last few weeks to discuss his views on race.
Mr. Giuliani, aides say, found a city in the early 1990s where most of the departments affecting the lives of black New Yorkers from schools to welfare to public safety were dysfunctional. Too many citizens expected government to coddle them, and too many black leaders, said Peter Powers, one of Mr. Giuliani’s oldest friends and his first deputy mayor, were afraid to work publicly with a white Republican mayor.
So Mr. Giuliani was intent on marginalizing these critics — even if he had to shun much of the black establishment. Mr. Powers said: “You are talking about some of the people who had been around for a while. Maybe we thought someone else deserved that role.”
Perhaps. But black leaders say Mr. Giuliani, in declining to talk with them, succeeded in isolating himself.
“He just drew a line and said, ‘Anyone who represents the black community, all of the elected officials, are irresponsible and I won’t meet with you,’ ” said former State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, a black Democrat who had a long record of building alliances with whites. “If you’re the leader of the city, you really can’t justify that.”
Good Will, Evaporated
It is one of the more intriguing “what ifs” in city politics. In 1989, a Republican adviser leaned across a lunch table and put this proposition to Bill Lynch, a liberal graybeard: Would Mr. Lynch, who is black, consider working in the mayoral campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani?
That was not so incongruous an offer as it sounds now. Many saw the incumbent, Mayor Edward I. Koch, then seeking a fourth term, as a racially divisive figure.
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Page 2 of 4)
“They thought Rudy could form a winning black-white Catholic coalition,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “They figured if they could attract someone like me, they could pull African-American voters because Koch was anathema to blacks.”
Mr. Giuliani gave a fiery speech in 1992 to hundreds of rowdy police officers who were protesting Mayor Dinkins's policies.
The Long Run
The Race Factor
This is the first article in a series on the lives and careers of the 2008 presidential contenders.
Mr. Lynch instead managed the campaign of Mr. Dinkins, who upset Mr. Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary.
The Giuliani of this period was longer on ambition than fixed views. He was liberal on homelessness and attacked Mr. Koch for calling Mr. Dinkins “a Jesse Jackson Democrat.” These, he said, were racial “code words.”
Some nights Mr. Giuliani went to Bushwick and Brownsville, neighborhoods ravaged by crack, talking to men and women trapped behind triple-locked apartment doors.
“He was trying to learn, in a very linear way, the way that poor people live,” recalled one guide, Michael Gecan, an organizer with East Brooklyn Congregations, a church-based community organizing group.
Mr. Giuliani was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on May 28, 1944. When he was 7, his family became part of the postwar migration to Long Island, eventually settling in North Bellmore, which was 99.7 percent white. He would return to the city to attend Bishop Loughlin High School and Manhattan College, schools that were 99 percent white. He became a passionate Democrat, devoted to John and Robert Kennedy as the civil rights struggle dominated the news.
“What we saw on television horrified us,” Mr. Powers recalled of the battle against Jim Crow laws. “When people kind of suggest, ‘You’re a bunch of white guys,’ it’s as if we didn’t live through America at that time. That’s ludicrous.”
As a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, Mr. Giuliani worked with black ministers to jail corrupt police officers and invited Mr. Sharpton to talk about the plague of crack. “He was not an ideologue, and he had no problem meeting,” Mr. Sharpton said. “Let me tell you, I was a lot more radical then.”
By early 1989, New York magazine wrote of Mr. Giuliani, “He is perhaps the only white politician in town who draws a positive emotional response — hugs and cheers — in Harlem.”
Most of that good will evaporated in the heat of the campaign. Mr. Dinkins became the Democratic nominee; his candidacy was laden with black aspiration and the promise of racial peace. Mr. Giuliani steered right and attacked hard.
When Mr. Dinkins called Mr. Giuliani, who served in the Justice Department, a “Reagan Republican,” he fired back. His campaign ran an ad in a Jewish newspaper with a photo of Mr. Dinkins and Mr. Jackson, a year after Mr. Jackson made a comment widely seen as anti-Semitic. Mr. Giuliani began calling Mr. Dinkins “a Jesse Jackson Democrat.”
Mr. Giuliani lost in 1989 and did not stop running until the next election was over. His political task seemed clear. He could not count on peeling black votes from a black mayor. So he cultivated Jews, ethnic whites and the Hispanic middle class.
With New York pitched into deep recession, its descent hastened by crack and racial disturbances, a campaign riven by race seemed inevitable. “There were people in his camp pushing him hard to tie race to crime,” said Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union who once advised Mr. Giuliani. “I don’t know if this was moral or practical, but Giuliani was having none of it,” Mr. Siegal recalled. “He was insistent that crime was about behavior, not race.”
Still, Mr. Giuliani took a fateful step that would for years prompt questions about his racial sensitivities. In September 1992, he spoke to a rally of police officers protesting Mr. Dinkins’s proposal for a civilian board to review police misconduct.
It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty officers drank heavily, and a few waved signs like “Dump the Washroom Attendant,” a reference to Mr. Dinkins. A block away from City Hall, Mr. Giuliani gave a fiery address, twice calling Mr. Dinkins’s proposal “bullshit.” The crowd cheered. Mr. Giuliani was jubilant.
“If you’re acculturated to like cops, you don’t necessarily see 10,000 white guys who don’t vote in the city, don’t write political checks and love you for the wrong reason,” an aide said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is working with the Giuliani presidential campaign.
Mr. Dinkins has not forgotten that sea of angry cops. “Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot,” Mr. Dinkins said in a recent interview.
Mr. Giuliani said he never saw racist signs. “One of the reasons those police officers might have lost control is that we have a mayor who invites riots,” he said at the time. The Giuliani campaign later conducted a “vulnerability study” to identify their candidate’s weaknesses in 1993. This study, obtained by Wayne Barrett, author of “Rudy!” — an investigative biography — offers an unsparing critique: “Giuliani’s shrieking performance at the cop rally may be his greatest political liability this year. Giuliani has yet to admonish those who attacked the mayor with racist code words on signs and banners. Why not?”
Tough Approach on Crime
=============
Page 3 of 4)
Determined to assault the liberal trenches, Mr. Giuliani never blanched at giving offense. He lopped the welfare rolls by 500,000, laid off thousands of black political appointees seen as too liberal and hired hundreds of more conservative whites seen as loyal to his political agenda. And he sent two schools chancellors — one black, one Hispanic — spinning out of town.
In 1995, he proposed cutting welfare benefits, and suggested that many of the poor might profitably leave town. “A natural consequence of a reduction in benefits might very well be that that would happen,” Mr. Giuliani said, adding, “That would be a good thing.”
Mr. Giuliani has written in his book “Leadership” about his belief in the cleansing power of confrontational words. Nor is he enamored of compromise. Asked in 2000 about reaching out to black leaders, he shook his head and said, “What happens when you engage in the dialogue is, you compromise.”
Yet at first, he made inroads into the black community. He endorsed Democratic Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in 1994, which won him applause in black churches. He tackled the sensitive business of removing from 125th Street, Harlem’s shopping strip, the street peddlers who drove many black merchants to distraction.
Izak-El M. Pasha, the imam of the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque, ignored other black leaders and helped the mayor with the peddlers.
“Church leaders tried to tell me ‘Man, you can’t be meeting with Giuliani!’ ” said Mr. Pasha, who struck up a friendship with the mayor. “I didn’t care. If you’re not willing to accept he has a strong personality, you have a problem.”
A record plunge in homicides earned the mayor a larger measure of good will. Black New Yorkers appreciated safer neighborhoods and applauded that thousands more of their young men remained alive.
“Rudy’s gift is that he could identify with people who felt trapped by crime,” Mr. Meyers said.
By 1997, Mr. Giuliani’s job approval rating in the black community stood at 42 percent, according to a New York Times poll.
But within these victories lay the seed of a problem. Even as crime dropped by 60 percent, officers with the street crime unit stopped and frisked 16 black males for every one who was arrested, according to a report by the state attorney general. Then came three terrible episodes that raised a pointed question for black New Yorkers: Was crime reduction worth any cost?
One hot night in August 1997, police officers grabbed Abner Louima, a black security guard, during a tussle in Flatbush. Mr. Louima exited a precinct house bleeding after officers jammed a broken broomstick into his rectum and his mouth.
Mr. Giuliani, who was running for re-election, was eloquent in his disgust. “These charges are shocking to any decent human being,” he said.
He created a task force to examine police-community relations, and invited adversaries to join. But Mr. Giuliani swamped his Democratic opponent that November. When his task force released a report the next March, Mr. Giuliani belittled its findings as “making very little sense.”
He endorsed just one suggestion, to change a deputy commissioner’s title. “We can change it from ‘affairs’ to ‘relations,’ ” Mr. Giuliani said.
Two police shootings of unarmed black men followed, one death upon another. In February 1999, the police fired 41 bullets at Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant. They said they thought he was reaching for a gun; he was trying to pull out his wallet. A year later, an undercover officer sidled up to Patrick Dorismond, an off-duty security guard, and asked to buy marijuana. Mr. Dorismond took offense; punches flew. Another undercover officer shot him.
Mayor Giuliani released the dead man’s juvenile arrest record. Mr. Dorismond, he said, was no “altar boy.” In fact, he had been an altar boy at a Brooklyn church.
There were marches and a civil disobedience campaign — Mr. Dinkins and Representative Charles B. Rangel were arrested. Mr. Powers, the mayor’s friend, said Mr. Giuliani fell victim to racial provocateurs and an amnesiac city. “A lot of the people in the minority community forgot all the good he did in lowering crime,” he said. “Rudy got demonized.”
With the city perched on edge, the mayor asked to meet with the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood of St. Paul Community Baptist Church. Once they had talked often; Mr. Youngblood, who is black, accompanied Mr. Giuliani on those long-ago trips to Bushwick apartments. But Mr. Giuliani had not taken his calls in years.
==============
Page 4 of 4)
Mr. Youngblood is a leader in East Brooklyn Congregations, an organizing group that prides itself on a cool-eyed view of power. Unhappy with Mr. Giuliani but willing to talk, a half-dozen ministers trooped to City Hall, where they found an angry but chastened mayor.
“We said: ‘We don’t do photo ops,’ ” Mr. Youngblood recalled. “ ‘You must apologize to the Dorismond family.’ ”
Mr. Giuliani turned sharply.
“You don’t understand,” two ministers recall Mr. Giuliani saying. “I have to visit the families of police officers who are shot.”
A minister replied: “Yes, Mr. Mayor, but we have to funeralize the people they shoot. You are not alone, O.K.?”
Mr. Giuliani later expressed regret without precisely apologizing. His approval rating among blacks had fallen to 7 percent by April 2000, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
A Damaged Agenda
The question lingers in conversation with black officials: Did Mr. Giuliani have a black problem, or did blacks just not get him?
He dueled with no end of white officials. Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, a fellow Republican? He’s “running a protection racket.” Gov. George E. Pataki? “Needs his head examined.” The Manhattan borough president, Ruth W. Messinger? She has “really jerky” ideas.
But Ms. Reiter, the former deputy mayor, said a mayor could not assume words register the same for every group. “One city, one standard is fine but unrealistic,” she said. “There are groups, for reasons of history, treated differently, and it happens every day.” Ignore that, she says, and a leader risks tone-deafness.
In the summer of 1999, Mr. Giuliani attended an Urban League fund-raiser at the Sheraton in Manhattan. He strode through the ballroom as though leaning into a strong wind.
“I want to apologize for leaving early,” he said. “It’s very, very hard for me to get a cab.” The ballroom fell silent. Then he went fishing for laughs, and found none. “You think I’m kidding? Have you ever tried to hail a cab in New York?”
He seemed unaware that many in this audience knew perfectly well what it was to hail a taxi that would not stop.
The city did not boil over on Mr. Giuliani’s watch; neither did it unite behind him.
But Mr. Sharpton, whose hand was behind most anti-Giuliani demonstrations, boycotts and attempted embarrassments, said Mr. Giuliani damaged his own agenda by failing to cultivate black allies.
“Rudy wanted to send a message that he wasn’t going to talk with the bad guys,” he said, referring to himself. “Well, guess what? The good guys couldn’t emerge because he wouldn’t talk to them either.”
Save for immigration, Mr. Giuliani rarely fields questions about race on the campaign trail. Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have clamored to hear about 9/11 and terror; a few of Mr. Giuliani’s supporters discuss Mr. Sharpton, mainly as a punch line.
But in a general election, Mr. Giuliani might have to answer questions about his ability to work with black leaders. “His old racial rhetoric could turn off suburban voters,” notes Henry Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant.
Mr. Giuliani asserts that black people are not mysterious to him, even if they find him a puzzle.
“In the case of the African-American community, I understand it really well,” he told a black editorial writer at The Daily News in 1999. “There’s no point trying to educate people that I’m not a racist any more than I’m not a criminal.”
If people can’t figure me out, he added, “that’s their problem.”
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Second post of the morning:
The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-
Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
NY Times
Published: July 22, 2007
Whipping westward across Manhattan in a limousine sent by Comedy Central's
"Daily Show," Ron Paul, the 10-term Texas congressman and long-shot
Republican presidential candidate, is being briefed. Paul has only the most
tenuous familiarity with Comedy Central. He has never heard of "The Daily
Show." His press secretary, Jesse Benton, is trying to explain who its host,
Jon Stewart, is. "He's an affable gentleman," Benton says, "and he's very
smart. What I'm getting from the pre-interview is, he's sympathetic."
Paul nods.
"GQ wants to profile you on Thursday," Benton continues. "I think it's worth
doing."
"GTU?" the candidate replies.
"GQ. It's a men's magazine."
"Don't know much about that," Paul says.
Thin to the point of gauntness, polite to the point of daintiness, Ron Paul
is a 71-year-old great-grandfather, a small-town doctor, a self-educated
policy intellectual and a formidable stander on constitutional principle. In
normal times, Paul might be - indeed, has been - the kind of person who is
summoned onto cable television around April 15 to ventilate about whether
the federal income tax violates the Constitution. But Paul has in recent
weeks become a sensation in magazines he doesn't read, on Web sites he has
never visited and on television shows he has never watched.
Alone among Republican candidates for the presidency, Paul has always
opposed the Iraq war. He blames "a dozen or two neocons who got control of
our foreign policy," chief among them Vice President Dick Cheney and the
former Bush advisers Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, for the debacle. On
the assumption that a bad situation could get worse if the war spreads into
Iran, he has a simple plan. It is: "Just leave." During a May debate in
South Carolina, he suggested the 9/11 attacks could be attributed to United
States policy. "Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?" he
asked, referring to one of Osama bin Laden's communiqués. "They attack us
because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years."
Rudolph Giuliani reacted by demanding a retraction, drawing gales of
applause from the audience. But the incident helped Paul too. Overnight, he
became the country's most conspicuous antiwar Republican.
Paul's opposition to the war in Iraq did not come out of nowhere. He was
against the first gulf war, the war in Kosovo and the Iraq Liberation Act of
1998, which he called a "declaration of virtual war." Although he voted
after Sept. 11 to approve the use of force in Afghanistan and spend $40
billion in emergency appropriations, he has sounded less thrilled with those
votes as time has passed. "I voted for the authority and the money," he now
says. "I thought it was misused."
There is something homespun about Paul, reminiscent of "Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington." He communicates with his constituents through birthday cards,
August barbecues and the cookbooks his wife puts together every election
season, which mix photos of grandchildren, Gospel passages and neighbors'
recipes for Velveeta cheese fudge and Cherry Coke salad. He is listed in the
phone book, and his constituents call him at home. But there is also
something cosmopolitan and radical about him; his speeches can bring to mind
the World Social Forum or the French international-affairs periodical Le
Monde Diplomatique. Paul is surely the only congressman who would cite the
assertion of the left-leaning Chennai-based daily The Hindu that "the world
is being asked today, in reality, to side with the U.S. as it seeks to
strengthen its economic hegemony." The word "empire" crops up a lot in his
speeches.
This side of Paul has made him the candidate of many people, on both the
right and the left, who hope that something more consequential than a mere
change of party will come out of the 2008 elections. He is particularly
popular among the young and the wired. Except for Barack Obama, he is the
most-viewed candidate on YouTube. He is the most "friended" Republican on
MySpace.com. Paul understands that his chances of winning the presidency are
infinitesimally slim. He is simultaneously planning his next Congressional
race. But in Paul's idea of politics, spreading a message has always been
just as important as seizing office. "Politicians don't amount to much," he
says, "but ideas do." Although he is still in the low single digits in
polls, he says he has raised $2.4 million in the second quarter, enough to
broaden the four-state campaign he originally planned into a national one.
Paul represents a different Republican Party from the one that Iraq,
deficits and corruption have soured the country on. In late June, despite a
life of antitax agitation and churchgoing, he was excluded from a Republican
forum sponsored by Iowa antitax and Christian groups. His school of
Republicanism, which had its last serious national airing in the Goldwater
campaign of 1964, stands for a certain idea of the Constitution - the idea
that much of the power asserted by modern presidents has been usurped from
Congress, and that much of the power asserted by Congress has been usurped
from the states. Though Paul acknowledges flaws in both the Constitution (it
included slavery) and the Bill of Rights (it doesn't go far enough), he
still thinks a comprehensive array of positions can be drawn from them:
Against gun control. For the sovereignty of states. And against
foreign-policy adventures. Paul was the Libertarian Party's presidential
candidate in 1988. But his is a less exuberant libertarianism than you find,
say, in the pages of Reason magazine.
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(Page 2 of 5)
Over the years, this vision has won most favor from those convinced the
country is going to hell in a handbasket. The attention Paul has captured
tells us a lot about the prevalence of such pessimism today, about the
instability of partisan allegiances and about the seldom-avowed common
ground between the hard right and the hard left. His message draws on the
noblest traditions of American decency and patriotism; it also draws on what
the historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American
politics.
Financial Armageddon
Paul grew up in the western Pennsylvania town of Green Tree. His father, the
son of a German immigrant, ran a small dairy company. Sports were big around
there - one of the customers on the milk route Paul worked as a teenager was
the retired baseball Hall of Famer Honus Wagner - and Paul was a terrific
athlete, winning a state track meet in the 220 and excelling at football and
baseball. But knee injuries had ended his sports career by the time he went
off to Gettysburg College in 1953. After medical school at Duke, Paul joined
the Air Force, where he served as a flight surgeon, tending to the ear, nose
and throat ailments of pilots, and traveling to Iran, Ethiopia and
elsewhere. "I recall doing a lot of physicals on Army warrant officers who
wanted to become helicopter pilots and go to Vietnam," he told me. "They
were gung-ho. I've often thought about how many of those people never came
back."
Paul is given to mulling things over morally. His family was pious and
Lutheran; two of his brothers became ministers. Paul's five children were
baptized in the Episcopal church, but he now attends a Baptist one. He doesn't
travel alone with women and once dressed down an aide for using the
expression "red-light district" in front of a female colleague. As a young
man, though, he did not protest the Vietnam War, which he now calls "totally
unnecessary" and "illegal." Much later, after the United States invaded Iraq
in 2003, he began reading St. Augustine. "I was annoyed by the evangelicals'
being so supportive of pre-emptive war, which seems to contradict everything
that I was taught as a Christian," he recalls. "The religion is based on
somebody who's referred to as the Prince of Peace."
In 1968, Paul settled in southern Texas, where he had been stationed. He
recalls that he was for a while the only obstetrician - "a very delightful
part of medicine," he says - in Brazoria County. He was already immersed in
reading the economics books that would change his life. Americans know the
"Austrian school," if at all, from the work of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig
von Mises, two economists who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and whose
free-market doctrines helped inspire the conservative movement in the 1950s.
The laws of economics don't admit exceptions, say the Austrians. You cannot
fake out markets, no matter how surreptitiously you expand the money supply.
Spend more than you earn, and you are on the road to inflation and tyranny.
Such views are not always Republican orthodoxy. Paul is a harsh critic of
the Federal Reserve, both for its policies and its unaccountability. "We
first bonded," recalls Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, "because we
were both conspicuous nonworshipers at the Temple of the Fed and of the High
Priest Greenspan." In recent weeks, Paul's airport reading has been a book
called "Financial Armageddon." He is obsessed with sound money, which he
considers - along with the related phenomena of credit excess, bubbles and
uncollateralized assets of all kinds - a "sleeper issue." The United States
ought to link its currency to gold or silver again, Paul says. He puts his
money where his mouth is. According to Federal Election Commission
documents, most of his investments are in gold and silver and are worth
between $1.5 and $3.5 million. It's a modest sum by the standards of major
presidential candidates but impressive for someone who put five children
through college on a doctor's (and later a congressman's) earnings.
For Paul, everything comes back to money, including Iraq. "No matter how
much you love the empire," he says, "it's unaffordable." Wars are expensive,
and there has been a tendency throughout history to pay for them by
borrowing. A day of reckoning always comes, says Paul, and one will come for
us. Speaking this spring before the libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation
in Reston, Va., he warned of a dollar crisis. "That's usually the way
empires end," he said. "It wasn't us forcing the Soviets to build missiles
that brought them down. It was the fact that socialism doesn't work. Our
system doesn't work much better."
Under the banner of "Freedom, Honesty and Sound Money," Paul ran for
Congress in 1974. He lost - but took the seat in a special election in April
1976. He lost again in November of that year, then won in 1978. On two big
issues, he stood on principle and was vindicated: He was one of very few
Republicans in Congress to back Ronald Reagan against Gerald Ford for the
1976 Republican nomination. He was also one of the representatives who
warned against the rewriting of banking rules that laid the groundwork for
the savings-and-loan collapse of the 1980s. Paul served three terms before
losing to Phil Gramm in the Republican primary for Senate in 1984. Tom DeLay
took over his seat.
Paul would not come back to Washington for another dozen years. But in the
time he could spare from delivering babies in Brazoria County, he remained a
mighty presence in the out-of-the-limelight world of those old-line
libertarians who had never made their peace with the steady growth of
federal power in the 20th century. Paul got the Libertarian Party nomination
for president in 1988, defeating the Indian activist Russell Means in a
tough race. He finished third behind Bush and Dukakis, winning nearly half a
million votes. He tended his own Foundation for Rational Economics and
Education (FREE) and kept up his contacts with other market-oriented
organizations. What resulted was a network of true believers who would be
his political base in one of the stranger Congressional elections of modern
times.
A Lone Wolf
-
Page 3 of 5)
In the first days of 1995, just weeks after the Republican landslide, Paul
traveled to Washington and, through DeLay, made contact with the Texas
Republican delegation. He told them he could beat the Democratic incumbent
Greg Laughlin in the reconfigured Gulf Coast district that now included his
home. Republicans had their own ideas. In June 1995, Laughlin announced he
would run in the next election as a Republican. Laughlin says he had
discussed switching parties with Newt Gingrich, the next speaker, before the
Republicans even took power. Paul suspects to this day that the Republicans
wooed Laughlin to head off his candidacy. Whatever happened, it didn't work.
Paul challenged Laughlin in the primary.
"At first, we kind of blew him off," recalls the longtime Texas political
consultant Royal Masset. " 'Oh, there's Ron Paul!' But very quickly, we
realized he was getting far more money than anybody." Much of it came from
out of state, from the free-market network Paul built up while far from
Congress. His candidacy was a problem not just for Laughlin. It also
threatened to halt the stream of prominent Democrats then switching
parties - for what sane incumbent would switch if he couldn't be assured the
Republican nomination? The result was a heavily funded effort by the
National Republican Congressional Committee to defeat Paul in the primary.
The National Rifle Association made an independent expenditure against him.
Former President George H.W. Bush, Gov. George W. Bush and both Republican
senators endorsed Laughlin. Paul had only two prominent backers: the tax
activist Steve Forbes and the pitcher Nolan Ryan, Paul's constituent and old
friend, who cut a number of ads for him. They were enough. Paul edged
Laughlin in a runoff and won an equally narrow general election.
Republican opposition may not have made Paul distrust the party, but beating
its network with his own homemade one revealed that he didn't necessarily
need the party either. Paul looks back on that race and sees something in
common with his quixotic bid for the presidency. "I always think that if I
do things like that and get clobbered, I can excuse myself," he says.
Anyone who is elected to Congress three times as a nonincumbent, as Paul has
been, is a politician of prodigious gifts. Especially since Paul has real
vulnerabilities in his district. For Eric Dondero, who plans to challenge
him in the Republican Congressional primary next fall, foreign policy is
Paul's central failing. Dondero, who is 44, was Paul's aide and sometime
spokesman for more than a decade. According to Dondero, "When 9/11 happened,
he just completely changed. One of the first things he said was not how
awful the tragedy was . . . it was, 'Now we're gonna get big government.' "
Dondero claims that Paul's vote to authorize force in Afghanistan was made
only after warnings from a longtime staffer that voting otherwise would cost
him Victoria, a pivotal city in his district. ("Completely false," Paul
says.) One day just after the Iraq invasion, when Dondero was driving Paul
around the district, the two had words. "He said he did not want to have
someone on staff who did not support him 100 percent on foreign policy,"
Dondero recalls. Paul says Dondero's outspoken enthusiasm for the military's
"shock and awe" strategy made him an awkward spokesman for an antiwar
congressman. The two parted on bad terms.
A larger vulnerability may be that voters want more pork-barrel spending
than Paul is willing to countenance. In a rice-growing, cattle-ranching
district, Paul consistently votes against farm subsidies. In the very
district where, on the night of Sept. 8, 1900, a storm destroyed the city of
Galveston, leaving 6,000 dead, and where repairs from Hurricane Rita and
refugees from Hurricane Katrina continue to exact a toll, he votes against
FEMA and flood aid. In a district that is home to many employees of the
Johnson Space Center, he votes against financing NASA.
The Victoria Advocate, an influential newspaper in the district, has
generally opposed Paul for re-election, on the grounds that a "lone wolf"
cannot get the highway and homeland-security financing the district needs.
So how does he get re-elected? Tim Delaney, the paper's editorial-page
editor, says: "Ron Paul is a very charismatic person. He has charm. He does
not alter his position ever. His ideals are high. If a little old man calls
up from the farm and says, 'I need a wheelchair,' he'll get the damn
wheelchair for him."
Paul may have refused on principle to accept Medicare when he practiced
medicine. He may return a portion of his Congressional office budget every
year. But his staff has the reputation of fighting doggedly to collect
Social Security checks, passports, military decorations, immigrant-visa
extensions and any emolument to which constituents are entitled by law.
According to Jackie Gloor, who runs Paul's Victoria office: "So many times,
people say to us, 'We don't like his vote.' But they trust his heart."
In Congress, Paul is generally admired for his fidelity to principle and
lack of ego. "He is one of the easiest people in Congress to work with,
because he bases his positions on the merits of issues," says Barney Frank,
who has worked with Paul on efforts to ease the regulation of gambling and
medical marijuana. "He is independent but not ornery." Paul has made a habit
of objecting to things that no one else objects to. In October 2001, he was
one of three House Republicans to vote against the USA Patriot Act. He was
the sole House member of either party to vote against the Financial
Antiterrorism Act (final tally: 412-1). In 1999, he was the only naysayer in
a 424-1 vote in favor of casting a medal to honor Rosa Parks. Nothing
against Rosa Parks: Paul voted against similar medals for Ronald Reagan and
Pope John Paul II. He routinely opposes resolutions that presume to advise
foreign governments how to run their affairs: He has refused to condemn
Robert Mugabe's violence against Zimbabwean citizens (421-1), to call on
Vietnam to release political prisoners (425-1) or to ask the League of Arab
States to help stop the killing in Darfur (425-1).
Every Thursday, Paul is the host of a luncheon for a circle of conservative
Republicans that he calls the Liberty Caucus. It has become the epicenter of
antiwar Republicanism in Washington. One stalwart member is Walter Jones,
the North Carolina Republican who during the debate over Iraq suggested
renaming French fries "freedom fries" in the House dining room, but who has
passed the years since in vocal opposition to the war. Another is John
(Jimmy) Duncan of Tennessee, the only Republican besides Paul who voted
against the war and remains in the House. Other regulars include Virgil
Goode of Virginia, Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland and Scott Garrett of New
Jersey. Zach Wamp of Tennessee and Jeff Flake, the Arizonan scourge of
pork-barrel spending, visit occasionally. Not all are antiwar, but many of
the speakers Paul invites are: the former C.I.A. analyst Michael Scheuer,
the intelligence-world journalist James Bamford and such disillusioned
United States Army officers as William Odom, Gregory Newbold and Lawrence
Wilkerson (Colin Powell's former chief of staff), among others.
In today's Washington, Paul's combination of radical libertarianism and
conservatism is unusual. Sometimes the first impulse predominates. He was
the only Texas Republican to vote against last year's Federal Marriage
Amendment, meant to stymie gay marriage. He detests the federal war on
drugs; the LSD guru Timothy Leary held a fundraiser for him in 1988.
Sometimes he is more conservative. He opposed the recent immigration bill on
the grounds that it constituted amnesty. At a breakfast for conservative
journalists in the offices of Americans for Tax Reform this May, he spoke
resentfully of being required to treat penurious immigrants in emergency
rooms - "patients who were more likely to sue you than anybody else," having
children "who became automatic citizens the next day." (Paul champions a
constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship.) While he backs free
trade in theory, he opposes many of the institutions and arrangements - from
the World Trade Organization to Nafta - that promote it in practice.
Paul also opposes abortion, which he believes should be addressed at the
state level, not the national one. He remembers seeing a late abortion
performed during his residency, years before Roe v. Wade, and he maintains
it left an impression on him. "It was pretty dramatic for me," he says, "to
see a two-and-a-half-pound baby taken out crying and breathing and put in a
bucket."
The Owl-God Moloch
Paul's message is not new. You could have heard it in 1964 or 1975 or 1991
at the conclaves of those conservatives who were considered outside the
mainstream of the Republican Party. Back then, most Republicans appeared
reconciled to a strong federal government, if only to do the expensive job
of defending the country against Communism. But when the Berlin Wall fell,
the dormant institutions and ideologies of pre-cold-war conservatism began
to stir. In his 1992 and 1996 campaigns, Pat Buchanan was the first
politician to express and exploit this change, breathing life into the motto
"America First" (if not the organization of that name, which opposed entry
into World War II).
===========
Page 4 of 5)
Like Buchanan, Paul draws on forgotten traditions. His top aides are
unimpeachably Republican but stand at a distance from the party as it has
evolved over the decades. His chief of staff, Tom Lizardo, worked for Pat
Robertson and Bill Miller Jr. (the son of Barry Goldwater's
vice-presidential nominee). His national campaign organizer, Lew Moore,
worked for the late congressman Jack Metcalf of Washington State, another
Goldwaterite. At the grass roots, Paul's New Hampshire primary campaign
stresses gun rights and relies on anti-abortion and tax activists from the
organizations of Buchanan and the state's former maverick senator, Bob
Smith.
Paul admires Robert Taft, the isolationist Ohio senator known during the
Truman administration as Mr. Republican, who tried to rally Republicans
against United States participation in NATO. Taft lost the Republican
nomination in 1952 to Dwight Eisenhower and died the following year. "Now,
of course," Paul says, "I quote Eisenhower when he talks about the
military-industrial complex. But I quote Taft when he suits my purposes
too." Particularly on NATO, from which Paul, too, would like to withdraw.
The question is whether the old ideologies being resurrected are neglected
wisdom or discredited nonsense. In the 1996 general election, Paul's
Democratic opponent Lefty Morris held a press conference to air several
shocking quotes from a newsletter that Paul published during his decade away
from Washington. Passages described the black male population of Washington
as "semi-criminal or entirely criminal" and stated that "by far the most
powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government."
Morris noted that a Canadian neo-Nazi Web site had listed Paul's newsletter
as a laudably "racialist" publication.
Paul survived these revelations. He later explained that he had not written
the passages himself - quite believably, since the style diverges widely
from his own. But his response to the accusations was not transparent. When
Morris called on him to release the rest of his newsletters, he would not.
He remains touchy about it. "Even the fact that you're asking this question
infers, 'Oh, you're an anti-Semite,' " he told me in June. Actually, it
doesn't. Paul was in Congress when Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant
in 1981 and - unlike the United Nations and the Reagan administration -
defended its right to do so. He says Saudi Arabia has an influence on
Washington equal to Israel's. His votes against support for Israel follow
quite naturally from his opposition to all foreign aid. There is no sign
that they reflect any special animus against the Jewish state.
What is interesting is Paul's idea that the identity of the person who did
write those lines is "of no importance." Paul never deals in disavowals or
renunciations or distancings, as other politicians do. In his office one
afternoon in June, I asked about his connections to the John Birch Society.
"Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!" he said in mock horror. "Is that
bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They're generally
well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don't know how many
positions they would have that I don't agree with. Because they're real
strict constitutionalists, they don't like the war, they're hard-money
people. . . . "
Paul's ideological easygoingness is like a black hole that attracts the
whole universe of individuals and groups who don't recognize themselves in
the politics they see on TV. To hang around with his impressively large
crowd of supporters before and after the CNN debate in Manchester, N.H., in
June, was to be showered with privately printed newsletters full of
exclamation points and capital letters, scribbled-down U.R.L.'s for Web
sites about the Free State Project, which aims to turn New Hampshire into a
libertarian enclave, and copies of the cult DVD "America: Freedom to
Fascism."
Victor Carey, a 45-year-old, muscular, mustachioed self-described "patriot"
who wears a black baseball cap with a skull and crossbones on it, drove up
from Sykesville, Md., to show his support for Paul. He laid out some of his
concerns. "The people who own the Federal Reserve own the oil companies,
they own the mass media, they own the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, they're part of the Bilderbergers, and unfortunately their spiritual
practices are very wicked and diabolical as well," Carey said. "They go to a
place out in California known as the Bohemian Grove, and there's been
footage obtained by infiltration of what their practices are. And they do
mock human sacrifices to an owl-god called Moloch. This is true. Go research
it yourself."
Two grandmothers from North Carolina who painted a Winnebago red, white and
blue were traveling around the country, stumping for Ron Paul, defending the
Constitution and warning about the new "North American Union." Asked whether
this is something that would arise out of Nafta, Betty Smith of Chapel Hill,
N.C., replied: "It's already arisen. They're building the highway. Guess
what! The Spanish company building the highway - they're gonna get the
tolls. Giuliani's law firm represents that Spanish company. Giuliani's been
anointed a knight by the Queen. Guess what! Read the Constitution. That's
not allowed!"
Paul is not a conspiracy theorist, but he has a tendency to talk in that
idiom. In a floor speech shortly after the toppling of the Taliban in
Afghanistan, he mentioned Unocal's desire to tap the region's energy and
concluded, "We should not be surprised now that many contend that the plan
for the U.N. to 'nation-build' in Afghanistan is a logical and important
consequence of this desire." But when push comes to shove, Paul is not among
the "many" who "contend" this. "I think oil and gas is part of it," he
explains. "But it's not the issue. If that were the only issue, it wouldn't
have happened. The main reason was to get the Taliban out."
Last winter at a meet-the-candidate house party in New Hampshire, students
representing a group called Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth asked Paul
whether he believed the official investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks was
credible. "I never automatically trust anything the government does when
they do an investigation," Paul replied, "because too often I think there's
an area that the government covered up, whether it's the Kennedy
assassination or whatever." The exchange was videotaped and ricocheted
around the Internet for a while. But Paul's patience with the "Truthers," as
they call themselves, does not make him one himself. "Even at the time it
happened, I believe the information was fairly clear that Al Qaeda was
involved," he told me.
"Every Wacko Fringe Group In the Country"
============
Page 5 of 5)
One evening in mid-June, 86 members of a newly formed Ron Paul Meetup group
gathered in a room in the Pasadena convention center. It was a varied crowd,
preoccupied by the war, including many disaffected Democrats. Via video link
from Virginia, Paul's campaign chairman, Kent Snyder, spoke to the group "of
a coming-together of the old guard and the new." Then Connie Ruffley,
co-chairwoman of United Republicans of California (UROC), addressed the
crowd. UROC was founded during the 1964 presidential campaign to fight off
challenges to Goldwater from Rockefeller Republicanism. Since then it has
lain dormant but not dead - waiting, like so many other old right-wing
groups, for someone or something to kiss it back to life. UROC endorsed Paul
at its spring convention.
That night, Ruffley spoke about her past with the John Birch Society and
asked how many in the room were members (quite a few, as it turned out). She
referred to the California senator Dianne Feinstein as "Fine-Swine," and got
quickly to Israel, raising the Israeli attack on the American Naval signals
ship Liberty during the Six-Day War. Some people were pleased. Others walked
out. Others sent angry e-mails that night. Several said they would not
return. The head of the Pasadena Meetup group, Bill Dumas, sent a desperate
letter to Paul headquarters asking for guidance:
"We're in a difficult position of working on a campaign that draws
supporters from laterally opposing points of view, and we have the added
bonus of attracting every wacko fringe group in the country. And in a Ron
Paul Meetup many people will consider each other 'wackos' for their beliefs
whether that is simply because they're liberal, conspiracy theorists,
neo-Nazis, evangelical Christian, etc. . . . We absolutely must focus on Ron's
message only and put aside all other agendas, which anyone can save for the
next 'Star Trek' convention or whatever."
But what is "Ron's message"? Whatever the campaign purports to be about, the
main thing it has done thus far is to serve as a clearinghouse for voters
who feel unrepresented by mainstream Republicans and Democrats. The
antigovernment activists of the right and the antiwar activists of the left
have many differences, maybe irreconcilable ones. But they have a lot of
common beliefs too, and their numbers - and anger - are of a considerable
magnitude. Ron Paul will not be the next president of the United States. But
his candidacy gives us a good hint about the country the next president is
going to have to knit back together.
-
I know that some of you, like myself, are sick of politics and generally don't trust Democrats or Republicans.
I also know that some of you tend to be a Libertarian, like me.
Ron Paul is a Republican, but is more like a Libertarian, and has a consistent voting record. He's also whupping McCain's ass so far in the pre-election.
I really like this guy, and will probably vote for him. Here's an issue that I like him for, and one that some of you will certainly support. This guy has balls.
Border Security and Immigration Reform
The talk must stop. We must secure our borders now. A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked. This is my six point plan:
Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
No amnesty. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 million people are in our country illegally. That’s a lot of people to reward for breaking our laws.
No welfare for illegal aliens. Americans have welcomed immigrants who seek opportunity, work hard, and play by the rules. But taxpayers should not pay for illegal immigrants who use hospitals, clinics, schools, roads, and social services.
End birthright citizenship. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.
Pass true immigration reform. The current system is incoherent and unfair. But current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country, according to the Heritage Foundation. This is insanity. Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and waiting periods.
What do you think?
Here's his website.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/
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Just thought I would put up some other things about Ron Paul not to mention that he never spent 500 Dollars on a Hair Cut or Did not Inhale or Crashed his Car on a whiskey and Coke diet *Cough* Bush *Cough* or went awol in the Military..He was a AirForce surgeon..
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.
He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
Congressman Paul introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.
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Well, the "youtube" "debate" that CNN keeps self promoting as the greatest invention since the wheel certainly proved one thing to me.
And that is that JFKennedy who proclamed, "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" *could never get elected today*.
The "nanny state" is only going to get worse it appears.
-
What makes you assume that CNN chose the questions fairly?
=============
“These are not debates, these are auditions. By definition, the psychology of an audition reduces the person auditioning and raises the status, for example, of Chris Matthews... I have no interest in the current political process. I have no interest in trying to figure out how I can go out and raise money under John McCain’s insane censorship rules so I can show up to do seven minutes and twenty seconds at some debate.” —Newt Gingrich
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Statement of Faith By Rep. Ron Paul, MD.
The Covenant News ~ July 21, 2007
We live in times of great uncertainty when men of faith must stand up for our values and our traditions lest they be washed away in a sea of fear and relativism. As you likely know, I am running for President of the United States, and I am asking for your support.
I have never been one who is comfortable talking about my faith in the political arena. In fact, the pandering that typically occurs in the election season I find to be distasteful. But for those who have asked, I freely confess that Jesus Christ is my personal Savior, and that I seek His guidance in all that I do. I know, as you do, that our freedoms come not from man, but from God. My record of public service reflects my reverence for the Natural Rights with which we have been endowed by a loving Creator.
I have worked tirelessly to defend and restore those rights for all Americans, born and unborn alike. The right of an innocent, unborn child to life is at the heart of the American ideal of liberty. My professional and legislative record demonstrates my strong commitment to this pro-life principle.
In 40 years of medical practice, I never once considered performing an abortion, nor did I ever find abortion necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. In Congress, I have authored legislation that seeks to define life as beginning at conception, H.R. 1094. I am also the prime sponsor of H.R. 300, which would negate the effect of Roe v Wade by removing the ability of federal courts to interfere with state legislation to protect life. This is a practical, direct approach to ending federal court tyranny which threatens our constitutional republic and has caused the deaths of 45 million of the unborn. I have also authored H.R. 1095, which prevents federal funds to be used for so-called “population control.” Many talk about being pro-life. I have taken and will continue to advocate direct action to restore protection for the unborn.
I have also acted to protect the lives of Americans by my adherence to the doctrine of “just war.” This doctrine, as articulated by Augustine, suggested that war must only be waged as a last resort--- for a discernible moral and public good, with the right intentions, vetted through established legal authorities (a constitutionally required declaration of the Congress), and with a likely probability of success.
It has been and remains my firm belief that the current United Nations-mandated, no-win police action in Iraq fails to meet the high moral threshold required to wage just war. That is why I have offered moral and practical opposition to the invasion, occupation and social engineering police exercise now underway in Iraq. It is my belief, borne out by five years of abject failure and tens of thousands of lost lives, that the Iraq operation has been a dangerous diversion from the rightful and appropriate focus of our efforts to bring to justice to the jihadists that have attacked us and seek still to undermine our nation, our values, and our way of life.
I opposed giving the president power to wage unlimited and unchecked aggression, However, I did vote to support the use of force in Afghanistan. I also authored H.R. 3076, the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001. A letter of marque and reprisal is a constitutional tool specifically designed to give the president the authority to respond with appropriate force to those non-state actors who wage aggression against the United States while limiting his authority to only those responsible for the atrocities of that day. Such a limited authorization is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the practical aim of keeping Americans safe while minimizing the costs in blood and treasure of waging such an operation.
On September 17, 2001, I stated on the house floor that “…striking out at six or eight or even ten different countries could well expand this war of which we wanted no part. Without defining the enemy there is no way to know our precise goal or to know when the war is over. Inadvertently more casual acceptance of civilian deaths as part of this war I'm certain will prolong the agony and increase the chances of even more American casualties. We must guard against this if at all possible.” I’m sorry to say that history has proven this to be true.
I am running for president to restore the rule of law and to stand up for our divinely inspired Constitution. I have never voted for legislation that is not specifically authorized by the Constitution. As president, I will never sign a piece of legislation, nor use the power of the executive, in a manner inconsistent with the limitations that the founders envisioned.
Many have given up on America as an exemplar for the world, as a model of freedom, self-government, and self-control. I have not. There is hope for America. I ask you to join me, and to be a part of it.
Sincerely,
Ron Paul
For More Information Contact:
Paul Dorr
Iowa Field Director
RonPaul2008@iowatelecom.net
Phone: 712-758-3660
Ron Paul 2008
Presidential Campaign Committee
www.RonPaul2008.com
Phone: 703-248-9115
FAX: 703-248-9119
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Is this true?
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2007/07/jihad_fred_fred.html
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Crafty: "Is this true?" - If you mean that former Senator and Energy Secretary Republican Spencer Abraham of Michigan joined the non-campaign campaign at the top level, yes. The rest of her hit piece concludes that Thompson can't be trusted for associating with such a bad, bad man. On that question I'll take a watch and see attitude. Seems to me that Thompson writes his own position papers, unlike probably any other candidate except Newt. Thompson's views on key issues are decidedly conservative. They are extremely clear with an un-erasable paper trail. And he has no history or tendency toward flip-flopping. In this story he reaches out to moderate and liberal Republicans, possibly independents. I see that as a good thing.
Abraham was elected (and defeated) in Michigan, a Democrat state that was almost in play in 2004. He is accused of being pro-immigration - so am I. He voted 'wrong' on a bill that included cracking down on expired green card holders. Maybe there were other considerations, and that was PRE-911. It's implied that he is pro-jihad, but I don't know any Christians from Lebanon that are less aware of the dangers of Islamic extremism than any of us here.
Missing from the piece about the energy secretary is ANY comment on his energy policies or views, other than security. Energy policy is one of the most important issues we face. I take it by omission that she had no major quarrel with him on the details of energy policy.
Speaking of moderates in high places, Reagan picked Richard Schweiker in 1976 and George H.W. in 1980 as running mates as his strategy to win. That didn't cause Reagan to check with his VP or campaign manager before he cut taxes or shouted out 'tear down this wall'.
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Regarding Newt - excellent video. I will vote for him if nominated. IMO he needs to demonstrate he can get moderate support and crossover votes before conservatives will trust him to win. The liberal playbook says he served divorce papers on his first wife on her hospital death bed and had an ongoing affair with a staffer during the Clinton impeachment. Rather than refute charges, he came out to admit non-specific sins. I know these are strange comments in a race where all have baggage, but there are moderates who just can't get past the hypocrisy. God forgives, Republicans don't. As a conservative, I credit him for what he accomplished, but also remember he risked what we worked for and lost it.(MHO)
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Back to Fred Thompson, here is the Washington Post yesterday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/26/AR2007072602247.html?nav=rss_politics
In Online Writings, Thompson Flashes His Conservative Credentials
On the Internet sites where conservatives gather to read and chat each day, Fred D. Thompson, the as-yet-unannounced Republican presidential candidate, has been laying out his positions on dozens of issues with little public notice and plenty of rhetorical flair.
The Virginia Tech massacre, he said, showed that students should be allowed to carry guns "to protect themselves on their campuses," and he said the university's ban on legal guns may have contributed to how long the shooter was able to keep killing.
Scientists who insist that global warming is ruining nature, he said, are like those true believers four centuries ago who insisted that the Earth is flat. "Ask Galileo," he said.
As for Congress's recent attempt at an immigration overhaul, that was nothing more than a "legislative pig" with lipstick that hid the United States' failure to secure its borders. "A nation without secure borders will not long be a sovereign nation," he warned.
The musings seem to constitute Thompson's early effort at assuring the core conservatives of the Republican Party that he is one of them -- despite his run-ins with the bloc as a U.S. senator who supported campaign finance reform and opposed federal limits on malpractice lawsuits and attorneys' fees.
"They were wildly popular," said Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, where three dozen commentaries by Thompson have been posted since he started testing the presidential waters in March. "It was a great way to introduce himself. He had just the right balance of red meat and substance to feed a conservative audience -- at least as an opener."
Thompson's writings could prove problematic in a general election, where he would have to win over moderate voters.
"Today, everything is out there forever, and you don't have any luxury of claiming there was a misunderstanding," said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist. "If a campaign is putting some of these comments out there, they are going to have to live with them for the rest of the campaign."
Rollins knows the benefits and risks of an actor-turned-politician's use of a "commentary campaign" to burnish conservative credentials before a run for the White House. He worked for Ronald Reagan, who for years used radio commentaries and columns to lay out his vision for America before running for president.
Thompson mostly writes his own articles, often borrowing material from the commentaries he gives on ABC Radio as a frequent contributor to Paul Harvey's show, aides said. In addition to his articles on National Review Online, Thompson has posted to the Townhall.com blog and placed podcasts on RedState.com, including a three-part, issue-oriented interview.
Aides said Thompson's writings and Web postings began a year or so ago as an effort to repurpose his radio commentaries. But they have taken on a life of their own now that Thompson is considering running for president, and giving him a forum to lay out his positions.
They have helped distinguish Thompson from many candidates in the race, said Mark Levin, a conservative talk radio host with 4 million listeners. Thompson has appeared on his show four times in the past four months.
"Most of the other candidates -- other than an issue here or there -- are trying to conceal their viewpoints in which they think they will offend some portion of the electorate," Levin said. "Thompson comes out, and he is unafraid of articulating his viewpoints. He's not trying to camouflage them."
Thompson's writings seem certain to appeal to key elements of the Republican base.
"Let me ask you a hypothetical question," Thompson wrote in defending Israel's military responses during the Palestinian conflict. "What do you think America would do if Canadian soldiers were firing dozens of missiles every day into Buffalo, N.Y.? . . . I can tell you, our response would look nothing like Israel's restrained and pinpoint reactions to daily missile attacks from Gaza."
His commentary on the Virginia Tech shootings -- titled "Signs of Intelligence?" -- suggested that the university's gun ban was a reason the gunman was not stopped sooner.
"One of the things that's got to be going through a lot of peoples' minds now is how one man with two handguns, that he had to reload time and time again, could go from classroom to classroom on the Virginia Tech campus without being stopped," Thompson wrote. "Much of the answer can be found in policies put in place by the university itself."
"Virginia Tech administrators overrode Virginia state law and threatened to expel or fire anybody who brings a weapon onto campus," he wrote. "Many other universities have been swayed by an anti-gun, anti-self defense ideology. I respect their right to hold those views, but I challenge their decision to deny Americans the right to protect themselves on their campuses."
Thompson also derided Congress's failed immigration legislation, demanding that its supporters "explain why putting illegals in a more favorable position than those who play by the rules is not really amnesty."
Thompson seems to have taken particular pleasure in mocking global warming.
"It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto. . . . This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle," he wrote.
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Some of the Dem candidates can be found in this compilation of "That was then, this is now".
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Dick Morris' opinion that Gingrich will announce by Fall. I wish Newt had more of John McCain's character, or that McCain had more of Newt's ideas and ingenuity. I don't really see how Newt could win in such a divided electorate. He must have as high *negative* ratings as Hillary but just from the opposite aisles of the political spectrum. Perhaps he could garner enough middle ground support like Hillary with similar populist platforms.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DickMorrisandEileenMcGann/2007/08/10/newts_time_to_jump_into_the_race_could_come_this_fall
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David S. Broder: Shaking up presidential race
Sacramento Bee, Opinion
David S. Broder
When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly.
Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats -- and prescribing tough cures he says others shrink from offering.
In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he "will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost" to assure the nation's future.
After spending most of the last few years on TV's "Law and Order," and starting a new family with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.
"There's no reason for me to run just to be president," he said.
"I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing." Thompson, like many of the others running, has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties in Washington -- and the partisanship that has infected Congress, helping to speed his own departure from the Senate.
But he says he thinks that the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. "I think a president could go to the American people and say, 'Here's what we need to be doing. and I'm willing to go half-way.' Now you have to make them (the opposition) go half-way." The approach Thompson says he's contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says "we're getting a free ride" fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, "wearing out our people and equipment," it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.
When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, "a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt," he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.
When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.
Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country's future. One is "Government at the Brink," a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president's budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems in Washington.
The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain today, Thompson said, and increasingly "threaten national security." His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Governmental Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending "unsustainable," and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government's fiscal ledger -- spending and revenues -- the next generation will suffer.
"Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it," Thompson said. "So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges." Thompson readily concedes that he does not know "where all those chips are going to fall" when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could assure a better future for their children.
But these issues -- national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath care costs -- "are worth a portion of a man's life. If I can't get elected talking that way, I probably don't deserve to be elected."
Thompson says "I feel free to do it" his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
Obama's Air Raid
Democratic Presidential candidate (and amateur airpower strategist) Barack Obama
Based on his recent comments about "invading" Pakistan and taking our nuclear option off the table, Illinois Senator (and Presidential hopeful) Barack Obama has demonstrated--beyond any shadow of a doubt--that he's unprepared to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Yet, Mr. Obama persists in demonstrating his incompetence in military and security affairs. Just yesterday, Senator Obama observed that "We've got to get the job done [in Afghanistan]. And that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there."
The Senator's remarks drew instant criticism from a spokesman for GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, although (predictably) Mr. Obama's Democratic rivals remained silent. We're guessing that the other Democrats harbor similar thoughts, or they're just content to watch Obama slowly destroy his own candidacy.
From a military perspective, there are clear problems with Senator Obama's "analysis." First and foremost, the U.S. military does not engage in the indiscriminate bombing of villages in Afghanistan--or anywhere else. If Mr. Obama had even a rudimentary knowledge of air operations, he would understand that bombing missions generally fall under two categories, interdiction and close air support.
As the name implies, interdiction raids are aimed at preventing the enemy from achieving specific military goals. While these strikes are typically planned at least a day in advance, they are based on firm intelligence indicators. In other words, if an Afghan village is a target, it's only because the Taliban are conducting operations there, and the air strike will be limited to those military elements, with strict ROE on target identification and weapons employment.
However, most of our air operations in Afghanistan are classified as close air support (CAS) , designed to help our troops on the ground. CAS missions are usually classified as pre-planned or immediate. Pre-planned sorties allocate specific assets to certain ground units or a geographical area, at a pre-determined time. Immediate CAS missions are flown in support of troops in contact. In both cases, the attacking aircraft are, invariably, under the control of a ground observer, who identifies the enemy, briefs the pilots and literally "talks" them onto the target. But then again, we rather doubt that Senator Obama is familiar with a "nine-line" briefing.
And, beyond the lamentable fact that innocent civilians are often killed in war, there may be another reason that Afghan villagers are falling victim to NATO bombs. As a Reuters correspondent noted in a report filed earlier this year, the Taliban have a long history of using human shields in their operations, hiding among civilians to conceal their activities and discourage allied attacks. During fighting around the Kajaki Dam in February, Taliban fighters even used children to shield their retreat.
In another February battle, NATO troops witnessed the Taliban removing the bodies of dead and wounded fighters after an air strike, leaving behind the remains of villagers, who may have been used as human shields. That tactic allows the Taliban to claim that the U.S. and its allies are "targeting" civilians, while covering up their actions that prompted the air strike.
Fortunately, that little ploy isn't having much of an impact on the battlefield. The air campaign in Afghanistan has ramped up in recent months, and it's a major reason that the Taliban's "spring offensive" never got off the ground. However, exaggerated Taliban claims of civilian casualties from bombing raids produce a different effect in Washington--and on the campaign trail--where a presidential wannabe is again declaring despair and defeat.
You'll note that no one is asking Senator Obama about his "plan" for Afghanistan, which (like most of his defense pronouncements) seems painfully inept. If his comments are any indication, the Obama strategy for Afghanistan would be based heavily on reconstruction programs. That's fine, but rebuilding a country is predicated on a security environment that allows those efforts to proceed. Remember that battle around Kajaki Dam? It was aimed at eliminating the local Taliban presence, so that reconstruction of the dam's power plant and transmission lines can continue.
And getting rid of the Taliban means killing them.
Using airplanes.
Dropping bombs.
Surely the Senator from Illinois can grasp those fundamental concepts. But then again, it's easy to over-estimate Barack Obama.
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ADDENDUM: Powerline reports that the AP rushed to Obama's defense last night, claiming in a "fact check" article that "western forces have been killing Afghan civilians at a faster rate than insurgents." That analysis is based on a rather dubious AP count, and even the wire service acknowledges that "tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify." We might add that some of those reports come from tribal "elders" who are Taliban sympathizers, or falsely claim civilian casualties, to prevent terrorist reprisals against their villages.
Labels: Barack Obama; Afghanistan; air-raiding villages
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Contender?
Arkansas's former governor offers a strange brew of populism and environmentalism.
BY BRIAN M. CARNEY
Saturday, August 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK--"Are you with Mike?"
The question is not a political one. Your correspondent has arrived at NPR's studios in midtown Manhattan, there to squeeze in an interview with former Arkansas governor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Mr. Huckabee is in the studio, but he arrived alone, and the slightly flummoxed receptionist asks everyone who comes through the door if he's one of Mike's people. None of them are.
Mr. Huckabee arrived late for the radio taping--he couldn't find a taxi at Penn Station--so I settle into a chair to wait for the candidate to emerge.
A week ago, Mike Huckabee was having trouble getting potential donors to return his calls. But after coming in a surprise second in the Iowa straw poll last weekend, the former Arkansas governor is on a media and fund-raising blitz. The man who greets me, with a firm handshake and a warm smile, is physically unassuming and seems slightly too small for the suit he's wearing--which he may be, having famously lost more than 100 pounds after being diagnosed with Type II diabetes a few years back.
Mr. Huckabee settles into a chair in NPR's 19th-floor conference room as I ask him why he's running for president. He offers some preliminaries about his executive experience in Arkansas and his ability in that state to work across the aisle to get things done with a Democratic state Assembly. Then he goes for the heart of the matter as he sees it:
"If the Republicans have a chance next year," Mr. Huckabee says, "the criteria are: No. 1, someone who can communicate our message to the people of our country and win them back, because we've lost a lot of them.
"No. 2, it's someone who has consistency on the principles and the core values that have caused people to be Republican. That includes the sanctity of life, it includes fiscal conservativism. It certainly includes an adherence to the traditional concept of marriage. It means respect for the Second Amendment. Those are issues that caused a lot of middle America and the South to go Republican." In other words, in line with the media sound bite about Mr. Huckabee, he represents the Republican wing of the Republican Party, the so-called social conservatives that the front-runners are said to have a hard time rallying to their cause.
But Mr. Huckabee doesn't stop there. Instead, he outlines, in broad strokes, a quite different, and somewhat surprising, vision of the Republican Party of the future. Rallying the base to the old standard, Mr. Huckabee says, isn't enough anymore. "A new Republican generation has also got to speak to issues of the environment, education, health care." We'll get back to that. But now Mr. Huckabee is on a roll, and he shifts seamlessly into a critique of his party that seems, oddly, to accept much of his political opposition's criticism of the GOP, and the Bush administration in particular:
"We have to show that we are also problem-solvers, not just ideologues. People are not going to tolerate a government that just is led by people who just believe something. They want a government that is led by people who can do something. And all the beliefs in the world don't change the dynamics if we're unable to function and function effectively." This is Mr. Huckabee-as-triangulator, as pragmatist.
One central theme of Mr. Huckabee's campaign that he hasn't mentioned yet is his support for the Fair Tax, a proposal to replace the federal income tax with a sales tax of either 23% or 30%, depending on how you count. So I ask him if he really expects the repeal of the 16th Amendment, the one that granted the federal government the authority to levy income taxes in the first place. "I hope we would [repeal it]. That's the whole point." But hope, of course, is not a plan. Does he have one? "I'd go directly to the people, sell it to them, and then ask them to sell it to Congress."
So much for taxes. Since he brought up the environment, what is his view on climate change? "My view is that we have allowed it to become a political issue rather than an issue about being responsible inhabitants of earth. . . . The one thing that's, to me, indisputable, is that we have a responsibility to be better stewards of the environment. So why we have any problems is to me of less importance than that we clearly need cleaner air, clean water, good soil. Anything we do that does in fact curb and contain CO2 emissions is a good thing. Because it simply means that there's a cleaner, fresher, more sustainable environment."
So Mr. Huckabee is in favor of curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. Does he have a preferred policy tool to accomplish the goal? "My first thought is that a tax is not the ideal way to try to change behaviors." No carbon tax, then. What about a cap-and-trade system, in which industries are given emissions credits that they can either use or sell? "I sometimes think that this whole idea of carbon credits, it seems to me a bit like buying indulgences from the ancient church. I find that just almost bizarre--that that's the answer, that I can waste all the energy I want and then justify it by writing a check and saying, 'Oh, I bought up some credits.' "
With a carbon tax off the table and cap-and-trade theologically unsound, what's left? "I think every citizen can take some steps. I drive a flex-fuel car. We've replaced most of our light fixtures with fluorescents. . . . I didn't have to do that. The government didn't tell me to do that. It just seems to me a better use of energy and my money." That may be virtuous, but it falls somewhat short of an environmental platform for the new Republican generation. So I ask the former governor whether he approves of the current legislative fad of requiring more ethanol in our gasoline. "I'm from an agricultural state, so I tend to like biofuels and think that they're a very important part of the future of energy."
But the production of ethanol for fuel is itself energy-intensive; at best it offers modest improvements to our current energy dependence. Right?
"It's not as efficient [as gas] right now. But as the technology evolves, it's already far more efficient than it was a few years ago. But I think the answer's going to be a combination of many sources: solar; nuclear; hydrogen, hydrogen cells, which are different than ammonia-based hydrogen; I think wind."
That may be what Mr. Huckabee thinks. But what should the government be doing, if anything, to bring this future about? "The best thing the government could do," Mr. Huckabee replies, "is eliminate any type of penalties on productivity and innovation. One of the reasons that I support the Fair Tax is that it turns all sectors of the economy loose." With Mr. Huckabee, I was beginning to suspect, most roads lead to the Fair Tax.
But he'd mentioned the economy, so I asked what he made of the recent turmoil in the markets. The answer surprised with its populist fervor. "You know, a lot of the folks that are worried now are experiencing maybe a little bit of what the average American worries about every day when they go to work and they're not sure whether any of these hedge-fund managers and their $100 million bonuses are going to sell off the jobs of the people out there in middle America to China, and they're going to lose their paychecks and their pensions."
Is our trade deficit with China something we should be worried about then? "I think we've got to be worried about the trade deficit." Why? "If they were to devalue the dollar through their actions, it would have a dramatically negative impact on our economy." I want to point out that devaluing the dollar relative to the Chinese yuan is precisely what those decrying the trade deficit would like to see happen, but he presses on: "I've also said we don't have free trade if you don't have fair trade and it's not fair trade if they're not abiding by the same rules and regulations that we are."
Fair trade is a hobbyhorse of the left more often than the right, not least because unions view imposing our labor and environmental standards on poor countries as a way of making them less cost-competitive. But Mr. Huckabee isn't done. "We can't even trust toothpaste [from China]. We have contaminated food and now contaminated toys that are coming here because they're so just adamant about making profits and producing enormous levels of goods and getting them into our marketplace that they haven't been as careful, making sure those products have the same level of safety that they would if they were manufactured here."
We should all be able to trust our toothpaste and our baby toys, to be sure. To that end, Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) wants to inspect every container from China for lead-painted children's toys. Is this the sort of thing Mr. Huckabee has in mind?
"I think the Dick Durbin idea is a little bit extreme . . . but there needs to be a greater level of scrutiny." That sounds safe enough, if somewhat vague, but suddenly Mr. Huckabee veers off-target. "I think we ought to know where our food comes from. I'm particularly concerned about the growing incidence of imported food. And part of it is I believe there are three things a country has got to do to be free: It's got to feed itself; it has to be able to fuel itself and it's got to be able to fight for itself. And if it can't do those things, then it's only as free as the nations who provide those things will allow it to be. So if we're dependent on anyone, whether it's the Chinese or the Europeans, for our food, the day they decide to cut off our food supply is the day we cease to have the freedom we currently enjoy."
Food independence was, it is true, long considered a strategic asset, but it seems a quaint goal, at best, in a globalizing world. And our current fixation on plowing under food crops to grow "biofuels" is already driving up food prices in this country. How, then, do we achieve energy and food independence simultaneously? Is it even possible?
Not at the moment, Mr. Huckabee says. "But I believe we can get there." How? "The same way that we developed an atom bomb in really a relatively small period of three years, when science was not nearly as advanced as it is now. The same way we went to the moon eight years from the time John F. Kennedy said we would go."
Is the candidate proposing a federally funded Manhattan Project to achieve food and energy independence from the world? "It doesn't even have to be federally funded as much as it has to be a federally turned-loose innovation in the private sector. Imagine the potential profits out there for those who can develop the clean, sustainable and replaceable domestically produced energy sources." That is code, I take it, for the Fair Tax again.
Until recently, Mr. Huckabee has been mostly an unknown quantity, despite his months-long presence in the race. His second-place finish in Iowa last weekend has brought him a new degree of media attention and scrutiny. The question for Republicans and for his campaign is, now that Mr. Huckabee is getting a closer look, will GOP voters like what they see?
Mr. Carney is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/19/debate-video-hillary-clinton-on-brushbacks/
Democrats and national weakness.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/20/audio-ron-pauls-radio-buddy-melts-down-over-neocons/
9/11 trufer goodness! :roll:
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RomneyCare 2.0
August 27, 2007; Page A10
At the most recent Republican Presidential debate, on August 5, Mitt Romney said on health care: "We have to have our citizens insured. And we're not going to do that by tax exemptions because the people that don't have insurance aren't paying taxes. What you have to do is what we did in Massachusetts."
Well, maybe not. In Florida on Friday, the former Bay State Governor laid out in detail his plan for overhauling the health-care system. Its main emphasis was on federalism, allowing the states to work out their own approaches. To do so they'd get some crucial free-market assistance from a Romney Administration, including efforts to deregulate the private insurance markets -- and even reform the tax code.
So this is a step forward for Mr. Romney on health policy, largely because it doesn't take Massachusetts as its model. Though he still regards that state's 2006 "universal" health insurance program as one of his signal achievements as Governor, his new proposal drops the most coercive elements, such as the individual mandate and the "pay or play" sanctions on businesses. Perhaps this intellectual progress is due to the influence of new Romney advisers Glenn Hubbard and John Cogan, both respected health-care economists.
In his new plan, Mr. Romney would address the core problem: distortions introduced by the tax code. Businesses are allowed to deduct the cost of providing health insurance to their employees, but individuals can't do the same. This bias creates third-party payer problems for the insured and raises prices for everyone else. The Romney plan would allow those who purchase policies on the individual market to fully deduct all premiums, deductibles and copays, thus restoring the tax parity of health dollars.
It would also offer incentives for health savings accounts, which set aside pre-tax dollars for medical expenses. And it would include medical malpractice reform with teeth -- specialized health courts and caps on punitive and non-economic damages.
Also constructive is Mr. Romney's proposal to turn today's open-ended Medicaid entitlement into federal block grants to the states, and do likewise for federal uncompensated care funds. That would give states maximum flexibility to tailor health plans to their own needs. Mr. Romney hopes the states will create plans to cover the lower- to middle-income uninsured -- and ideally, to help them buy their own private policies.
This pool of federal money would also be leverage to persuade states to make insurance more affordable. In practice, that means doing away with the costly mandates and regulations that many states have imposed. It's a good idea, but we question the willingness of states to actually do so, given that the government health trend has been toward increased centralization and intervention in the marketplace. That was one of the greatest limitations of Governor Romney's plan: Massachusetts did not deregulate before requiring individuals to acquire insurance.
Rather than forcing people to buy plans approved by their state, a better idea would be to allow insurers to sell plans across state lines. This would retain the federalist approach, but individuals could choose which state regulations to buy into, creating a "regulatory marketplace." We suspect there'd be an insurance exodus from Massachusetts, which, for instance, requires plans to cover chiropractic services and in vitro fertilization.
One key difference with Rudy Giuliani, who has also proposed similar changes to the tax code, is that the former New York Mayor would allow for interstate insurance and Mr. Romney would not. Mr. Romney says that the logistical difficulties would become a "camel's nose" for national insurance regulations. Maybe so, but that is always a risk with federalism. A far worse camel's nose is the "universal" plan Mr. Romney championed in Massachusetts. As Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards put it, "If universal health care was good enough for Massachusetts, why isn't it good enough for the rest of the country?"
It's not an unfair question. Mr. Romney's Bay State legacy is now praised by liberals as a prototype for national policy. That's done a great deal to set back the kind of tax reform that he now espouses. The issue for GOP primary voters to consider is why he went in such a different direction in Boston. Granted, a mere Governor couldn't restructure the federal tax code, and he was dealing with a far-left legislature. Yet his willingness to compromise in Massachusetts on core matters of principle, and then trumpet those statist policies as a "free-market" solution, raises questions about how far and easily he'd bend to a Democratic Congress.
Mr. Romney's conversion to free-market health-care thinking is nonetheless welcome -- assuming he believes it.
WSJ
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
Follow the Money (Clinton Campaign Edition)
The Wall Street Journal's Brody Mullins has a fascinating report in today's paper that suggests the Clinton campaign machine is--0nce again--raking in some serious cash from rather unusual sources.
Mr. Mullins investigative piece focuses on a "tiny, lime-green bungalow" in Daly City, California, which is home for the Paws, a Chinese-American family. According to campaign donation records, six members of the Paw family have donated $45,000 to Mrs. Clinton since 1995, and given a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates during the same period. That places the Paws among the Top 5 donors to the Clinton campaign, topping even the Maloof family of Las Vegas, which owns the Palms Casino and the Sacramento Kings basketball team, among other holdings.
More impressively, the Paws have apparently become major political donors without the wealth of the Maloof family, or the hedge fund and real estate tycoons who make up the rest of Mrs. Cllinton's Top 5. Public records reviewed by the Journal show that the Paws own a small gift shop. Additionally, William Paw, the family patriarch, works as a letter carrier, earning about $49,000 a year. His wife, Alice, is a homemaker. The couple's three grown children have jobs ranging from account manager at a software company, to school attendance "liaison" and mutual fund executive.
And, if you don't find that sort of financial acumen intriguing, here's another angle that raises more suspicions:
The Paws' political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign. He has hosted or co-hosted some of her most prominent money-raising events.
People who answered the phone and the door at the Paws' residence declined requests for comment last week. In an email last night, one of the Paws' sons, Winkle, said he had sometimes been asked by Mr. Hsu to make contributions, and sometimes he himself had asked family members to donate. But he added: "I have been fortunate in my investments and all of my contributions have been my money."
That's fine and dandy, but it doesn't explain why Mr. Hsu (a multi-millionaire who lives in New York) once listed the Paw home as his address, according to other public records reviewed by the WSJ. However, the paper's reporting did raise the ire of Mr. Hsu, his attorney, and a spokesman for the Clinton campaign:
Mr. Hsu, in an email last night wrote: "I have NEVER asked a single favor from any politician or any charity group. If I am NOT asking favors, why do I have to cheat...I've asked friends and colleagues of mine to give money out of their own pockets and sometimes they have agreed."
Lawrence Barcella, a Washington attorney representing Mr. Hsu, said in a separate email: "You are barking up the wrong tree. There is no factual support for this story and if Mr. Hsu's name was Smith or Jones, I don't believe it would be a story." He didn't elaborate.
A Clinton campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said in an email: "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton. During Mr. Hsu's many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question."
A former official with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) told the Journal that the unusual two-year pattern of donations "justifies a probe of possible violations of campaign-finance law, which forbid one person from reimbursing another to make contributions."
Officially, there are no records that Mr. Hsu reimbursed the Paws for their donations to the Democratic Party, and no indication that Mrs. Clinton ever met members of the family. As the Journal observes, in some cases the candidates are unaware of payments made on their behalf.
But there are compelling reasons for the FEC to take a look at these donations. Beyond the questions of how a middle-class family can make such large contributions--and why they follow the pattern of Mr. Hsu, there's the issue why the Paws suddenly became political activists. According to the Journal, the family never made a campaign contribution until the 2004 presidential election, when they began givign to John Kerry, and their donations correlated to those of Mr. Hsu.
Finally, the Journal doesn't raise another issue that bears scrutiny: is there any connection between this fund-raising activity and the infamous "PRC connection" highlighted in Year of the Rat, by Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II. Their book details the sordid relationship between the Clinton-Gore campaign and Chinese intelligence operatives, and others with ties to the People's Liberation Army. It was that relationship that brokered thousands of dollars in campaign contributions; meanwhile, senior administration officials--including President Clinton--played host to at least one PLA intelligence officer, along with Chinese arms merchants and others eager to gain political influence (and access to U.S. technology).
At this point, the only thing that the Paws have in common with those former Clinton donors is their ethnic Chinese background. But their sudden rise to prominence as donors to Mrs. Clinton--and other Democrats--certainly merits an FEC inquiry. It would also be helpful to know if the Paws (and Mr. Hsu) ever crossed paths with John Huang, Johnny Chung and other Chinese-Americans who raised money for the Clintons a decade ago. This has nothing to do with race; it has everything to do with how campaign money is raised, and whether any laws were broken.
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Castro: Clinton-Obama ticket 'invincible'
By Alexander Mooney
CNN Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Add another name to the list of political observers who think a Clinton-Obama ticket would be unbeatable: Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
In an editorial in Cuba's communist party newspaper, Granma, the ailing dictator called the pairing of the two White House hopefuls "invincible," according to an English translation on the paper's Web site.
Castro, who has overseen communist rule of Cuba since 1959, did, however, make it clear that he is no fan of the two Democrats' support of democratic reform in Cuba.
"Both of them feel the sacred duty of demanding 'a democratic government in Cuba,'" Castro wrote. "They are not making politics: they are playing a game of cards on a Sunday afternoon."
The two Democratic candidates actually disagree over America's policy toward Cuba.
Obama, a senator from Illinois, wants to grant Cuban-Americans "unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island." Such activities are strictly limited by current U.S. policy.
Meanwhile, Clinton, New York's junior senator, said through a spokesman that "we cannot talk about changes to U.S. policy" unless and until Castro passes from the scene and a new government demonstrates its intentions.
Castro also weighed in on the "will-he-or-won't-he" debate on former Vice President Al Gore's potential candidacy.
"I don't think he will do so," Castro said, but added that Gore, "better than anyone, he knows about the kind of catastrophe that awaits humanity if it continues along its current course."
Castro was not, however, entirely full of praise for the 2000 Democratic nominee, conceding, "When he was a candidate, he of course committed the error of yearning for "a democratic Cuba."
Castro, 81, has not appeared in public in over a year. Intestinal problems forced him to hand over power of the island to his brother, Raul, in July, 2006.
All AboutFidel Castro • Hillary Clinton • Barack Obama
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/08/28/castro.clinton.obama/index.html
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Big Source of Clinton's Cash
Is an Unlikely Address
Family's Donations
Closely Track Those
Of Top Fund-Raiser
By BRODY MULLINS
August 28, 2007; Page A3
DALY CITY, Calif. -- One of the biggest sources of political donations to Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tiny, lime-green bungalow that lies under the flight path from San Francisco International Airport.
Six members of the Paw family, each listing the house at 41 Shelbourne Ave. as their residence, have donated a combined $45,000 to the Democratic senator from New York since 2005, for her presidential campaign, her Senate re-election last year and her political action committee. In all, the six Paws have donated a total of $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, election records show.
CAMPAIGN 2008
• The Money Race: Compare fund-raising by Clinton, Giuliani, McCain, Obama and other major candidates. Second-quarter data
• Old vs. New Money: Fundraising is heavier than ever. Compare this race with past races.
• Complete coverageThat total ranks the house with residences in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan's Upper East Side among the top addresses to donate to the Democratic presidential front-runner over the past two years, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of donations listed with the Federal Election Commission.
It isn't obvious how the Paw family is able to afford such political largess. Records show they own a gift shop and live in a 1,280-square-foot house that they recently refinanced for $270,000. William Paw, the 64-year-old head of the household, is a mail carrier with the U.S. Postal Service who earns about $49,000 a year, according to a union representative. Alice Paw, also 64, is a homemaker. The couple's grown children have jobs ranging from account manager at a software company to "attendance liaison" at a local public high school. One is listed on campaign records as an executive at a mutual fund.
The Paws' political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign. He has hosted or co-hosted some of her most prominent money-raising events.
People who answered the phone and the door at the Paws' residence declined requests for comment last week. In an email last night, one of the Paws' sons, Winkle, said he had sometimes been asked by Mr. Hsu to make contributions, and sometimes he himself had asked family members to donate. But he added: "I have been fortunate in my investments and all of my contributions have been my money."
Mr. Hsu, in an email last night wrote: "I have NEVER asked a single favor from any politician or any charity group. If I am NOT asking favors, why do I have to cheat...I've asked friends and colleagues of mine to give money out of their own pockets and sometimes they have agreed."
DONATION DATA
See details on political donations from the Paw family, Norman Hsu and a handful of Mr. Hsu's business associates in New YorkLawrence Barcella, a Washington attorney representing Mr. Hsu, said in a separate email: "You are barking up the wrong tree. There is no factual support for this story and if Mr. Hsu's name was Smith or Jones, I don't believe it would be a story." He didn't elaborate.
A Clinton campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said in an email: "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton. During Mr. Hsu's many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question."
Kent Cooper, a former disclosure official with the Federal Election Commission, said the two-year pattern of donations justifies a probe of possible violations of campaign-finance law, which forbid one person from reimbursing another to make contributions.
"There are red lights all over this one," Mr. Cooper said.
There is no public record or indication Mr. Hsu reimbursed the Paw family for their political contributions.
For the 2008 election, individuals can donate a maximum of $4,600 per candidate -- $2,300 for a primary election and $2,300 for a general election -- and a total of $108,200 per election to all federal candidates and national political parties.
Six members of the Paw family list this house in Daly City, Calif., as their address.
In the wake of a 2002 law that set those limits, federal and state regulators and law-enforcement officials said they have seen a spike recently in the number of cases of individuals and companies illegally reimbursing others for campaign donations. Those cases don't necessarily implicate the candidates, who sometimes don't even appear to be aware of such payments executed on their behalf.
The 2002 law also raised penalties for infractions and included the prospect of prison sentences for offenders for the first time. That increased incentives for the FEC and federal prosecutors to investigate and prosecute infractions. Since the law was enacted, the FEC has collected millions of dollars in fines for illegal donations, including its largest-ever penalty, a $3.8 million levy against Freddie Mac last year.
According to public documents, Mr. Hsu once listed his address at the Paw home in Daly City, though it isn't clear if he ever lived there. He now lives in New York, according to campaign-finance records, on which he also lists a half-dozen apparel companies as his employer. In the campaign-finance forms, Mr. Hsu lists his companies as Next Components, Dilini Management, Because Men's Clothes and others.
He is on the board of directors of the New School in New York. News stories in the mid-1980s said he criticized trade policies that made it harder to import goods from China.
Mr. Hsu is also a major fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats. When Democrats won control of Congress in November, he threw a party at New York City hot spot Buddakan with many prominent party leaders. Press reports said that toward the end of the night, he grabbed the microphone from the deejay and shouted: "If you are supporters of Hillary for President 2008, you can stay. Otherwise, get out."
Mr. Hsu has pledged to raise $100,000 or more for Mrs. Clinton, earning the title of "HillRaiser" along with a few hundred other top financial backers of her campaign. Earlier this year, he co-hosted a fund-raiser that raised $1 million for Mrs. Clinton at the Beverly Hills, Calif., home of billionaire Ron Burkle. He is listed as a co-host for another Clinton fund-raiser next month in northern California.
The Paw family is just one set of donors whose political donations are similar to Mr. Hsu's. Several business associates of Mr. Hsu in New York have made donations to the same candidates, on the same dates for similar amounts as Mr. Hsu.
On four separate dates this year, the Paw family, Mr. Hsu and five of his associates gave Mrs. Clinton a total of $47,500. In all, the family, Mr. Hsu and his associates have given Mrs. Clinton $133,000 since 2005 and a total of nearly $720,000 to all Democratic candidates.
The Paw's Daly City home is a one-story house in a working-class suburb of San Francisco. On a recent day, a coiled garden hose rested next to a dilapidated garden with a half-dozen dried out plants. The din of traffic from a nearby freeway was occasionally drowned out by jumbo jets departing San Francisco International Airport.
William and Alice Paw are of Chinese descent. The entire family got their Social Security cards in California in 1982, according to state records. All but one of the Paws registered to vote as "nonpartisan." A San Mateo County elections official said that members of the Paw family vote "sporadically."
No one in the Paw family had ever given a campaign contribution before the 2004 presidential election, according to campaign-finance reports. Then, in July 2004, five members of the family contributed a total of $3,600 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. Five of the checks were dated July 27, 2004. About the same time, Mr. Hsu made his first donations to a political candidate, contributing the maximum amount allowed by law to Mr. Kerry in two separate checks, on July 21, 2004, and on Aug. 6.
From then on, the correlation of campaign donations between Mr. Hsu and the Paw family has continued. The first donations to Mrs. Clinton came Dec. 23, 2004, when Mr. Hsu and one Paw family member donated the then-maximum $4,000 to her Senate campaign in two $2,000 checks, campaign-finance records show. In March 2005, the individuals gave a total of $17,500 to Mrs. Clinton.
Since then, Mr. Hsu, his New York associates and the Paw family have continued to donate to Democratic candidates. This year, Alice Paw and four of the Paw children have donated the maximum $4,600 to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.
Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com
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WSJ
-- John Fund
In Case You Forgot Who John Huang Was...
Hillary Clinton suddenly has her own version of John Huang, the mysterious fund-raiser and former Clinton political appointee who was at the heart of her husband's 1996 campaign scandals. He's Norman Hsu, a wealthy New Yorker and Democratic fundraiser whose questionable political giving was the subject of an investigative report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Mr. Hsu also happens to be an official high-dollar "HillRaiser" for the Clinton campaign -- and, it turns out, a fugitive from justice since 1992, when he reportedly pleaded no contest to a charge of grand theft, agreed to serve three years in prison and then vanished.
How very reminiscent of the strange cast of characters who swirled around the 1996 Clinton campaign. At the center of the controversy over improper contributions and alleged links between the contributors and the Chinese government was James Riady, scion of the shadowy Hong Kong-based Lippo Group, who returned to Asia and never cooperated with investigators. Pauline Kanchanalak, whose $253,000 in contributions had to be returned by the DNC, decamped to her native Thailand. Little Rock restaurateur Charlie Trie, a major-league fund-raiser and recipient of wire transfers from the Bank of China in Hong Kong, took up residence in Beijing to avoid questioning.
Mr. Hsu appears to be following in the footsteps of Mr. Huang, a genius at finding contributors of apparent modest means to donate lavishly to the Clinton campaign. The Journal reported this week that among his prize catches was the family of William Paw, a mail carrier in Daly City, Calif. None of the Paws ever donated to any candidate before 2004, but seven adults in the Paw family have donated $213,000 to Democratic candidates in the last three years, including $55,000 to Mrs. Clinton. In Mr. Huang's day, an Indonesian gardener and his wife, despite being foreign nationals, donated $450,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 1996 and then suddenly had to leave for Jakarta.
E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., the Washington lawyer who represents Mr. Hsu, says his client had nothing to do with the 1996 fundraising scandal and is simply a big fan of the Clintons and Democrats in general. As for that pesky grand theft charge, Mr. Barcella says his client doesn't recall pleading guilty to any criminal charge or having an obligation to serve jail time.
Hmm. Similar memory failures were rampant in the 1996 scandal. Witnesses called before the Senate investigative committee chaired by then-Senator Fred Thompson suffered collective amnesia on just about any subject much beyond their names, titles and Social Security numbers.
To its credit, the Clinton campaign does remember Mr. Hsu and is bravely defending him -- for now. "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic Party and its candidates, including Sen. Clinton," said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, on Tuesday. Of course, that was before the latest revelations about Mr. Hsu's criminal record. No doubt he will now be placed in the same memory hole as Mr. Huang and all the other fundraisers for the Clinton political machine whose tactics proved embarrassing.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hsu29aug29,0,3184101,full.story?coll=la-home-center
From the Los Angeles Times
Democratic fundraiser is a fugitive in plain sight
California authorities have sought businessman Norman Hsu for 15 years. Since 2004, he has carved out a place of honor raising cash for such candidates as Hillary Rodham Clinton.
By Chuck Neubauer and Robin Fields
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
August 29, 2007
WASHINGTON — For the last 15 years, California authorities have been trying to figure out what happened to a businessman named Norman Hsu, who pleaded no contest to grand theft, agreed to serve up to three years in prison and then seemed to vanish.
"He is a fugitive," Ronald Smetana, who handled the case for the state attorney general, said in an interview. "Do you know where he is?"
Hsu, it seems, has been hiding in plain sight, at least for the last three years.
Since 2004, one Norman Hsu has been carving out a prominent place of honor among Democratic fundraisers. He has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions into party coffers, much of it earmarked for presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
In addition to making his own contributions, Hsu has honed the practice of assembling packets of checks from contributors who bear little resemblance to the usual Democratic deep pockets: A self-described apparel executive with a variety of business interests, Hsu has focused on delivering hefty contributions from citizens who live modest lives and are neophytes in the world of campaign giving.
On Tuesday, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr. -- a Washington lawyer who represents the Democratic fundraiser -- confirmed that Hsu was the same man who was involved in the California case. Barcella said his client did not remember pleading to a criminal charge and facing the prospect of jail time. Hsu remembers the episode as part of a settlement with creditors when he also went through bankruptcy, Barcella said.
The bulk of the campaign dollars raised by major parties comes from the same sources: business groups, labor unions and other well-heeled interests with a long-term need to win friends in the political arena.
But the appetite for cash has grown so great that politicians are constantly pressured to find new sources of contributions. Hsu's case illustrates the sometimes-bizarre results of that tendency to push the envelope, often in ways the candidates know nothing about.
As a Democratic rainmaker, Hsu -- who graduated from UC Berkeley and the Wharton School of Business -- is credited with donating nearly $500,000 to national and local party candidates and their political committees in the last three years. He earned a place in the Clinton campaign's "HillRaiser" group by pledging to raise more than $100,000 for her presidential bid.
Records show that Hsu helped raise an additional $500,000 from other sources for Clinton and other Democrats.
"Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic Party and its candidates, including Sen. Clinton," Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the campaign, said Tuesday.
"During Mr. Hsu's many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question or to return them."
Wolfson did not immediately respond Tuesday night to questions about Hsu's legal problems.
Though he is a fugitive, Hsu has hardly kept a low profile. The website camerarts.com, which sells photographs taken at political events, features shots of Hsu at several fundraisers he hosted at Manhattan's elegant St. Regis hotel -- including a June 2005 luncheon for Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento).
Hsu lives in New York City. Efforts to contact him were unsuccessful. Barcella said Hsu chose to respond through his lawyer.
Records show that Hsu has emerged as one of the Democrats' most successful "bundlers," rounding up groups of contributors and packaging their checks together before delivering the funds to campaign officials. Individuals can give a total of $4,600 to a single candidate during an election cycle, $2,300 for the primaries and $2,300 for the general election.
One example of the kind of first-time donors Hsu has worked with is the Paw family of Daly City, Calif., which is headed by William Paw, a mail carrier, and his wife, Alice, who is listed as a homemaker.
The Paws -- seven adults, most of whom live together in a small house near San Francisco International Airport -- apparently had never donated to national candidates until 2004. Over a three-year period, they gave $213,000, including $55,000 to Clinton and $14,000 to candidates for state-level offices in New York.
The family includes a son, Winkle Paw, who Barcella said was in business with Hsu. Another son works for a Bay Area school board, while one daughter works for a hospital and another for a computer company.
"They have the financial wherewithal to make their own donations," Barcella said. "It didn't come from Norman."
He said that Hsu had known the Paws for a decade.
"Norman never reimbursed anyone for their contribution," Barcella said. It is a violation of federal law for one person to reimburse donors for campaign contributions.
Hsu's bundling of contributions from the Paws and others was first reported Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal.
Records show Hsu also solicited funds from three members of a New York family that helps run a plastics packaging plant in Pennsylvania. They have given more than $200,000 in the last three years.
Danny Lee, a manager at the packaging firm, has given $95,000 to federal Democratic campaigns -- $19,500 of which went to Clinton. Yu Fen Huang, who shares a New York house with Lee, has given $52,200 to Democrats, $8,800 to Clinton. Soe Lee has contributed $54,000 to Democrats, $8,800 to Clinton.
The Paws, the Lees and Huang did not return telephone calls seeking comment on their donations.
Over the years, Hsu and his associates have given to Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Barack Obama of Illinois and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. Obama and Biden, like Clinton, are seeking the presidential nomination.
Hsu's legal troubles date back almost 20 years.
Beginning in 1989, court records show, he began raising what added up to more than $1 million from investors, purportedly to buy latex gloves; investors were told Hsu had a contract to resell the gloves to a major American business.
In 1991, Hsu was charged with grand theft. Prosecutors said there were no latex gloves and no contract to sell them.
Hsu pleaded no contest to one grand theft charge and agreed to accept up to three years in prison. He disappeared, Smetana said, after failing to show up for a sentencing hearing. Bench warrants were issued for his arrest but he was never found, Smetana said.
chuck.neubauer@latimes.com
robin.fields@latimes.com
Times staff writer Dan Morain in Sacramento and researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
The Plot Thickens
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an illuminating article which suggested that the Clinton/China fund-raising machine was back, and operating in high gear. Analyzing campaign contribution lists and other public records, Journal reporter Brody Mullins discovered that some of Mrs. Clinton's biggest contributors lived in a modest bungalow in Daly City, California, the home of a Chinese-American clan. Collectively, six members of the Paw family have given $200,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005, and $45,000 to Hillary Clinton during the same period.
These donations are more remarkable since the Paws appear to be a middle-class family. The father makes $49,000 a year as a letter carrier; his wife is a homemaker. Their four adult children have jobs ranging from mutual fund executive, to school attendance officer. Yet, the Paws can not only meet their monthly bills in a high-cost-of-living area (San Francisco), they also donate sizable sums to the Democratic Party.
But, as Mr. Mullins reports, the Paws donations are attracting scrutiny for other reasons, too. The family apparently never made a political contribution until 2005, they rapidly moved to the upper echelons of Democratic donors. Additionally, contributions for the Paws seem to track with those of Norman Hsu, a Chinese-American businessman who is a major Clinton fund-raiser. Interesting, Mr. Hsu (who controls a half-dozen clothing manufacturing companies) once listed the Paws' modest home as his address.
While the Federal Election Commission considers a potential probe of the Paws' donations, the Los Angeles Times has discovered that Norman Hsu has a slightly checkered past. Turns out that the Democratic fund-raiser is also a wanted fugitive; he skipped out on a three-year prison sentence almost fifteen years ago, after entering a "no contest" plea on grand theft charges:
Hsu's legal troubles date back almost 20 years.Beginning in 1989, court records show, he began raising what added up to more than $1 million from investors, purportedly to buy latex gloves; investors were told Hsu had a contract to resell the gloves to a major American business.
In 1991, Hsu was charged with grand theft. Prosecutors said there were no latex gloves and no contract to sell them.Hsu pleaded no contest to one grand theft charge and agreed to accept up to three years in prison.
He disappeared after failing to show up for a sentencing hearing. Bench warrants were issued for his arrest but he was never found. Ronald Smetana, the prosecutor who handled the case for the state attorney general, described Hsu as a fugitive. "Do you know where he is?" Smetana asked.
Turns out that Hsu has been hiding in plain sight, hosting high-profile fund-raisers for Democratic candidates and raising thousands in campaign donations since 2004. According to the LA Times, Hsu and his associates have, over the years, raised money for some of the biggest names in the Democratic Party, including, Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Barack Obama of Illinois and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. Like Clinton, Obama and Biden are also seeking their party's presidential nomination.
With Hsu's criminal past now exposed, we're waiting to see if California authorities will finally arrest him and send him to prison. We're also wondering if any of the Democratic pols who took Hsu's money will return the contributions, given what we know about their donor's former crimes. And most importantly, we're watching the FEC, to see if they mount a serious investigation into the Hsu case. As a former FEC official told the WSJ, "there are red flags all over this one."
Likewise, we'd also like to know about any ties between Mr. Hsu, his associates, and the Chinese fund-raising machine that was instrumental in Bill Clinton's presidential victories of 1992 and 1996. That operation raised millions of dollars from individuals and organizations with ties to the Beijing government. It was later revealed that PRC intelligence agents actually met with Mr. Clinton in the White House, part of a massive influence-peddling campaign mounted by the Beijing government and its military.
While no links have been established between Mr. Hsu and the John Huang/Charley Trie operation of the mid-1990s, an inquiry into possible contacts and relationships is clearly in order. The last Democratic fund-raising scandal resulted in the compromise of sensitive missile technology (primarily through the Hughes-Loral deal), and John Huang's participation in secret CIA briefings, thanks to his post as a senior Commerce Department official. Huang later pleaded guilty to charges of making illegal contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1999. Deposed in a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, Huang "took the 5th" more than 2,000 times when asked if he had ties to Chinese intelligence. Readers will recall that Mr. Huang was a long-time employee of Indonesia's powerful Lippo Group, an organization with proven ties to Beijing's intelligence establishment.
Where does the trail of Norman Hsu and the Paw family lead? The American people have a right to know.
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Was/is the Lippo Group related to the Riadys of Indonesia, the same Riady's who gave $700,000 to Webster Hubbell for a consulting contract for which he did nothing after he got out of jail for taking the rap for the billing fraud at Hillery's law firm in Arkansas-- the same fraud for which the billing records were found in her office in the White House a couple of years after they were subpoenaed?
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http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/05/05/hubbell/
Hubbell Explains Riady Money In Latest Tapes
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, May 5) -- In newly released tapes of his prison conversations, Clinton confidant Webster Hubbell describes something he has been silent on until now: how he came to work for the Riady family of Indonesia.
Hubbell, talking with his attorney, describes how he got $100,000 from the Lippo group, a multinational firm controlled by the Riadys, who were major supporters of President Bill Clinton.
A L S O :
Hear Hubbell's prison telephone calls
Hubbell suggested that John Huang, then a Lippo employee, helped set up and attend early meetings that led to the big-money retainer.
At the time, Hubbell said, Huang still worked for Lippo and had not started his job at the Commerce Department. Later, Huang went on to become a Democratic Party fund-raiser and now stands at the center of Justice Department and congressional investigations into allegations of illegal overseas contributions to the Democrats.
Hubbell also disclosed that James Riady, son of the Lippo patriarch, wanted him to go to Indonesia.
"And as James was encouraging me to come to Indonesia until John was working for Lippo. He was the contact person in trying to set that up and arrange it," Hubbell explained.
For months, prosecutors have been looking at consulting fees that Hubbell received, including the Riady money, wondering whether it served as "hush money" to buy Hubbell's silence on Whitewater-related matters.
Hubbell has declined to publicly talk about his clients and what work he did for them. But when he was indicted last week for tax fraud in connection with payments, a spokesman for Independent Counsel Ken Starr said Hubbell "performed little or no work for some of these payments."
In the latest tapes, Hubbell insists that no one bought his silence.
At one point, he tells his sister, "You know me, I have a hard time saying anything bad about the devil."
Hubbell, in another conversation, tells his wife, Suzy, "We know that's not true," as they discussed allegations that he was bought off with no-work legal fees.
The money came from "people who befriended me. I provided services to them," Hubbell says on the tapes.
In general, the latest batch of tapes paint a more favorable picture of Hubbell and the Clintons than the excerpts that Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) released last week. Democrats furiously attacked Burton then for what they called partisan alterations and omissions, while Burton claimed he was only trying to protect Hubbell's privacy.
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linton Donor Under a Cloud in Fraud Case
by MIKE McINTIRE and LESLIE EATON
Published: August 30, 2007
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said yesterday that it would give to charity $23,000 it had received from a prominent Democratic donor, and review thousands of dollars more that he had raised, after learning that the authorities in California had a warrant for his arrest stemming from a 1991 fraud case.
The donor, Norman Hsu, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates since 2003, and was slated to be co-host next month for a Clinton gala featuring the entertainer Quincy Jones.
The event would not have been unusual for Mr. Hsu, a businessman from Hong Kong who moves in circles of power and influence, serving on the board of a university in New York and helping to bankroll Democratic campaigns.
But what was not widely known was that Mr. Hsu, who is in the apparel business in New York, has been considered a fugitive since he failed to show up in a San Mateo County courtroom about 15 years ago to be sentenced for his role in a scheme to defraud investors, according to the California attorney general’s office.
Mr. Hsu had pleaded no contest to one count of grand theft and was facing up to three years in prison.
The travails of Mr. Hsu have proved an embarrassment for the Clinton campaign, which has strived to project an image of rectitude in its fund-raising and to dispel any lingering shadows of past episodes of tainted contributions.
Already, Mrs. Clinton’s opponents were busy trying to rekindle remembrances of the 1996 Democratic fund-raising scandals, in which Asian moneymen were accused of funneling suspect donations into Democratic coffers as President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were running for re-election.
Some Clinton donors said yesterday that they did not expect the Hsu matter to hurt Mrs. Clinton unless a pattern of problematic fund-raising or compromised donors emerged, which would raise questions about the campaign’s vetting of donors. Mr. Hsu’s legal problems were first reported yesterday by The Los Angeles Times; The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday about his bundling of questionable contributions.
“Everyone is trying to make the implications that it’s Chinese money, that it’s the Al Gore thing all over again, but I haven’t seen any proof of that,” said John A. Catsimatidis, a leading donor and fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton in New York.
Some donations connected to Mr. Hsu raise questions about his bundling activities, although there is no evidence he did anything improper. The Wall Street Journal reported that contributors he solicited included members of an extended family in Daly City, Calif., who had given $213,000 to candidates since 2004, even though some of them did not appear to have much money.
A lawyer for Mr. Hsu, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., has said that Mr. Hsu was not the source of any of the money he raised from other people, which would be a violation of federal election laws.
On his own, Mr. Hsu wrote checks totaling $255,970 to a variety of Democratic candidates and committees since 2004. Even though he was a bundler for Mrs. Clinton, his largess was spread across the Democratic Party and included $5,000 to the political action committee of Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois.
Last month, Mr. Hsu was among the honored guests at a fund-raiser for Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, given by Stephen A. Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group at the New York Yacht Club.
Al Franken, a Democratic Senate candidate in Minnesota, said he would divest his campaign of Mr. Hsu’s donations, as did Representatives Michael M. Honda and Doris O. Matsui of California and Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, all Democrats.
Mr. Hsu’s success on the political circuit was not always matched by success in business.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Mr. Hsu came to the United States when he was 18 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, as a computer science major. He later received an M.B.A. at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, according to a brief biography that appeared in apparel industry trade publications in 1986.
With a group of partners from Hong Kong, Mr. Hsu started a sportswear company in 1982 called Laveno that went bankrupt two years later, not long after he left the company. From that, he cycled through several other enterprises, mostly men’s sportswear, under the Wear This, Base and Foreign Exchange labels.
Mr. Hsu’s career hit a low in 1989, when he began raising $1 million from investors as part of a plan to buy and resell latex gloves.
Ronald Smetana, a lawyer with the California attorney general’s office, said Mr. Hsu was charged with stealing the investors’ money after it turned out he never bought any gloves and had no contract to resell them.
When Mr. Hsu was to attend a sentencing hearing, he faxed a letter to his lawyer saying he had to leave town for an emergency and asking that the court date be rescheduled, Mr. Smetana said.
He failed to show up for the rescheduled appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. That was the last that prosecutors saw of Mr. Hsu.
“We assumed he would go back to Hong Kong, where he could recede into anonymity,” Mr. Smetana said.
The California attorney general’s office declined to comment on how it intends to pursue Mr. Hsu.
Mr. Hsu issued a statement yesterday, saying he was “surprised to learn that there appears to be an outstanding warrant” and insisting that he had “not sought to evade any of my obligations and certainly not the law.”
“I would not consciously subject any of the candidates and causes in which I believe to any harm through my actions,” he said.
At some point, Mr. Hsu resurfaced in New York, where he was connected to several clothing-related businesses, according to campaign finance records, which list his occupation variously as an apparel consultant, clothing designer, retailer or company president. He also began to donate to the Democratic Party, and arranged for friends to do the same.
He has been referred to in news accounts of campaign fund-raising events as an “apparel magnate” and his quick rise in the New York political and social scene — as well as his open checkbook — catapulted him into the big leagues.
He became a trustee at the New School and was elected to the Board of Governors of Eugene Lang College there. He endowed a scholarship in his name at the college and was co-chairman of a benefit awards dinner in 2006 that featured Mrs. Clinton, who had secured a $950,000 earmark for a mentoring program at the college for disadvantaged city youths.
Asked yesterday about Mr. Hsu, Brian Krapf, a spokesman for the New School, said in a statement that “it is inappropriate to talk about a matter involving one of our trustees, particularly while we are still gathering all the facts.”
Patrick Healy contributed reporting.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/30/the-hillraisers-another-day-another-fugitive/
Another day, another fugitive!
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Political Journal WSJ
Crime Without Punishment
The Federal Election Commission has just found that Americans Coming Together, a top union group active in the 2004 presidential election, spent $100 million illegally on federal election activity that year. The agency imposed a fine of just $775,000 -- and not one dime will go back to the union workers who financed ACT's illegal activities with their forced payment of dues.
This is a textbook example of what's wrong with federal election laws. The FEC takes years to catch up with those who break the law, then administers a slap on the wrist on the grounds that ACT disbanded after the 2004 election and won't be engaging in further election activity.
In reality, such groups may disband but their supporters and personnel have every intention of remaining active in politics under another brand name. That perfectly describes the ACT shell game.
Its largest donor was the Service Employees International Union, one of the most politically active labor unions. Its largest non-union donor was billionaire George Soros. And who was the group's president? None other than Harold Ickes, a long-time functionary of the Clinton machine who served as Bill Clinton's deputy White House chief of staff. Mr. Ickes is now a major player in the huge fundraising apparatus of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who unsurprisingly has run into her own campaign finance scandal this week. One of her top donors, Norman Hsu, was revealed to be a fugitive from justice and may have illegally laundered campaign contributions to the Clinton campaign through "straw" or fake donors.
It's clear the FEC can't be relied upon to report on the law-skirting by major political players before voters render their judgment at the polls in 2008. Nor are its sanctions much of a deterrent to those playing for big stakes on the presidential stage. Mrs. Clinton's latest scandal appears to be a near-replica of the 1996 Clinton fundraising scandals, in which 120 people either fled the country to avoid questioning, took the Fifth Amendment or otherwise failed to cooperate with investigators.
The FEC enforcement action against ACT came after a complaint three years ago by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Meanwhile, the news media resolutely ignored the story, insisting that looking into the modus operandi of the Clinton machine represented "old news." Here's hoping the press wakes up and realizes the time for vigilant reporting on the 2008 election excesses of all parties is before Americans vote, not years afterward.
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A New Member of 'Exiles for Hillary'?
Norman Hsu, the fugitive from justice who may have illegally funneled over a million
dollars to Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats, has apparently gone missing.
The New York Times tried to find the elusive Mr. Hsu this week and ran into a stone
wall.
There are no offices for Mr. Hsu at any of the addresses he listed for his
companies, and at the elegant residential tower that he gives as his personal
address, Times reporters were told he moved out two years ago.
Even E. Lawrence Barcella, Mr. Hsu's lawyer, seemed to be abandoning his client. He
said that Mr. Hsu was getting a California lawyer to represent him over a warrant
that was issued there in the 1990s when Mr. Hsu failed to show up for a court
hearing after pleading no contest to grand theft charges. Mr. Barcella carefully
declined to comment on the whereabouts of his client and stressed that he won't be
handling Mr. Hsu's argument with California authorities: "On that matter, he will be
represented by California counsel."
All of this is very reminiscent of the 1996 Clinton fundraising scandal. A total of
120 witnesses either fled the country, pleaded the Fifth Amendment or otherwise were
unavailable for questioning. In the end, a total of 14 people were found guilty on
various charges relating to the scandal. No wonder the Hillary Clinton campaign
wants to change the subject away from Mr. Hsu.
-- John Fund
Opinion Journal WSJ
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/31/nyt-lat-background-check-on-hillary-donor-turns-up-new-and-exciting-shadiness/
The MSM takes notice, turns over a few rocks. :-o
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What Women Want
How the GOP can woo the ladies.
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, August 31, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Hillary has herself. Barack has Oprah. John Edwards has his wife, Elizabeth. And what secret weapon do Republican presidential candidates have to curry the all-important "women's vote"?
(Cue silence.)
Expect to hear a lot about lady voters over the next few months, though most of it from Democrats. Women make up 60% of the left's primary electorate, and the front-runners are already going to the mat for their vote. It's why Ms. Clinton has six full-time staffers for women's outreach; why Mr. Obama sports a women's "policy committee"; and why Bill Richardson recently told a cheering mob that "women are better workers than men" (you go, Bill!).
Come next year one of these folks will be the nominee, and at that point will train a formidable outreach machine on the general female electorate. They'll mean business. Democrats understand that they need women to offset what tends to be a permanent advantage for Republicans among male voters. Al Gore's 54% women's vote got him a crack at the Supreme Court. John Kerry's 51% women's vote only got him back to the Senate.
A smart Republican candidate would be doing Twister moves to deny Democrats those votes. Yet what's extraordinary is that no GOP contender has yet recognized the huge opportunity to redefine "women's" politics for the 21st century. That's a double failing given that the GOP could win modern women by doing little more than tailoring their beliefs in freer markets to the problems women struggle most with today.
The Democrats' own views of what counts for "women's issues" are stuck back in the disco days, about the time Ms. Clinton came of political age. Under the title "A Champion for Women," the New York senator's Web site promises the usual tired litany of "equal pay" and a "woman's right to choose." Mr. Richardson pitches a new government handout for women on "family leave" and waxes nostalgic for the Equal Rights Amendment. Give these Boomers some bell bottoms and "The Female Eunuch," and they'd feel right at home. Polls show Ms. Clinton today gets her best female support from women her age and up.
The rest of the female population has migrated into 2007. Undoubtedly quite a few do care about abortion rights and the Violence Against Women Act. But for the 60% of women who today both scramble after a child and hold a job, these culture-war touchpoints aren't their top voting priority. Their biggest concerns, not surprisingly, hew closely to those of their male counterparts: the war in Iraq, health care, the economy. But following close behind are issues that are more unique to working women and mothers. Therein rests the GOP opportunity.
Here's an example of how a smart Republican could morph an old-fashioned Democratic talking point into a modern-day vote winner. Ms. Clinton likes to bang on about "inequality" in pay. The smart conservative would explain to a female audience that there indeed is inequality, and that the situation is grave. Only the bad guy isn't the male boss; it's the progressive tax code.
Most married women are second-earners. That means their income is added to that of their husband's, and thus taxed at his highest marginal rate. So the married woman working as a secretary keeps less of her paycheck than the single woman who does the exact same job. This is the ultimate in "inequality," yet Democrats constantly promote the very tax code that punishes married working women. In some cases, the tax burdens and child-care expenses for second-earners are so burdensome they can't afford a career. But when was the last time a Republican pointed out that Ms. Clinton was helping to keep ladies in the kitchen?
For that matter, when was the last time a GOP candidate pointed out that their own free-market policies could help alleviate this problem? Should President Bush's tax cuts expire, tens of thousands of middle-class women will see more of their paychecks disappear into the maw of their husband's higher bracket. A really brave candidate would go so far as to promise eliminating this tax bias altogether. Under a flat tax, second-earner women would pay the same rate as unmarried women and the guy down the hall. Let Democrats bang the worn-out drum of a "living wage." Republicans should customize their low-tax message to explain how they directly put more money into female pockets.
Here's another one: Ask almost any working woman what the toughest part of her life is, and she'll say the complications of scheduling both work and family life. What makes that task so tough is a dusty piece of legislation called the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that hourly workers who put in more than 40 hours a week get overtime. Some women like overtime. But in a 1995 poll, an extraordinary 81% said they'd prefer compensatory time off. Put another way, many women would like to pack 45 hours into the first four days of work, then knock off early on Friday to catch Jimmy's soccer match.
The mod term for this is "flex time" and Democrats pay it lip service. But what the left won't mention--and Republicans have failed to mention--is that Democrats are the obstacle to changing the overtime law. Organized labor likes the 40-hour-week law, and union leaders prefer to be the ones to arrange any flex-time agreements on behalf of their members. So in 1997, when Republican Sen. John Ashcroft put forward legislation to allow flexible scheduling in the private workforce, it was Democrats, at the beck of unions, who killed it. Some intelligent GOP candidate might want to consider adopting the flex-time cause, or at the least re-crafting the usual "flexible labor law" jargon into real-world examples of how flexibility helps women.
The majority of health-care decisions are made by women, yet neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mitt Romney has explained how their innovative proposals to put individuals back in charge of care would help women in particular. No candidate has explained that only through private Social Security accounts will women ever see the full fruits of their payroll taxes.
This isn't to suggest Republicans treat women as a "special interest" or a monolithic bloc. But there are votes to be had for the candidate who owns the quotidian concerns of this population. And there are future generations of women voters to be won by the party that progresses beyond the stale rhetoric of women's "rights" and crafts a new language of women's "choice" and "opportunity" and "ownership."
Come on guys; the women are waiting.
Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, based in Washington. Her column appears Fridays.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/09/01/lat-wonders-how-could-hillary-not-have-known-about-hsu/
The MSM seems to take this story seriously. About time, I guess.
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One can only hope.
Anyway, on a more reflective note on the whole process, here's this:
WSJ
Presidential Leapfrog
The nominating process gets curiouser and curiouser.
Saturday, September 1, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
The way things are going, the first votes in the 2008 Presidential election may yet be cast in 2007, more than 10 months before the national elections next November. This is not an improvement.
In a little-noticed move this week, Wyoming Republicans moved their party conventions to January 5, beating out Michigan, which just moved its primaries to January 15. State laws in Iowa and New Hampshire require those states, in turn, to leapfrog Michigan and Wyoming, potentially pushing one or both elections into December. So voters in those two states might have to interrupt their holidays to participate in a Presidential primary campaign better held during a much less busy season.
This maneuvering continues a Presidential election process that is changing in ways that make it both longer, yet paradoxically less reflective, than ever. Sixty years ago, Presidential nominees were chosen largely by delegates to conventions held in late summer, between 60 to 90 days before the actual vote. That system gave us FDR, Truman and Ike, to name three better than average Presidents. It also gave us Warren Harding--but then no system is perfect.
In any event, this was deemed too beholden to insiders, so the Progressives lobbied for primaries to open the nominating process to more voters. Yet those primaries were also spread out, from March through the early summer, allowing candidates to adjust to a defeat, raise money between primaries, and even to enter at a late date.
President Lyndon Johnson didn't drop out of the race in 1968 until March, after Eugene McCarthy's surprise showing in the New Hampshire primary. Bobby Kennedy entered the race that same month, and he only emerged as a real threat to the nomination after winning in California in early June. (He was assassinated on the night of that victory.)
On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan lost to President Gerald Ford in New Hampshire in 1976. But he turned his campaign around with a victory in North Carolina in late March, based in part on his opposition to the Panama Canal treaty. That began a series of primary victories that left him only a handful of delegates short of winning the GOP nomination.
Both scenarios would be impossible this election cycle, when the party nominees will be decided in a flurry of primaries that may transpire over less than a month. The big states have tired of the attention devoted to puny Iowa and New Hampshire, and so have elbowed themselves into an earlier, and they hope more decisive, role. The candidates have responded by kicking off their campaigns even earlier. Some have been running for a year already.
Republican Fred Thompson--expected to formally announce next week--will test the proposition that you have to start that early. But he's going to have to raise a lot of money very fast under restrictive campaign-finance laws to be competitive in so many states so quickly after New Hampshire and Iowa. Only someone already famous--Al Gore or Newt Gingrich--could still decide to enter later this fall and have a chance.
To put it another way, this process is both too long and too constricted. It is too long in the sense that it starts the Presidential race more than two years before the actual vote. This shrinks the time for actual "governing," to the extent this still happens in Washington, with Senators like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden having to calibrate every utterance for its impact on their nomination chances. This has only made it harder this year for the parties to find any bipartisan common ground on Iraq, for example. Then once the nominees are all but picked next year on February 5, we will have another long 10 months of campaigning before November. No wonder the political pros call this "the permanent campaign."
But the process is also too constricted, because once the primary voting starts, it will be over in a flash. This makes it harder for a dark horse candidate to break through; even with an early victory, it might be too late to raise enough money to compete in the fast-following giant states.
It also gives Americans less chance to scrutinize the nominees once the actual balloting begins. Sure, voters may know the names of most of those who are running, but average, rational citizens lack the time or interest to focus until an election is nigh. A nominating primary gantlet of three to four weeks is the political equivalent of a blur. This means that crucial facts about a candidate's experience and character may not be discovered until he has already wrapped up the nomination.
We're not sure what can be done about all this. Both parties have conspired in the past in moving up the primary dates for their own competitive reasons (such as getting the intra-party disputes out of the way early when taking on a sitting President). And this year, both parties have threatened to punish state parties that move up their primaries to crowd the early small states--to no avail.
Perhaps it will all turn out for the best this time around. But if the process leaves one or both parties lukewarm about their nominees, it could also open the field for a third party candidate to make a run. This is the scenario that New York's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been eyeing. Pressure could also build for Congress to intervene and set some new campaign limits--which, in the usual Congressional fashion, could make things worse. It's not too early for the parties to start thinking how to organize things better for the 2012 campaign. On present course, they are making us nostalgic for conventions and smoke-filled rooms.
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His First Coming Feels Like a Second Coming
Fred Thompson will announce for president this week in the same unorthodox manner he ran his non-campaign.
He is skipping Wednesday night's Fox News GOP primary debate, but will air a 30-second ad on Fox just before the debate directing viewers to his Web cast campaign announcement the next day. On Thursday night, he will appear on NBC's "Tonight Show," whose six million viewers dwarf any debate audience, to preview his candidacy with host Jay Leno. In the following few days, he will attempt to lay to rest rumors that he is a slacker as a campaigner by making a dozen appearances in the key states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
All of this won't satisfy a grouchy media that became annoyed with Mr. Thompson's endless delays in launching his campaign and lovingly highlighted the ouster of several staffers. But Mr. Thompson is betting that voters have more patience and only now are beginning to pay attention to the candidates.
At least he will be in fighting trim. Using a personal trainer, he has lost weight and toned up, such that some voters may have to look twice to recognize the same man who will still be appearing on cable TV this fall in his "Law and Order" role (cable isn't covered by the federal equal-time rules that limit appearances by candidates on broadcast network shows). Those reruns air so frequently that voters are more likely to see Mr. Thompson in his fictional role than they are likely to see his presidential campaign ads.
-- John Fund
Early Pollsters Waste Their Money, Your Time
The presidential race begins in earnest this week as the hopefuls embark on a four-month marathon that will last until the actual voting in Iowa and New Hampshire sometime in early January.
While handicappers pore over the national polls showing Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani out front, it's important to remember just how fluid the contests for each party's nomination have been historically. At a similar point in the 2004 election calendar (i.e. four months before the Iowa caucus), John Kerry was drawing only 9% support among Democrats nationally and pundits were practically writing his presidential obituary. Then Mr. Kerry won the key Iowa caucus and quickly soared to 52% support nationally, eventually winning the nomination.
On the GOP side, large numbers of GOP voters traditionally make up their minds only in the final week before Iowa and New Hampshire. Sometimes they go with the frontrunner, other times they surprise and give a challenger such as John McCain in 2000 a big boost.
Here are some numbers showing just how late many voters wait before deciding how to cast their ballots. In 1996, when Bob Dole was battling Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander in Iowa, exit polls found a full 23% of caucus voters made up their minds in the last three days before voting and another 19% made up their minds in the preceding week. In New Hampshire, 23% made up their minds on Election Day itself, and another 42% in the week prior. That means two-thirds of GOP voters made up their minds in the final days of the primary campaign.
In 2000, it was much the same. Iowa wasn't a factor that year, because John McCain chose not to challenge George W. Bush there. In New Hampshire, 50% of GOP voters decided in the last week, with 14% making up their minds on Election Day itself. In the key South Carolina primary, 9% made up their minds on Election Day with the total of those deciding in the last week reaching 38%.
What does this mean? Simply that while strong national polling numbers help fundraisers raise more cash for popular candidates and help build media attention, early polls are not nearly as important as what happens in the home stretch in the key primary campaigns. Voters still have the final say and they often take their own sweet time making up their minds.
Opinion Journal/WSJ
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Thanks Marc for the post on Fred Thompson. I support Fred at this time for reasons I already wrote and will likely elaborate on over time. Mostly because I'm a conservative and I find him to be an unapologetic conservative, unlike hyphonated-compassionate-conservatives and Republicans in our purple state who brag about how much like Democrats they are. That said, I wanted to enter this negative critique of Fred Thompson into the record here from a writer whose opinion I respect, John Hinderacker at Powerlineblog last week. Basically he says that something is missing with Fred. Where I disagree I think is that he doesn't seem to give credit for some very direct and bold written positions that Fred has delivered also via radio and internet that will form a foundation for his candidacy in both the primaries and the general election. Also I predict Thompson is the candidate who will align most closely with proposals that Newt is generating which may answer the objection: "Nor does he offer unique solutions to problems...". To his credit, Hinderacker was face to face with Thompson and has been watching his pre-candidacy pretty closely. I would say the guys at Powerline lean pro-Mitt Romney and are very respectful of Giuliani though they claim to be undecided.
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August 27, 2007
My Dinner With Fred
(by John Hinderaker)
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/08/018298.php
Actually, given the exigencies of Presidential campaigns, Fred Thompson left before dinner. But I did have the opportunity to be part of a small group who chatted with him and asked him questions.
Thompson was in Minnesota today for a variety of functions, including an appearance at the Minnesota State Fair. That convinced me that he is in the race to stay. No one would work the state fair circuit unless he were serious about the race.
My own impression of Thompson was similar to the image I already had of him. He's good; he has a nice, folksy manner, some good lines, a sincere, fatherly demeanor, and comes across as a solid conservative of the border-state variety.
Yet I still think there is something missing. Thompson gives long answers to questions, and a point often comes where his folksiness gives way to ennui. He rarely shows much--any--intensity. Thomson presents himself as the solution to intractable problems like entitlements and the world-wide Islamofascist threat. Yet one misses the spark of fire, of energy, that would generate confidence that Thompson is really the man to get the job done. Nor does he offer unique solutions to problems; his proposals are, like his persona, of the generic conservative variety.
There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily. But in the end, Thompson's candidacy rests on the premise that there is something about him that will rally millions of otherwise uncommitted voters to the conservative banner. Maybe there is; maybe that folksiness goes a long way. If in the end I'm convinced that he is the strongest Republican candidate, I'll support him. But I haven't seen persuasive evidence of that yet.
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A second post also inspired by Marc's WSJ piece, my comments for the other side of the aisle. I noticed this phrase from the WSJ story: "In 1996, when Bob Dole was battling Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander in Iowa..."
It's not a perfect analogy, but that scenario reminds quite a bit of the trio right now on the Democratic side. Hillary is the Bob Dole of her party and will win the nomination. She is nearly the war hero politically (remember the 60 minutes episode confronting the Gennifer Flowers story that rescued her party to victory in 1992) and it appears right now that this is her turn.
Barack Obama is the Steve Forbes though reversed in qualities. Forbes had substance without charisma and Obama may have the reverse. Still each is the big hope of the idiological wing of his own party. My favorite liberal friends still want Obama though it is pretty clear he has no chance. And Edwards is the Lamar Alexander. From my point of view just running very hard yet staying irrelevant.
I hope someone also writes the positives of this cast here, but from my point of view Hillary is unchallenged by anyone of substance in her own party but lacking in real achievements qnd crossover appeal.
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/search/label/Norman%20Hsu%3B%20Hillary%20Clinton%20fund-raising%3B%20China%20connection
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Where in the World is Norman Hsu?
Have you seen this man?
Norman Hsu, the Chinese-American businessman who served as Hillary Clinton's latest, shady campaign "bundler" failed to show up for a bail hearing in California today (surprise, surprise), and according to the AP, a judge has issued a new warrant for his arrest.
Hsu's fugitive status--he never served jail time after pleading no contest to grand theft conviction in the early 1990s--came to light after the Wall Street Journal highlighted correlations between his contributions to Mrs. Clinton and those of the Paw clan, a middle-class Chinese family in the San Francisco area. Despite modest means, the family gave the maximum amount of money (more than $200,000) to the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign since 2005.
A Los Angeles Times article subsequently identified Hsu as a fugitive, stemming from his efforts to bilk investors in a $1 million latex glove resale operation. Mr. Hsu was facing up to three years in prison when he failed to show up for sentencing more than a decade ago.
But despite his criminal past, Hsu emerged as a major Democratic fund-raiser in recent years, bundling his contributions with those of other donors, including the Paws. Both Hsu and the Paws have denied any wrong-doing, and the Clinton campaign "gave" their money to charity when confronted with the fund-raiser's criminal past (more on that contribution in a moment).
By skipping today's hearing, Hsu forfeits $2 million in bail that he posted last week. Mr. Hsu's lawyer says he "doesn't know" where his client is. We can't offer a precise location, but a good place to begin the search is China. After all, it's the refuge of choice for Clinton contributors caught in criminal or questionable activities. Following the Clinton donor scandal in 1996, scores of Chinese "contributors" fled the country to avoid indictment, or testimony before Congressional committees.
Put another way: we'd be greatly surprised if Mr. Hsu wasn't in China. He's a native of Hong Kong, and reportedly fled there after his fraud conviction in 1992, before resurfacing in New York as a major campaign fund-raiser for the Democratic Party.
Obviously, someone who's willing to forfeit $2 million in bail is worried about more than a three-year stretch in a minimum-security prison. As Ed Morrissey noted last Friday, the questions about Hsu and his campaign "bundling" extend well beyond the recent contributions to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Eliot Spitzer, and other Democratic luminaries. When The New York Times tried to track down Hsu's various apparel businesses, they found private residences where "employees" said they had never heard of Mr. Hsu, or that he moved years ago. As Morrissey observes, Hsu's enterprises appear to be shams, but the money he threw around was very, very real. Where did it come from?
At this point, an equally salient question is why wasn't Hsu required to surrender his passport when he surrendered to authorities last week? According to the Times, Mr. Hsu was supposed to turn it in today, but when his attorney sent an assistant to retrieve the passport, it couldn't be found. Asked by reporters of Hsu had fled the country, his attorney James Brosnahan, said "I would imagine he has the capability."
While the authorities search for Mr. Hsu (good luck with that arrest warrant), the size of the scandal continues to grow. New York blogger Flip Pidot, doing the job of the MSM, has been tabulating the expanse of Hsu's largesse, and it's considerable. Using federal, state and local databases, he's uncovered a total of $1.6 million in donations from Mr. Hsu to Democratic politicians.
And not surprisingly, the amount of money "returned," by the Democrats or "given to charity" is only a fraction of what they've received. For example, the Clinton campaign touted its return of a $23,000 check that Hillary received directly from Mr. Hsu, but they're "keeping" another $152,000 from his associates.
Imagine that.
Labels: Norman Hsu; Hillary Clinton fund-raising; China connection
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This seems about right to me. (Run Newt Run!)
The Thompson Effect
No dominant candidate gives Thompson a shot if he can seize it.
Thursday, September 6, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Fred Thompson is scheduled today to make official what's long been obvious: He's seeking the Republican nomination for President. His entry brings adrenaline and new competition to the race, and our guess is that the ultimate nominee will be better for it.
The two Republican front-runners, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, have their strengths, but no one in the field has emerged as a dominant candidate. Mr. Giuliani in particular has been impressive on the big issues, including the war on terror and the economy. He understands the consequences of premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. To help sustain economic growth, he's proposed lowering marginal tax rates and eliminating the death tax. Still, many cultural conservatives remain skeptical of Mr. Giuliani's liberal record on gun control, gay rights and abortion. YouTube videos of the former New York mayor in drag don't help.
Mr. Thompson clearly has an opening here, if he can seize it. For starters, he's a Southern conservative in a party dominated by Southern conservatives. As a Senator from Tennessee, he gained Beltway experience. He's got natural charisma, and in standing up forcefully for Scooter Libby earlier this year, he showed political courage.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Thompson served as a U.S. attorney and Watergate investigator. And since leaving politics, he's enjoyed a successful acting career. Which is to say that the latest addition to the GOP field can plausibly present himself as an outsider at a time when the rank and file are unhappy with Beltway Republicans.
The biggest question he has to answer is, Why President Thompson? So far he hasn't provided one, other than he's none of the other candidates. But voters will want more than that, and it would behoove Mr. Thompson to think big in terms of campaign themes.
Mr. Giuliani is not only Mr. 9/11 but also the mayor who cleaned up a supposedly "ungovernable" city and is tough enough to take on our enemies abroad. Mr. Romney is the manager who built a company, saved the Olympics and can bring the same skills to Washington. Mr. Thompson, meanwhile, has said he wants to fix a federal government "that can't seem to get the most basic responsibilities right for its citizens."
True, but folksy populism by itself won't be enough. He'll have to get more specific, and that should include coming clean about his past differences with conservatives on campaign finance and tort reform. The Romney lesson is that trying to be all things to all Republicans opens you to the charge that you lack guiding principles.
The rationale for a Thompson candidacy may still be a work in progress, but that doesn't mean his entry won't have some immediate impact. There's a reason Mr. Giuliani has welcomed him to the race with open arms, while Mr. Romney nervously joked with reporters that it would be better if Mr. Thompson waited a few more months to declare. Mr. Thompson probably steals more of Mr. Romney's thunder initially, if only because the former's movie and television roles have made him more recognizable. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney is still introducing himself to voters. A recent CBS News poll found that two-thirds of GOP primary voters had yet to form an opinion of the former Massachusetts governor. Mr. Thompson's presence will make it that much harder for Mr. Romney to distinguish himself.
As the new kid on the campaign trail, press coverage of the Thompson candidacy will be voluminous. But media interest won't last any longer than voter interest if Mr. Thompson doesn't use it to put forward some intriguing ideas, and then show that he can defend them with conviction. Mr. Thompson will also have to demonstrate in short order that his fund-raising abilities can compete with Mr. Giuliani's extensive network and Mr. Romney's deep pockets.
With the public in a sour mood, Republicans aren't likely to win unless they make the 2008 election about big themes and issues. They need a reform agenda, and if Fred Thompson doesn't stand for something beyond his persona as a television DA and pickup truck populist, he's not likely to go the distance.
WSJ
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Hsudini
Political circles were buzzing about the bizarre turn the Norman Hsu caper took yesterday, as the mysterious businessman who quickly became Hillary Clinton's No. 3 fundraiser failed to show up for a bail hearing or surrender his passport. Mr. Hsu has once again disappeared.
Mr. Hsu had previously been a fugitive from justice on a California grand theft charge, and now his prodigious fundraising for Democratic candidates is under Justice Department investigation. The suspicion is that Mr. Hsu or his financial backers illegally reimbursed individuals who contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ms. Clinton and other Democrats, thereby evading campaign finance limits.
His friends professed bafflement. Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, president of the New School in New York, had recruited Mr. Hsu to join the school's board of directors. Even after his shady past was reported last week, Mr. Kerrey defended him. Now Mr. Kerrey is shocked at what's happened. "I don't know what is going on in his mind," he told reporters. "I thought that I knew him, but obviously I didn't."
Other people who were close to Mr. Hsu took no time in distancing themselves. Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, called on the fugitive to turn himself in. He also said that while the Clinton campaign was giving $23,000 in direct Hsu donations to charity, it would keep the much larger amounts Mr. Hsu brought in from others, a practice known as "bundling." Mr. Wolfson declined to release the names of bundled donors, a stance that drew fire from some liberal watchdog groups such as Public Citizen, which said the Clinton campaign's failure to disclose would only invite more speculation.
Yes, indeed. That speculation is rooted in the 1996 re-election effort of Bill Clinton, which was run in large part by Terry McAuliffe and Harold Ickes, the same players now playing big roles in Hillary Clinton's White House effort. Back then, reporters and investigators were continuously stonewalled when trying to get to the bottom of a campaign finance scandal that eventually saw 14 people enter guilty pleas while another 120 either fled the country or invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions.
Among those who fled the country were Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata, two Indonesian gardeners who gave $450,000 to the Democratic Party. Mr. Wiriadinata eventually revealed that the money had been wired to him by his wife's father, a close business partner of Mochtar Riady, the head of the Lippo Group, a conglomerate with many connections to the Chinese government.
Given just how strange the structure of the 1996 Clinton fundraising operation turned out to be, it's not surprising the Clinton campaign now declares it's time to "move on" from the Hsu scandal. Some of its supporters are even alleging racism behind the intense interest in Mr. Hsu. In reality, the troubling similarity between the 1996 scandal and the one involving Mr. Hsu isn't the presence of so many Asian names. It's that once again Team Clinton appears to be recklessly unconcerned about who might be seeking to buy favor with a future President Clinton and uninterested in answering questions that would help reporters and watchdogs get to the bottom of matters.
Opinion Journal/WSJ
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Second post of the AM:
PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE
Fred Thompson?
“My friends, I come to you today to tell you that I intend to run for President.” With that, Fred Dalton Thompson announced his candidacy for President this week—adding his name to a lengthy list of Republican contenders.
Traditionally, Presidential candidates have announced their intentions after Labor Day, but that tradition has given way to “campaignus infinitum ad nauseam.” Criticized by media talkingheads for his “late entry,” Thompson expressed his doubt that voters will say, “That guy would make a very good president, but he didn’t get in soon enough.”
After all, says Thompson, “People treat politicians sort of like dentists—they don’t have anything to do with them till they have to.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, arguably the most articulate constitutional constructionist to hold that post in the last century, recently offered this assessment of the political process: “What’s the job of the candidate in this world? The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous.”
Notably, responding to inquiries about his own interest in a presidential bid, Gingrich added, “If Fred Thompson runs... then I think that makes it easier for me to not run.”
What does the timing of Fred Thompson’s announcement say about him as a candidate? Well, mostly that he is a leader, not a follower. To his credit, Thompson is not a “formula candidate.” He doesn’t comport with the expectations of Beltway politicos, commentators and media types, and his campaign won’t be as slick as some of his opponents in both parties.
For the record, however, I know Fred Thompson—the man. I know his character, his intellect and his sincerity, and I know his views on the supremacy of our Constitution. Fred’s style is evocative of Ronald Reagan’s strengths. Like Reagan, Thompson speaks right over the heads of his opponents and the Leftmedia, directly to the people. For that reason and more, the Democrats fear Fred Thompson.
In 1993, Tennessee’s Republican leadership convinced Thompson, a relative unknown, to campaign for the unexpired Senate term of then-Vice President Albert Gore. He could have been just a sacrificial lamb, but on the campaign trail Fred demonstrated his ability to win the hearts and minds of Republican and Democrat voters.
Despite all the support Bill Clinton and Al Gore could muster for Fred’s opponent, popular six-term Democrat Rep. Jim Cooper, Thompson won a landslide victory in 1994, garnering 61 percent of the vote. It was the largest victory margin in any statewide political contest in Tennessee history.
Thompson’s tour de force didn’t go unnoticed by the Democratic [sic] National Committee, nor did his 1996 re-election bid, which he won by an even wider margin. Rest assured, the DNC fears Thompson.
As a two-term senator from Tennessee, Thompson never forgot who brung him to the dance. His voting record is clear, and it establishes his standing as an unequivocal constitutional constructionist. For this reason, he garnered not only the respect of his constituents, but also the admiration of colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
Like his primary opponent, Rep. Ron Paul, Thompson loathes politicos who subscribe to the notion of a “Living Constitution,” those who, for political expediency, have abandoned their oaths to “support and defend” that singular document.
“Our people have shed more blood for liberty and freedom... than all the other countries put together,” says Thompson, yet the central government “can’t seem to get the most basic responsibilities right for its citizens.”
Like Rep. Paul, Thompson’s commitment to uphold the plain language of our Constitution has put him on the short end of a couple of votes during his tenure (99-1 in the Senate), and his devotion to his oath of office led to several controversial votes. In 1999, for example, when the Senate voted on the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Thompson voted in the affirmative on the question of whether Clinton had obstructed justice, but joined nine other Republicans voting against conviction on the perjury charge, believing that this charge did not meet the constitutional test for removing a president from office.
Thompson’s philosophy and record are most clear in regard to constitutional exegesis pertaining to federalism and state’s rights, as specified by the Tenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
That amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This language is specific about the limitations our Constitution places upon the central government and the rights and responsibilities reserved by the several states and the people. Nonetheless, Democrats, and the judicial activists who do their bidding, have, for five decades, evaded the plain language of our Constitution by insisting that it be adulterated by judicial diktat in order to serve the special interests of their constituents.
Those who have been readers of The Patriot Post for many years know that we began life as The Federalist, a journal of federalism and states’ rights, and that our mission “to restore constitutional limits on government and the judiciary” is, by definition, the restoration of constitutional federalism, as outlined by Ronald Reagan’s “Presidential Executive Order 12612”.
It is notable, then, that on Fred Thompson’s campaign website, under the category of “Principles,” there is only one item: Federalism.
Indeed, since our first issue, The Patriot has asserted that if the first principle is not the restoration of constitutionally authorized federalism, then the remainder is just the product of smoke and mirrors.
In his exposition on federalism, Thompson notes, “Before anything else, folks in Washington ought to be asking first and foremost, ‘Should government be doing this? And if so, then at what level of government?’ But they don’t. The result has been decades of growth in the size, scope and function of national government. Today’s governance of mandates, pre-emptions, regulations and federal programs bears little resemblance to the balanced system the Framers intended... A government powerful enough to give you everything can take away from you, anything. Our government must be limited by the powers delegated to it by the Constitution.”
On that note, it is clear that Thompson will give Republican front-runners Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, both “big-government Republicans,” a run for their money. The next debate is 17 September, four months ahead of the first state primaries. With Thompson in the lineup, expect a real debate. One thing will be abundantly clear at the end of that debate: Unlike the other frontrunners, Fred Thompson does not “need” to be President in order to satiate arrogant ambition. He is driven by one motive—to humbly serve his countrymen, to promote our national security, unity and prosperity—and do so within the constraints of our Constitution.
Quote of the week
“Fred Thompson’s eight-year record (in the U.S. Senate) is generally pro-growth with an excellent record on entitlement reform and school choice and a very good record on taxes, regulation and trade. His belief in a limited federal government is demonstrated by his numerous votes against government intrusion in the private sector and increased federal spending. Thompson consistently voted against increased spending and new government projects, at times, one of only a handful of senators to do so.” —Club for Growth president Pat Toomey
On cross-examination
“By setting himself apart from the gaggle and having a one-on-one chat with six million Americans, Thompson messed up the political ecosystem. In a single well timed appearance, he made up for a late start and got exposure and buzz. And it didn’t cost him a dime. Some mistake.” —Kathleen Parker
Open query
“What would [Thompson] do while running for the presidency to help his party regain control of the Congress in the 2008 elections if he’s at the top of the ticket? While the media consider that impossible, the utter failure of the Democrats in Congress to do anything worthwhile gives the GOP a fighting chance.” —Michael Reagan
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Third post of the AM
This Hsu Not Made for Running
Fugitive fundraiser Norman Hsu was arrested in a hospital in Colorado yesterday, where he had been taken after falling ill on an Amtrak train. Lots of nagging questions about how the mysterious businessman managed to "bundle" vast amounts of money for Democratic candidates, especially Hillary Clinton, remain. But don't expect the Clinton campaign to help out.
While her staff says it will donate any contributions received directly from Mr. Hsu to charity, it refuses to release the names of donors bundled by Mr. Hsu, who collectively contributed well over $1 million to the Clinton coffers. "Every contribution Hsu bundled and sent on to Hillary is dirty, and will paint a map for the press -- if it was interested -- of who Hsu is and what he was attempting to gain," says radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Take the curious case of the Paw family, headed by a California mail carrier who earns $45,000 a year and whose house Mr. Hsu has listed as his own address. Somehow, Mr. Paw and his family managed to donate over $290,000 to various Democrats since 2004. The Paws never before had given a campaign contribution to anyone.
Unlike dozens of witnesses to Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign scandals, Mr. Hsu hasn't managed to flee the country or had an opportunity yet to invoke the Fifth Amendment. But given the 1996 experience, you would think reporters would show an urgent curiosity about him and exactly where his money came from. It would be nice this time to have some answers before Americans must go to the polls. For instance, what or who was the ultimate source of his money? The American Spectator reports that the textile companies Mr. Hsu claims to run have no offices and no legitimate addresses. One address given by Mr. Hsu turned out to be a Manhattan Public Library.
For now, of course, Mr. Hsu will have only one address -- a cell in a California jail, where he will sit while the Justice Department tries to untangle his rich history.
-- John Fund
Hillary's Entitlement Bailout Tax?
Hillary Clinton's plan to rescue Social Security from financial disaster is as clear as mud. Tuesday, she pledged to an AARP legislative conference that she won't cut benefits, raise the retirement age or permit personal retirement account options. That leaves two alternatives: Do nothing to head off the program's impending $11.4 trillion fiscal train wreck (in which case benefit cuts are already in the law), or raise taxes.
The first option is inconsistent with her earlier promise to keep Social Security "affordable and sustainable." Further complicating matters, Ms. Clinton said this week: "We need to get back to the fiscal responsibility of the 1990's when we weren't raiding the Social Security trust fund." Yet a vote analysis by Freedom Works discovered that Senator Clinton voted against a bill that would have prevented raiding the Social Security fund to pay for other programs. Some $1 trillion of payroll taxes earmarked for the trust fund have already been squandered this way over the past decade.
Former Congressman Dick Armey of Texas was among those critical of Mrs. Clinton's posturing: "We all know that businesses should fully fund their employees' 401k plans. Why does Senator Clinton, as an elected official with direct access to the Social Security money, refuse to live up to any such obligation herself?" No answer yet from the Clinton for President campaign.
The other option that Senator Clinton has not ruled out is to raise taxes to pay for a Social Security bailout plan. This would eventually require raising the payroll tax to 18% or 20% from today's 15% to pay benefits to tomorrow's retirees. To taxpayers, that option isn't "affordable or sustainable." It would be a serious job killer.
So just what is Mrs. Clinton's Social Security plan? Here's Hillary on the subject one last time: "It's in all our interests to preserve and strengthen Social Security into the next century. And if we don't want to burden our children and grandchildren -- if we want to make sure Social Security remains solvent well into the 21st century -- we must make bold decisions now." She just won't tell us what those bold decisions are.
-- Stephen Moore
Quote of the Day I
"[Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] both are emphasizing the exact same issues and they are saying almost the exact same things about those issues. The consultants and their focus groups have never seemed more powerful. Health care for every single American (except that neither has produced a plan to do that -- Obama's lacks a mandate and we'll see about Hillary's, when she launches in a couple of weeks). Energy independence. End the war. Restore America's place in the world. Raise up the middle class. End cronyism. Both candidates have populist flickers, and name the Insurance companies, Big Oil, Big Pharma as corporate evildoers" -- Time magazine columnist Joe Klein.
Quote of the Day II
"My Scottish friends say I should be called 'First Laddie' because it's the closest thing to 'First Lady'" -- ex-President Bill Clinton explaining to Oprah Winfrey this week what his title would be if wife Hillary wins the White House.
Georgia Strikes a Blow Against Vote Fraud
Being expected to show identification isn't that controversial in this post 9/11 world. Oprah Winfrey will hold a $3 million fundraiser for Barack Obama at her California home this weekend and is expected to require that guests show state-issued IDs to gain admittance.
But when it comes to voting, liberals have made wild claims that being asked to show an ID is the functional equivalent of a Jim Crow poll tax. When a photo ID bill passed the Georgia legislature in 2005, black legislators sang slave songs and one even slammed down a prisoner's shackles on the desk of the bill's sponsor. Juan Williams, a National Public Radio correspondent and author of "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years," says critics are "reacting to devils that have been slain 40 years ago." He told Fox News: "In service to having no-fraud elections, I think you could say to people, 'Go and get a legitimate ID.' I don't think that's too much to ask."
Neither does U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy. The Georgia jurist, who happens to be a cousin of the last Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House, issued a ruling yesterday dismissing a two-year old challenge to the state's photo ID law. The Democratic-appointed judge wrote: "Voters who lack photo ID undoubtedly exist somewhere, but the fact that the plaintiffs, in spite of their efforts, have failed to uncover anyone 'who can attest to the fact that he/she will be prevented from voting' provides significant support for a conclusion that the photo ID requirement does not unduly burden the right to vote."
For years, civil rights groups have warned that poor and minority voters would be barred from the polls. Barbara Arnwine of The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights even claimed that photo ID laws "could disenfranchise 10% of the electorate."
Now that Judge Murphy has put such hysteria to rest, perhaps other states can have a rational discussion of photo IDs and similar laws designed to crack down on voter fraud and manipulation. Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador, told me he believes that in an era when people have to show ID to rent a video or cash a check, "requiring [voter] ID can help poor people" by encouraging them to integrate into mainstream society. He notes that Georgia's law provides for extensive outreach efforts, including a mobile ID center that will allow groups like the NAACP to request visits to specific sites to help people obtain IDs.
The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to rule on the constitutionality of photo ID laws next year. Here's hoping that Judge Murphy's comprehensive 180-page ruling is part of their homework.
-- John Fund
Political Journal/WSJ
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Off to the Races
By PEGGY NOONAN
September 8, 2007
This week the Republican candidates for the presidency tried to make it new again. Summer's over, autumn's here, they're relaunching. I think they pretty much succeeded. Their debate Wednesday night had sparks and fire. And a new candidate moved in.
So while Barack Obama struggles with a big question of his candidacy -- how to draw deep blood from Hillary Clinton without fatally endangering his future in the party and earning the enmity of its power brokers; and Mrs. Clinton figures out each day how to slow him and stop him but not right now squish him like a bug, which would highlight a reputation for ruthlessness and embitter a portion of the base -- a look at the Republicans in what was a Republican week.
The debate was full of fireworks about Iraq, about its essentials -- the rightness of the endeavor, and what should rightly be done now. From the libertarian Ron Paul a blunt argument against the war: We never should have gone in and we should get out. "The people who say there'll be a blood bath are the same ones who said it would be a cakewalk. . . . Why believe them?" His foreign policy: "Mind our own business, bring our troops home, defend our country, defend our borders." After Mr. Paul spoke, it seemed half the room booed, but the other applauded. When a thousand Republicans are in a room and one man of the eight on the stage takes a sharply minority viewpoint on a dramatic issue and half the room seems to cheer him, something's going on.
Sparks fly between Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.
Ron Paul's support isn't based on his persona, history or perceived power. What support he has comes because of his views. As he spoke, you could hear other candidates laughing in the background. They should stop giggling, and engage in a serious way.
Mike Huckabee, and for this I h Huckabee, shot back that history will judge whether we were right to go in, but for now, "we're there." He echoed Colin Powell: We broke it, now we own it. "Congressman, we are one nation. We can't be divided. . . . If we make a mistake, we make it as a single country, the United States of America, not the divided states of America." David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network says he doesn't know why Mr. Huckabee isn't in the top tier. I wonder too. Maybe he is and we don't know it.
John McCain seems liberated by loss. Once he was the front-runner, then he was over. Unburdened by the pressure to do well, he has rediscovered the pleasures of the trail. The other day when a student was impertinent, he pleasantly responded, "Thanks for the question, you little jerk." It reminded me of the time Mayor Rudy Giuliani told an insistent radio caller who pressed for the legalization of ferrets that he probably cared about the issue because he was insane.
In the debate, Mr. McCain was spirited -- we stay and fight in Iraq, "otherwise we face catastrophe and genocide in the region." Fox News's focus group said he won. As he retools, he should speak of Reagan in 1976, when he was washed up in South Carolina and said, "I'm taking this all the way to the convention, and I'm going even if I lose every damn primary between now and then."
Mitt Romney is -- well, he continues to seem like someone who's stepped from the shower and been handed a dress shirt by his manservant George. He's like a senior account executive on "Mad Men." Still the most focused and disciplined of all the Republicans, he did fine the other night. But he should get shirt-sleeved, dig deeper, get to his purpose. He had the best quips about Fred Thompson's decision to get in, telling reporters, "Why the hurry? Why not take a little longer to think this over? From my standpoint, if he wants to wait until January or February, that would be ideal."
Rudy Giuliani proved it is possible to bang the gong too much on leading New York City. Enough already, we heard you, move on. Then come back to it in a few months and make it new again. For now, can he be thoughtful about foreign affairs? Not forceful, not pugnacious, not rote, but thoughtful. No one knows quite what he thinks, as opposed to feels.
Duncan Hunter was there. So was Tom Tancredo, who shouldn't be. When you can't compellingly break through with the issue that most roils the base, and on which you were a leader and in agreement with the roiled, then you should admit it didn't work, and leave. But whom he throws his support to -- who he decides has an immigration stand he can back -- might have some significant impact on primary voters.
For Fred Thompson, spurning the debate and announcing on Leno was rude and shrewd. He loped on like a long, tall, folksy fella and got a good burst of applause from the audience when he said he was running. The Web video was fine, the 60-second commercial unveiled Wednesday too self-consciously presidential. A young journalist brutally remarked to me of the makeup and lighting, "He looks like a skull on a Disney pirate ride."
He faces three big challenges. He has come in saying, essentially, I'm not the other guys. That's good, but raises the questions: Who are you? And the reason you're running for president would be . . .?
Second challenge: You can come to the rescue only when someone calls "Help!" You can save the drowning guy only when he falls through the ice; you can't do it when he's skating by and giving you a friendly nod. Three and six months ago, the Republican Party was looking at its slate of candidates and shouting, "Help!" Since then, the candidates have been out there making an impression, getting known, declaring their stands. They've found supporters.
Is the party still yelling "Help!"? Is it falling through the ice?
A third challenge, I think, is a certain dissonance in Mr. Thompson's persona. He seems preoccupied, not full of delight that he's at the party. John McCain has been having sly fun with the idea of Mr. Thompson's sluggishness. When asked why Mr. Thompson didn't come to the debate, Mr. McCain said "Maybe we're up past his bedtime."
I felt this week, and to my surprise, that the campaign was focusing itself, tightening in some way, getting serious. The next Republican debate, the first one with Mr. Thompson, is Sept. 17, in New Hampshire. The first real voting, in Iowa and New Hampshire, is in only four months. For all our complaints about the endless campaign, this one may catch us short. It may get decided when we aren't watching -- knowing, as everyone told us, that we had plenty of time to start paying attention. This could move quickly. Got to watch now.
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Of course there is a report that it is a *Republican* initiated rumor that Hsu is a Chinese spy funneling moneys to China's preferred presidential candidate(s). But I have already wondered this same theory myself. I would not be surprised to learn if this is more than just a theory. Conversely, I will not even know if I should believe it if comes out in the news that this was not the case. A bigger question is, if it is a Chinese directed payoff, then why does China prefer the Clintons? I already suspect the answer but will anyone in the media ask and explore this? Time will hopefully bear fruit.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8RGMB000&show_article=1&catnum=3
There is a reason that many foregners "love" the Clintons. But it ain't because it is in *our* best interests.
Please God. Save us from this couple's delusional thinking that they alone can save the world from itself.
Not another eight years of this pathological couple. As Republican, there is almost no other Democrat I would not prefer.
Than again. In the last several years the Republicans have been a major disppointment too. Money, power, corruption. They threw it all away IMHO.
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My analysis is that Hsu will turn out to be a triad affiliated bagman. Now tracking the source of the money may well run back to Beijing. Slick Willie made a series of decisions as president that assisted the PLA's rise under his watch.
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GM, what does this mean:
*triad affiliated bagman*
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Triad= Chinese organized crime. Bagman=dishonest official; a person who collects, carries, or distributes illegal payoff money.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/09/08/hsu-and-the-shrimp-boy/
"Runaround Hsu's" triad connections begin to bubble to the surface.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triad_society
Not a bad wiki article on triads.
Before our board's "trufers" get too excited about the reference to the Chinese Freemasons and try to find a link to the illuminati and the Bilderbergers, the Chinese Freemasons have no connection to freemasonry, except for the name.
_____________________________________________________________________
A KILLING IN CHINATOWN
Allen Leung, a power in the community and named to a city task force by 2 S.F. mayors, was slain 2 months ago -- and no one is talking to police
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writers
Saturday, April 8, 2006
More...
Allen Leung's life was one of seeming contradictions.
He was known as the "dragon head" -- a leader in the closed, sometimes illicit world of Chinese brotherhoods known as tongs -- but he also played a very public role in San Francisco as a commissioner of the Taiwanese government and a member of a local economic task force.
He once shot and killed an intruder in his home, but he was considered a peacemaker and resolver of disputes within San Francisco's Chinese community.
He had great power and influence among the city's Chinese Americans but at times feared for his life because of an extortion plot.
In February, the 56-year-old native of China was shot to death in his import-export business on Jackson Street. A gunman wearing a mask demanded cash. Leung agreed but was shot anyway as his wife looked on.
Investigators are struggling to unravel Leung's intricate web of relationships, a life that spanned boundaries of East and West, legal and illicit, public and private. They say they have come up against a wall of silence, even from Leung's closest associates.
"There are people out there," homicide Inspector Dennis Maffei said, "who know a lot more than they're saying."
Allen Ngai Leung, like many immigrants before him, joined tongs to help him make his way in Chinatown.
The youngest of five children, born in southern China, Leung was raised by his sisters after the Communists jailed his mother and forced his father to flee to Hong Kong. Leung went to Hong Kong as a teen and came to the Bay Area in 1971 when he was 20.
Leung honed his English and attended San Francisco State University, where he studied business and philosophy and met his future wife, Jenny. After graduating, he earned a real estate license and became a bilingual counselor at John O'Connell High School.
He helped establish the White Crane martial arts studio with his two brothers, and in 1979 he founded Wonkow International Enterprises Inc., a travel agency on Jackson Street that later became an import-export company.
During these years, he joined the Hop Sing tong and the Chinese Freemasons, two influential brotherhoods in Chinatown.
The tongs grew out of secret societies founded by revolutionaries in 17th century imperial China. In America, they started during California's Gold Rush, helping immigrants endure the hardships of discrimination, and eventually spread to other parts of the country.
Some began offering "protection" to defend interests in gambling, drugs and prostitution. Today, federal authorities still label several tongs, including Hop Sing, as "criminally influenced," meaning some members might engage in illegal activity.
"With any organization, you have a certain percentage of people who may go sideways on you and become organized into criminal activity," said Nelson Lowe, a senior FBI agent and expert in Asian organized crime.
"Although they are associated with a tong, they are not representative of what a tong stands for."
By the 1970s, most San Francisco tongs had become social clubs for aging immigrants. But Hop Sing was torn by violence as younger members struggled for power with older leaders.
One of the upstarts was shot to death on a Chinatown street in August 1973. Four years later, three teenage gunmen opened fire inside the Golden Dragon restaurant, which is in a Hop Sing-owned building. Five patrons were killed and 11 wounded; the apparent target, a Hop Sing enforcer, was unharmed.
Leung's business was just a couple of blocks from Hop Sing headquarters on Waverly Place.
Leung built his business by trading in shark fin, a Chinese delicacy. On his company Web site, he credited himself with successfully urging the U.S. government to back shark fishing. Eventually, limits were imposed to prevent overfishing.
He opened a Hong Kong office in 1985 and expanded into real estate. He bought homes for himself in the Marina district, Las Vegas and Florida.
At the recommendation of Pius Lee, one of Chinatown's best-known figures, Mayor Willie Brown appointed Leung to the board of the Chinatown Economic Development Group in 1999. Mayor Gavin Newsom would reappoint him.
Taipei made him a volunteer commissioner for the government, the highest honorary position for overseas pro-Taiwan leaders. Even though he never lived in Taiwan, his anti-communist sentiments and those of Hop Sing were well known.
"It's the combination together that made him popular," Lee said, naming organizations Leung was involved in. "People knew about him. He liked to negotiate. For any problem, he said: 'Let's sit down with a cup of coffee.' "
Olivia Leung, one of Leung's three children, said in an interview that her father relished being his own boss because it freed him to be involved in the community.
She said her father encouraged his children to network. "Not only to help people," she said, "but to get to know people in the community and to benefit you."
As Leung's businesses grew, he took a larger role in Hop Sing. In 1990, he became the English secretary, able to conduct tong business and translate Chinese documents into English.
After a period of relative quiet, however, the tong was again in turmoil.
According to federal authorities, Chinese organized crime had taken over Hop Sing and other tongs. Two of the reputed leaders were Peter Chong and Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow.
Chong came to the United States in 1982 ostensibly to promote Chinese opera. Chow, who claimed to have joined Hop Sing soon after arriving in 1976 at age 16, would later boast that he controlled all Asian gangs in San Francisco.
"If you are asking me which gang did I join, I did not join any gang," Chow told a federal prosecutor in 2002. "I owned the gang. ... All those people who were walking the streets of the Bay Area, all of them were controlled by me."
In 1992, authorities indicted Chong, Chow and 25 others for racketeering, saying Hop Sing was involved in everything from underage prostitution to the international heroin trade.
Chong left for Hong Kong before he could be arrested. Caught in Macao, he was released by Chinese officials skeptical of the U.S. case.
Chow was convicted of gun charges and sent to prison for 25 years to life.
According to the prosecutor in that case, Leung had a minimal role in tong business at the time the two men were in control. With Chow in prison and Chong out of the country, he became a leader. In 1994 he began the first of four stints as Hop Sing president.
He was a "perfect leader" and negotiator who treated even those with whom he disagreed with respect, said the current tong president, Bill Wong.
"Some people don't like him, but he treats them nicely," Wong said in an interview after Leung's death. "He sometimes has a different opinion, but he always tries to compromise. You never hear about him trying to do something in his own interests. He always thinks about the association and the Chinese community."
Leung was an elder in the tong when, in 2003, Raymond Chow was released from prison. His sentence had been cut in half in 2001 when he agreed to testify against Peter Chong. The government used his testimony to secure Chong's extradition and his conviction for racketeering.
Chow got what many in law enforcement said later was an extraordinary deal: Instead of deporting him, the government supported his application for a resident visa.
The San Francisco police soon concluded that Chow was associating with members of Asian gangs, including those in Hop Sing, in violation of his deal.
"The deal shouldn't have been cut with him," said Oakland police Lt. Harry Hu, who took part in the federal investigation. "He's out, and there's practically no leash on him -- they did a disservice to the community."
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney William Schaefer, who helped arrange Chow's deal, said it was made in part because Chow's testimony cemented Chong as the leader of the group.
"He and Mr. Chong were clearly very, very close," Schaefer said.
Not long after Chow got out of prison, one of his associates approached a longtime friend of Leung and said several young members of Hop Sing wanted money "to do business."
The friend was Jack Lee, now 86, a Hop Sing elder who had fended off a challenge to his leadership during the bloody days of the 1970s. He also co-owned the Golden Dragon.
According to the police, Lee solicited other elders from Hop Sing chapters in Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver and Portland, Ore., to contribute a total of $120,000 for what was described as money to start a youth group.
"The elders were skeptical about how the money was to be used," Inspector Jameson Pon, a member of the department's gang task force, said in a subsequent affidavit for search warrants.
As he solicited support for the youth group, Lee was having financial problems involving his restaurant, which paid rent to the tong.
His business partner was having trouble making the payroll, and Lee was embroiled in a court battle over $450,000 he said his restaurant partner owed him.
Nothing had been decided on the youth group request when, on Feb. 25, 2005, someone splattered the headquarters of several Chinatown tongs with red paint. Hop Sing was not hit.
On March 11, Hop Sing unanimously voted down the money proposal. The next day, someone fired rounds into the door of Hop Sing.
Leung became a key source for investigators probing the paint attacks and the shooting. He told FBI Special Agent William Wu about the decision to turn down the request for money. He also told him Chow had shown up at Hop Sing's headquarters in late 2004, demanding $100,000.
Chow -- still on supervised release -- told Wu a very different story. He said Hop Sing board members had approached him and "wanted him to loan-shark the money," according to Inspector Pon's affidavit.
On the same day as the shooting, the police learned from the FBI that immigration authorities had picked up Chow "as a result of the escalating events leading up to the shooting at the Hop Sing tong," Pon said.
Within days, a letter postmarked from San Francisco arrived at Hop Sing, addressed to Leung, Lee and the tong president at the time, Johnny Chiu.
"Someone open fire at your front door, but you're just chicken s -- , no response to it, just keeping your mouth quiet," the letter read. "Having this kind of a leader makes all the tongs lose face. I have a poem to dedicate to you. It says you should be embarrassed for a thousand years and your reputation stink for ten thousand years."
On March 31, Leung approached Pon's partner in the gang task force as the investigator ate lunch in Chinatown. He worried that Chow's emissaries "will try to get him and the board members," Pon said. A week later, Leung told the FBI the same thing.
Federal agents wanted Leung to wear a hidden listening device to further the investigation, but Leung refused. Without direct evidence, police and FBI officials said later, the case died.
Leung's family said he had resumed his normal life. "He wasn't afraid," said Olivia Leung, 23.
"He said we have to take precautions. But I wouldn't say he was paranoid. There is no point in living in fear."
Leung had already proved that he was no one to be trifled with.
One night in April 1997, he opened fire on a burglar who had broken into the family home in the Marina. The man was hit in the chest and died at the scene; the police ruled the shooting justified.
At 4 p.m. on Feb. 27, a man came out of a driving rainstorm into the office on Jackson Street where Leung and his wife were working. He demanded cash and opened fire. The police say it clearly was an execution slaying.
Investigators have not ruled out Chow, who is free as he challenges efforts to deport him, or any of his emissaries as suspects. But it's become clear that others didn't like Leung. Even some of his friends have been reluctant to open up.
Jack Lee was seen eating with Leung at a cafe about an hour before Leung was shot, and the police wanted to talk to him about what he knew.
Before Lee would talk, however, he hired a criminal defense lawyer. Homicide Inspector Dennis Maffei wouldn't say whether Lee has been interviewed.
Lee's lawyer, Garrick Lew, would not comment.
Investigators are looking at Leung's other connections, particularly a brotherhood called the Chee Kung Tong, or Chinese Freemasons.
The tong, one of the oldest in the country, was once powerful, helping to raise money to support Chinese Nationalist Sun Yat-Sen's overthrow of imperial rule. Its headquarters in Chinatown still has a black metal safe that was used to store the money.
Over the years, the tong had evolved into a social organization. "It is no longer a viable group anymore because of its dying and dwindling membership,'' said Marlon Hom, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.
Leung assumed a leadership role after two elders of the tong died. He inherited a squabble with members in East Coast chapters.
The dispute began in 2002 when a member of the New York tong, Pang Woon Ng, proclaimed himself a leader in the Chinese Freemasons. Leaders in San Francisco objected and accused Ng of usurping authority. In a civil suit, Ng charged the San Francisco leaders with defamation.
Leung tried to settle the dispute while at the same time paying to fight the lawsuit.
The ill will lingered. The New York tong now is blocking a plan to divide up $1.1 million the Freemason chapters received from the mainland Chinese government as compensation for a temple the government demolished in Shanghai.
Major figures from both Hop Sing and the Chinese Freemasons joined hundreds of mourners at Leung's funeral on March 18 in Chinatown. Fu-Mei Chang, a Taiwan cabinet minister, presented a posthumous medal honoring Leung's government service.
Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow was there, stocky with a shaved head, dressed in a white suit, a distinctive figure in a mass of black mourning attire. He was one of the few people called by name to bow before Leung's casket, a sign of honor.
Chow also filed up with the Chinese Freemasons. Before the group bowed, he bellowed exhortations in Chinese about heroes and heroism, a traditional Freemason salute. Then, the group bowed in unison.
He was there to pay respects to "Big Brother," he told Chinese reporters. He said he was saddened by Leung's death but declined to comment on the killing.
The police say they're making progress in what they concede is a complex case.
On March 24, investigators searched the offices of both Hop Sing and the Chinese Freemasons in Chinatown. Investigators expect to go to New York in coming weeks. This week they released a composite sketch of the gunman and said the Hop Sing tong is offering a $250,000 reward for help.
"We are looking at every possibility," Inspector Maffei said.
E-mail the writers at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com and vahua@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/08/MNGE9I686C1.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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The 'See No Evil' Clinton Money Machine
Just how sloppy or reckless was the Hillary Clinton campaign when it came to dealing with disgraced donor Norman Hsu? Team Clinton still won't identify the donors "bundled" by Hsu, but yesterday it announced it was returning $850,000 to 260 contributors linked to the former fugitive. The turnaround came shortly after the Los Angeles Times uncovered emails between a California Democratic Party official and Samantha Wolf, Mrs. Clinton's campaign's finance director for the Western states. The state party official warned the Clinton campaign that he had heard Hsu was running a "Ponzi scheme" that threatened to bilk investors and should be treated with care. But Ms. Wolf was unmoved.
"I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a ponzi scheme," she wrote. "He is COMPLETELY legit." This about a man who had been a fugitive for 15 years after pleading guilty to a grand theft charge and who had twice been bankrupt, including just before he returned to the U.S. from China in 1998 to start a strange new career as a high-stakes political power broker.
Nor is Ms. Wolf the only Clinton finance official who seems oblivious to the need to run a tight fundraising ship. Take Harold Ickes, former deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and now a top honcho in Team Hillary. In 2004, he ran Americans Coming Together, a George Soros-funded group that spent some $137 million trying to elect John Kerry and other Democrats.
It didn't take long to discover ACT was spending its money illegally on blatant electioneering, a violation of the group's tax status. In addition, much of the union money ACT spent on politics was a prohibited use of the forced dues payments of union members. Just last month, ACT was forced to pay $775,000 in fines to the Federal Election Commission, the third largest fine that agency has every imposed. The FEC took no further action, however, because ACT expressed an "intention to wind down and terminate its affairs."
But, of course, ACT is shutting down. Mr. Ickes has moved on to the main event: electing Hillary Clinton president. If the Hsu caper is any indication of how Team Clinton intends to carry on, I have no doubt the Federal Election Commission will eventually show an interest again. But, as Team Clinton well knows, by that time the 2008 election will be over.
-- John Fund
Political Journal/WSJ
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Too bad the contributions weren't made in the form of toys. :evil:
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Ron Paul gave a speech at my school today. I think my thoughts were 80% "that's interesting" and 20% "that's crazy." But overall interesting spearker. Any thoughts on him?
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I tend towards libertarianism, but i'm connected to reality, which means i'm not an actual libertarian. Ron Paul is 70% crazy and much of his supporters are close to 100% looney. I'd vote for the Dowager Empress Clinton before i'd vote for Ron Paul and his ilk.
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Gingrich hints of White House bid
September 12, 2007
By Ralph Z. Hallow - Newt Gingrich is moving closer to a presidential nomination bid in a severely divided Republican Party.
"I will decide based on whether I have about $30 million in committed campaign contributions and whether I think it is possible to run a campaign based on ideas rather than 30-second sound bites," the former House speaker told The Washington Times yesterday.
Many Republicans, regardless of whether they agree with his views, regard him as conservatism's brainiest and most-engaging politician.
"The party believes ideas have consequences, and no one articulates our message better than Newt," said Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saulius "Saul" Anuzis.
Party strategist Tom Edmonds says Mr. Gingrich "is intellectually superior, but his challenge will be to stay focused." The first deadline for a Gingrich move is Oct. 15, when prospective and declared presidential nomination candidates must pay $500 to Utah to be on the state's primary ballot, said Gingrich confidant Randy Evans.
Mr. Gingrich is careful not to commit formally to a run.
"I will conduct workshops around the country through September 30, after which I will make a decision," he told The Times after a major policy address at the American Enterprise Institute.
Another factor is whether any current contender coalesces Republican voters before the middle of next month.
Former Sen. Fred Thompson and Rudolph W. Giuliani are each commanding a quarter of likely primary voters, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain of Arizona each have about 12 percent support in the latest Rasmussen national poll of more than 600 likely Republican primary voters.
By contrast, 41 percent of Democrats in the same poll already have coalesced around New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama at 20 percent and John Edwards at 17 percent.
Some social conservatives have moved to Mr. Thompson's side. They worry about further splitting the conservative vote. Pollster Scott Rasmussen says conservatives constitute about 60 percent of the party's primary voters.
"If we split the conservative vote, Rudy wins," says Free Congress Foundation President Paul M. Weyrich. "I have high regard for Newt. ... He would force the other candidates to face issues they don't want to face up to."
Mr. Gingrich has been getting his message out through policy addresses at the American Enterprise Institute, considered a major center of neoconservative ideas, and through a series of online workshops for his American Solutions for Winning the Future.
He says American Solutions is a nonpartisan effort "to defend America and our allies abroad and defeat our enemies, to strengthen and revitalize America's core values, and to move the government into the 21st century." Six years after the attacks of September 11, "we are having the wrong debate about the wrong report," Mr. Gingrich said in his AEI speech on Monday, the day Gen. David H. Petraeus gave Congress his report on the state of the Iraq war.
Mr. Gingrich figures he would need at least $30 million to conduct competitive television-ad campaigns in the first five primary and caucus states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and perhaps Florida or Michigan. The primary calendar is still up in the air.
"If this election is about money and structure, then we already know who our nominee is," said Mr. Evans, alluding to the well-organized and financed Giuliani and Romney campaigns. "If it's about ideas and a movement, then we may not know who our nominee is for a long time to come, because nobody has yet tapped into the core coalition of Americans who have a vision of where they think America should go."
Mr. Gingrich has proposed an informal committee of congressional lawmakers from both parties "to meet every two weeks with the next president" that would foster far less partisanship. He also proposed setting the budget for defense and intelligence at 5 percent of the nation's total economic output, almost double what President Bush settled for in 2002.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/09/13/audio-why-ron-paul-is-a-crank-episode-314/
US Marines vs. Mall Security in Ron Paul's mind.
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"The danger [Hillary Clinton] runs is that in attempting to appease the left wing of her party she becomes unacceptable to the majority of Americans once they understand what she said she'd do. She is actually much more centrist than MoveOn.org. She is much tougher on military affairs than [her party's] Left. She is more rational, and I have very great respect for her as a hardworking professional. No Republican should think she is going to be easy to beat. But I have watched her now for a year be gradually pulled to the left. Her husband was too clever to do that" -- Newt Gingrich, in an interview with National Journal.
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I'm putting my support behind Fred Thompson....this country needs another Ronald Reagan.....not the pack of Jimmy Carter's and Mrs. Bill Clinton's also running in this race.
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***No Republican should think she is going to be easy to beat***
On Drudge today Newt calls the '08 election - 80% likely the Dems will win. He didn't name Hillary but obviously he thinks she will win.
I believe her populist views will carry her to victory.
Clinton made polling his central political war strategy. That way *his* "views" were/are almost always mere expressions of the *majority* view found in polls. How can this strategy be beaten when they simply jump to the majority position like flies chase dodoo? He would get his ugly nose in the TV every single day and in our faces and say something that he knew was agreed on by a majority listeners. Clintons are not original thinkers by any stretch of the imagination like Newt is IMO.
OTOH what I don't quite get is although he supposedly left office with a popularity of over 60% he never got more than 48% popular vote in the national election.
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Concerning Hillary, I think Rudy may be the best to take her on-- his skills as a DA will serve him well in nailing down her evasions of truth and the law.
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Bringing the Market to Health Care
By JOHN F. COGAN and R. GLENN HUBBARD
September 15, 2007
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney's recent health-care reform proposals, which rely on free-market principles and federalism, will go a long way to fixing our health-care system's woes.
The centerpiece of Mr. Romney's plan is to attack the tax code's discrimination against cost-effective private insurance. He proposes to allow individuals to deduct out-of-pocket health-care expenditures from their taxable income, allow individuals who purchase health insurance premiums on their own -- rather than through their employer -- to deduct health insurance premiums, and to expand Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) by eliminating the requirement that a qualifying health plan contain a high deductible.
Virtually all observers have argued that the U.S. tax preference for employer-provided health insurance encourages overconsumption of health services. First, it creates a large financial incentive for workers to purchase as much medical care as they can through their employer's insurance plan. In practice, workers do so by enrolling in health plans with high-premiums, but low-deductibles and coinsurance payments. Such plans, by making the purchase of health-care services appear to be less costly than they really are, create a "moral hazard" that leads to overconsumption of health-care services. Second, the tax preference makes health care look cheaper compared to all other goods and services.
The tax preference's impact has been profound. It is the principal reason why nine out of every 10 private health-care plans in the U.S. are purchased through an employer. It is the principal reason why six out of every seven dollars of health-care spending is made by someone other than the person receiving the care. And, it is a key reason for the U.S. health-care system's excessive cost and waste.
Many economists (including us) have emphasized the large benefits to health care of revoking the tax preference. Yet elected officials have repeatedly failed to enact the change because of strong political opposition.
Over the past 30 years, Congress has instead opted for a second best policy. On a piecemeal basis, Congress has gradually leveled the "tax playing-field" between employer insurance and out-of-pocket expenses by expanding the tax preference to out-of-pocket expenses rather than by eliminating the preference for employer provided insurance.
In 1978, Congress created Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) to allow health expenditures to be nontaxable to the employee. In 1996, Congress created Medical Savings Accounts to allow a limited number of employees of small businesses to set aside funds tax-free for their out-of-pocket expenses.
In 2002, Treasury regulations established Health Reimbursement Accounts to allow employees to use pre-tax dollars for medical expenses without the annual use-it-or-lose-it provision of FSAs. And in 2003, Congress replaced Medical Savings Accounts with far more attractive Health Savings Accounts. HSAs allow employers and individuals with high-deductible health plans to set aside money tax-free to pay their current or future out-of-pocket expenses.
Mr. Romney's proposal to allow individuals to deduct out of pocket medical expenses is a significant advance in this 30-year progression to a level tax playing field between out-of-pocket expenses and insurance. And a more level tax playing field would encourage individuals to choose health plans with lower premiums and higher copayments for their routine health-care purchases. With more "skin in the game," individuals would exert more control over their choice of health-care services. The health-care savings would be large. We estimate that a proposal such as Romney's would reduce private health-care spending by 6%.
Some critics have argued that allowing out-of-pocket expenses to be tax-deductible will raise, not lower, health-care spending because the policy will make the price of direct medical-care purchases cheaper relative to all other goods and services. As our empirical analysis with Daniel Kessler demonstrates, the critics are wrong. The cost-reducing impact on health-care expenditures of individuals shifting into health plans with higher copayments swamps by a large margin the cost-increasing impact of making out-of-pocket purchases cheaper.
The benefits don't stop with reducing the growth in health costs. As employer premiums decline, the savings will accrue to workers in the form of higher money wages. In competitive labor markets, workers -- not employers and not insurance companies -- bear the burden of paying for employer-provided health-insurance premiums. Although employers might write the check for premiums, workers ultimately pay by foregoing money wages.
We estimate that making out-of-pocket expenses tax deductible, combined with Mr. Romney's other proposals, will reduce the average premium of employer-provided family health plans by around $2,300 per year. Workers' wages will rise by this amount on average. To be sure, higher out-of-pocket expenses will offset part of this increase -- $1,000 of it. But workers will still experience a net increase of $1,300 in (taxable) income. Mainly because of this economic effect, we estimate that the U.S. Treasury's revenue loss will be modest -- about $10 billion per year.
Mr. Romney's proposal also allows persons who purchase health insurance on their own to deduct their premium payments. This tax deduction will make insurance significantly less costly for unemployed persons and workers in firms that don't offer insurance coverage. Because both out-of-pocket spending and individually purchased health insurance would be deductible, a person in a 15% tax bracket who purchases a $2,000 health-insurance plan and who has an additional $700 in out-of-pocket expenses would realize a tax savings of $405 -- a 20% reduction in the effective cost of the insurance plan. The lower cost provides significant incentive for currently uninsured individuals to buy at least catastrophic insurance.
Some health-policy experts have questioned why Mr. Romney would seek tax changes beyond those embodied in Health Savings Accounts. Indeed, HSAs are one of the most important health-care policy innovations in decades. If they are to achieve their potential, they must be made more attractive to a broader segment of the population. A key deterrent to choosing an HSA has been the requirement that an individual must be enrolled in a high-deductible health-care plan. The requirement, $1,100 for individuals and $2,200 for families, is simply too high for many consumers.
It is also unnecessary. Mr. Romney's proposal to eliminate the "high deductible" requirement will allow individuals to establish an HSA regardless of their health plan's deductible. Eliminating the high deductible requirement will maintain the cost-reducing benefits of HSAs. Evidence from the RAND Experiment indicates that most of the expenditure-reducing effects of health-plan deductibles occur at low levels of deductibles.
The key to reducing the U.S. health-care system's excessive cost without damaging its ability to innovate is to allow competitive market forces to operate. These forces have worked in every other market to keep costs low and improve quality. There is no reason why they won't work in health care. Attacking the tax code's bias against efficient and cost-effective health insurance is fundamental to creating an economically sound health-care system.
Mr. Cogan, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan. Mr. Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. They are both advisers to the Romney campaign.
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Now that we've read that about Romney, here's Hillary's Health Care:
Thirteen years after Hillary Rodham Clinton's plan for health care went down to disastrous defeat, she is back with a new proposal that again seeks to cover all Americans but reflects some lessons learned.
COMPARING THE PLANS
• Chart: What the candidates are proposing.
• Complete coverage: Campaign 2008The Democratic presidential candidate is set to unveil her new approach in Iowa Monday, and she will include a requirement that everyone get health insurance. A big difference from last time: She's proposing to build on the existing system of insuring Americans -- a mix of private coverage and government-subsidized care -- not remake it altogether.
Still, Mrs. Clinton's plan, described by people familiar with it, would involve sweeping change. It would create new federal subsidies to aid those who couldn't afford the required health coverage. And it would impose new mandates on large employers to provide health coverage or help pay for it.
That will surely trigger sharp criticism from conservatives branding her plan government-dictated "HillaryCare" and comparing it to the unwieldy overhaul she proposed 13 years ago during her husband's presidency. Yet she may find Americans more receptive to an expanded federal role in health care, as the national mood has changed since the 1990s and states have experimented with universal-coverage plans.
The number of people without insurance has risen to 47 million from 39.7 million in 1993, and insurance premiums have doubled for those with coverage.
Mrs. Clinton's two principal rivals for the Democratic nomination, John Edwards and Barack Obama, both have comprehensive plans that, like Sen. Clinton's, build on action in the states and place mandates on employers. Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani also have detailed their more market-oriented approaches. Mr. Romney would rely on the states to lead change; Mr. Giuliani wants changes to the federal tax code that would make it easier to buy coverage on the open market.
But no candidate has been as closely watched on the issue as Mrs. Clinton. Health care and Iraq are likely to be the two central issues that define how the New York senator's candidacy is perceived by voters and key constituencies from labor to business.
On the presidential campaign trail, Sen. Clinton regularly mentions her scars from the 1993 effort, saying it gave her the experience to get the job done this time. Aides say she is diligently implementing battle lessons.
Chief among them: Assure people who already like their coverage that they can keep it, and that her plan still offers something for them. To that end, she first offered detailed proposals on reducing health-care costs and improving quality, before moving on to address how she would expand coverage to those who don't have it.
Officials at the Clinton campaign declined to discuss details of the proposal Sen. Clinton is scheduled to release Monday. While people familiar with it said the outline is in place, details could change over the weekend.
Sen. Clinton has telegraphed that, unlike last time, she would be willing to compromise to get a deal. She regularly cites the importance of developing consensus. In recent months, she has met with dozens of executives at large corporations to talk about health care, hoping to forestall a backlash during her campaign and, if she wins, her presidency.
Robert Galvin, director of global health care for General Electric Co., met with her in a small group a few months ago. He says she hit a "home run" in understanding business and its concerns. "I saw in there someone who came out of a tough experience in the '90s wiser, more patient, and with a real understanding of the complexities and how every stakeholder had to have some win," says Mr. Galvin.
The Clinton 2007 health plan is likely to be less threatening to the insurance industry, which helped kill her earlier plan. Mrs. Clinton's rhetoric denouncing the industry remains sharp -- but her plan is less so.
Last time, she proposed caps on premiums to hold down costs and a system under which insurance companies would be required to bid for regional business. This time, insurance companies would be required to sell a policy to anyone who applied and would be barred from charging sick people more. But they wouldn't face limits on how much they could charge for premiums generally.
The most significant element of the Clinton plan is expected to be a new requirement for all Americans to have insurance. That disturbs some liberals, who worry that low-income families won't be able to afford it, as well as some conservatives, who object to such a sweeping government mandate. But many health-policy experts say it's essential that everyone be in the insurance system so that healthy people with low medical costs can balance out the sick.
Sen. Edwards, too, has proposed an individual mandate; Sen. Obama has not. Gov. Romney supported the mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts but has not endorsed it nationally.
To help people get insurance, Sen. Clinton would establish federal subsidies for lower-income Americans and create new pools where individuals and small businesses could shop for private health plans.
She is also likely to require that some employers, likely large ones, either cover their workers or help pay the cost of their coverage elsewhere. That will be controversial with employers that don't provide insurance, though likely welcomed by those that do. Exempting small business could eliminate opposition from small-business owners, who helped lead the effort to kill the 1993 plan.
Sen. Clinton also supports expansion of the joint federal-state Children's Health Insurance Program. Conservatives led by President Bush oppose that, saying it's a step toward government-run insurance for all, in what has become something of a proxy for the larger health-coverage debate.
Politically, analysts say the health issue cuts both ways for Sen. Clinton. Polls suggest Americans trust her more than any presidential candidate of either party when it comes to health. A July Gallup poll found that 65% of all voters had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence that she would do the "right thing" for the health-care system. Among Democrats, the figure was 91%.
"People see her as very committed to health care and making sure people in this country have coverage," says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who worked for opponents of the original Clinton plan and now works for Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Still, he said, Mrs. Clinton is vulnerable among swing voters and Republicans, particularly if she produces a health plan that is seen as too complicated or too government-driven.
In certain circles, her name is synonymous with big, government-run health. Republicans regularly deride health care proposals they don't like as "HillaryCare." A summary of Mr. Romney's health care plan, posted on his Web site, contains the word "Hillary" 23 times, attacks her 1993 plan as "socialized medicine" and is headlined, "The Romney Vision: Conservative, Market-Based Health Care Vs. Hillarycare."
Sen. Clinton says she has learned her lessons. For one, in 1993 the White House got too mired in the details, delivering to Congress a 1,342-page bill for consideration. By giving so many specifics, the Clintons gave opponents with special interests easy fodder to kill the plan, while the public was bewildered.
By contrast, her aides speak admiringly of President Bush's approach on many domestic issues: put out general principles, negotiate the details with Congress and, more often that not, declare victory when a bill reaches his desk.
At one stage, Mrs. Clinton's aides considered not presenting a specific plan for covering the uninsured, noting that many Americans thought she had one already. But pressure from other candidates and from the powerful Service Employers International Union persuaded her to come forward. Messrs. Obama and Edwards had criticized her for sticking to generalities even as they offered specifics.
Aides say Sen. Clinton knows that the White House erred last time in failing to woo Congress, meaning her plan had few champions on Capitol Hill. In her later White House years, Mrs. Clinton learned to work more effectively with Congress and saw some successes, such as bipartisan passage of the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Since winning election to the Senate in 2000, Mrs. Clinton has worked with Republicans on a range of health issues. She allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on health benefits for veterans, although he had served as a manager of the effort to impeach her husband. She has even exchanged warm words on health with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who helped lead the effort to torpedo her 1993 plan.
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Harold Stassen Reincarnated
Alan Keyes had a distinguished career in the State Department before becoming a conservative activist and gadfly. He's obviously a smart man, which is why it's so distressing to see him act as if voters have no memory as he starts a third effort to run for the GOP presidential nomination. We last heard from Mr. Keyes when he parachuted into the Illinois Senate race in 2004, ultimately losing to Barack Obama by 43 points. You'd think that he would have viewed that as a signal from the political marketplace.
Mr. Keyes explained the rationale for his candidacy Monday by saying the GOP race was so wide open, it clearly had a place for him: "There isn't a standout. I'm like a lot of folks, who have just looked at it and been unmoved."
It's more likely that what is moving Mr. Keyes is that he scents another fund-raising opportunity. In 1999, he raised an impressive $4.3 million in just six months even before Iowa or New Hampshire voted. But the cash hasn't come without controversy. In his previous campaigns, Mr. Keyes was caught paying his personal living expenses out of campaign donations -- a legal but highly controversial practice. In addition, his 2000 presidential race was fined $23.000 by the Federal Election Commission for various violations involving the public financing he had accepted from the government.
No doubt the fiery Mr. Keyes would liven up the remaining Republican debates, but will someone please explain to me why debate organizers should even invite a "candidate" with zero standing in the polls and who appears to be interested in harvesting dollars at least as much as he is interested in getting votes?
political journal/WSJ
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Alan Keyes :roll:
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-- John Fund
London Puts Rudy in a Generous Mood
You can't get much more productive than Rudy Giuliani during his whirlwind tour of London this week. He met with the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair, accepted an award from Margaret Thatcher and engaged in some Churchillian rhetoric indirectly slapping down Hillary Clinton.
The occasion was Mr. Giuliani's receipt of an award named after Mrs. Thatcher from the Atlantic Bridge think tank. In his acceptance speech, he ventured into foreign policy by calling for NATO membership to be enlarged beyond Europe, indeed "to any country who meets basic standards of good governance, military readiness, global responsibility." He specifically suggested membership for Australia, Israel, Singapore and Japan.
Given that NATO membership carries with it the right to expect U.S. military support in the event of an attack by any country, Mr. Giuliani's proposed sweeping expansion left even some Americans in his audience unsettled. "I'm not sure the speechwriters fully thought that one out," one American with experience on Capitol Hill told me.
Any such quibbles, however, were a small bump in the road on what was essentially a Giuliani lovefest in London. American expatriates who attended a Giuliani fundraiser were thrilled with remarks he made just before arriving in London criticizing what he called Hillary Clinton's attempts to portray herself as a new "Iron Lady." He said such attempts would fail because she had surrendered to her party's hard left on the Iraq war. "I don't think Margaret Thatcher would impugn the integrity of a commanding general in a time of war, as Hillary Clinton did, or require an army to give a schedule of their retreat to the enemy, as the Democrats are suggesting," Mr. Giuliani said.
"That's the kind of muscular rhetoric that's needed to win against the Clintons," Robert Jameson, an American businessman in London, told me. "If you don't take them on first, they will roll over you."
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-- John Fund
Senators Fret About Their 'Primary' Responsibility
Not only are presidential candidates flummoxed by the ever-changing, ever-earlier 2008 primary calendar, now Senators are getting into the act. At a hearing of the Senate Rules Committee yesterday, Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) testified on behalf of their bill to create a regional primary system and somehow exert control over the increasingly chaotic process.
The move comes after Michigan and Florida broke both parties' rules and moved their nominating contests to January 15 and January 29, respectively. Party rules say no state can hold its primary before February 5th, though Democrats granted special waivers to Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
The Senate bill would still allow Iowa and New Hampshire to cast the first ballots, though Mr. Lieberman, who famously bragged he had achieved a "three-way tie for third" after his fifth-place finish in the 2004 New Hampshire primary, said he was concerned about their "disproportionate impact" on the nominating calendar's outcome.
Some, though, have questioned whether any move by Congress to control the nominating process is constitutional. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution provides for the election of the executive branch, though nowhere does the document address primaries or nominating contests. A 2000 decision by the Supreme Court ruled that a law allowing primary voters in California to vote for any candidate, regardless of party, unconstitutionally violated a political party's First Amendment right to freedom of association. Similar so-called "blanket primaries" were struck down in Washington State and in Alaska.
After the Washington State primary was struck down, the Washington State Grange sponsored an initiative on the 2004 ballot providing for a "top-two" system, by which the top two finishers in the first round of balloting, regardless of party, would advance to a runoff. The measure passed with nearly 60% of the vote, yet the established political parties again claimed the system would unfairly preclude their right to select their own nominees. The Washington State Republican Party brought suit and the case is slated to be the first heard in the Supreme Court's new term, with arguments to be given on October 1st. The outcome could be vital in determining whether Sens. Lieberman, Klobuchar, Alexander and the rest of Congress will actually be Constitutionally able to intervene in the primary scheduling brouhaha.
Political Journal WSJ
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http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/crim/ushsu91907cmp.pdf
More on Hillary Rotten Clinton's mystery money man.
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Rudy takes on Hillary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L63Ff_mGzs
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Potential presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Tuesday blasted the modern-day road to the White House as too long, too expensive and verging on "insane."
Ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the presidential campaign structure is "stunningly dangerous."
The former House speaker from Georgia said he will decide whether to enter the GOP presidential field in October. But in a wide-ranging speech at the National Press Club in Washington, he ridiculed campaign consultants and spin doctors who he said are extending the 2008 campaign. He said presidential debates have become "almost unendurable."
"These aren't debates," the former Georgia congressman said. "This is a cross between [TV shows] 'The Bachelor,' 'American Idol' and 'Who's Smarter than a Fifth-Grader.'"
"What's the job of the candidate in this world?" asked Gingrich. "The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous." Watch why Gingrich is "deeply worried" »
Gingrich said the need to raise tens of millions of dollars has driven campaigns to begin cranking up much earlier than ever. Meanwhile, he said, advisers are telling candidates to begin campaigning "as soon as possible -- I need a check."
"Go look at all the analysis," said Gingrich. "Why are people starting early? Because you can't build the organization. What are you building the organization for? So you can raise the money."
But for most voters, he said, the race "begins after Christmas, no matter what the news media has to cover." He cited the example of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who was the Democratic front-runner until the first votes of the 2004 campaign were cast.
Don't Miss
Gingrich sees Clinton/Obama ticket
"Normal, rational Iowans who had rigorously avoided politics for the entire previous year looked up and said, 'He's weird.' And they looked back down, and Howard Dean disintegrated," Gingrich said.
At the same time, he said, any candidate who dares to change position on an issue during a two-year campaign risks being labeled a "flip-flopper" -- an epithet used to undercut 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry and one being waved at current Republican hopeful Mitt Romney.
"You begin to trap people," Gingrich said. "As the campaigns get longer, you're asking a person who's going to be sworn in in January of 2009 to tell you what they'll do in January of 2007, when they haven't got a clue -- because they don't know what the world will be like, and you're suggesting they won't learn anything through the two years of campaigning."
"For the most powerful nation on Earth to have an election in which Swift Boat veterans versus National Guard papers becomes a major theme verges on insane," said Gingrich, referring to 2004 campaign controversies that targeted Kerry and President Bush. "I mean, it's just -- and to watch those debates, I found painful -- for both people. They're both smarter than the debates."
He blamed the pressures of sound-bite campaigning for the recent controversy over Sen. Barack Obama's declaration that he would dispatch U.S. troops to Pakistan to attack leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network if Pakistani authorities fail to get them.
Gingrich said the Illinois Democrat, one of his party's leading presidential candidates, "said a very insightful thing in a very dangerous way." But the response, he said, "was to attack Senator Obama, not to explore the underlying kernel of what he said."
Gingrich's answer to the problems would be to get rid of limits on campaign financing, which he said have made the problems worse by requiring more individual donations to meet the same goals, and to stage a series of "dialogues" among the major-party candidates -- once a week, for 90 minutes, for nine weeks before the elections.
Candidates would pick the topics, and their answers would be uninterrupted "except for fairness on time," he said.
"After nine 90-minute conversations in their living rooms, the American people would have a remarkable sense of the two personalities and which person had the right ideas, the right character, the right capacity to be a leader," he said.
Gingrich, who has long billed himself as a visionary, led the Republicans who captured both houses of Congress in 1994 elections. National polls in July ranked him fifth among current GOP contenders, with average support of 7 percent, according to a CNN poll released Monday.
Gingrich stepped down as House speaker in 1998, after Republicans lost seats amid the drive to impeach then-President Bill Clinton over allegations that he lied under oath about a sexual relationship with a White House intern.
In March, Gingrich acknowledged he was having an affair of his own around the same time. He insisted he was not a hypocrite because Clinton was not impeached for the affair -- but for lying about it.
The Senate acquitted Clinton the following year, and his wife, former first lady-turned-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, is among the current Democratic front-runners. E-mail to a friend
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Second post of the morning:
Political Journal/WSJ
'A Very Interesting Past'
"A top campaign adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton says Rudy Giuliani's stormy personal life will be fair game should he win the Republican nomination for president," the New York Post reports:
"There's a lot that the rest of the country is going to get to know about Mayor Giuliani that the folks in New York City know," said Tom Vilsack, former Iowa governor and a co-chairman of the Clinton campaign.
"I can't even get into the number of marriages and the fact that his children--the relationship he has with his children--and what kind of circumstances New York was in before Sept. 11," Vilsack said during an interview on NY1 last night.
"There are lot of issues involving Mayor Giuliani . . . He's got a very interesting past."
Giuliani is just lucky Mrs. Clinton doesn't practice the politics of personal destruction.
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“There has been a void in the Republican presidential race. The GOP candidates have spoken about immigration, taxes, social issues, and the war in Iraq. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain have also spoken frequently about Ronald Reagan in order to position themselves as the political heirs to the great president. The candidates, however, have overlooked a central idea that animated Reagan’s view of government. That was federalism, the constitutional principle that the federal government’s responsibilities are ‘few and defined’ as James Madison put it. That’s why I’m pleased that Fred Thompson has thrown his hat into the ring. Thompson has been talking and writing about his belief in federalism. In a recent speech, he argued that ‘centralized government is not the solution to all our problems...[T]his was among the great insights of 1787, and it is just as vital in 2007.’ Thompson rightly argues that the abandonment of federalism has caused a range of pathologies including a lack of government accountability, the squelching of policy diversity between the states, and the overburdening of federal policymakers with local matters when they should be focusing on national-security issues.” —Chris Edwards
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I appreciate seeing a positive Fred Thompson story (Crafty's Chris Edwards of Cato post) as I still prefer him. For balance, here is a nice compilation of all the negatives cast against Thompson, written by Dick Morris who thinks Thompson isn't up to the task: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296882,00.html
What Morris, an ideological agnostic, misses IMO is that the ho-hum speeches sounding ho-hum conservative themes like secure borders, federalism, judges who interpret the constitution, etc. might actually have surprising appeal.
Should he win the nomination, it is good for him strategically in the general election to have not been branded early as an extreme conservative or be in lock-step with the party or the administration.
One of the knocks against Thompson is fund-raising, yet look at the attention and poll numbers he has drawn without money. Right now these candidates are not running very hard against each other. The idea that if you don't give to Fred for example, then Rudy or Mitt will be the nominee, even McCain, is not a scary proposition for a Republican. In a general election it will be pretty easy to make the case in a fund raising letter that if you don't support this guy (or whoever the nominee is) that Hillary will be President.
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This from the WSJ!
Calling Rudy
For Mr. Giuliani, it's more than his wife that's on the line.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Most Americans understand it takes an extra chromosome to run for President, but there are some limits on odd behavior. Which makes us wonder what Rudy Giuliani was thinking last Friday when he accepted, and even flaunted, a phone call from his wife Judith in the middle of his speech to the National Rifle Association.
This was no emergency call. His cell phone rang in his pocket during his speech, which is itself unusual; most public officials turn theirs off during events, if only out of courtesy for the audience. Mr. Giuliani went on to answer it and carry on a routine "love you" and "have a safe trip" exchange with Mrs. Giuliani while the crowd (and those of us watching on C-Span) wondered what in the world that was all about.
His campaign aides spun the episode as a "candid and spontaneous moment" illustrative of the couple's affection. We might believe that if we hadn't heard stories of similar behavior by Mr. Giuliani as he has campaigned around the country. During one event in Oklahoma, we're told he took two calls, at least one from his wife, and chatted for several minutes as the audience waited. That episode followed Mr. Giuliani's eye-popping disclosure earlier this year that, if he's elected, his wife would sit in on Cabinet meetings. He later downplayed that possibility.
Mr. Giuliani has run an impressive campaign so far, especially on the issues. He has a record of accomplishment in New York, and he projects the kind of executive competence that many Americans want in a President. The rap on his candidacy, however, is that his personal history and behavior are simply too strange for someone who wants to sit in the Oval Office. Voters will decide whether that's true, but if nothing else Mr. Giuliani ought to be aware of this vulnerability and do nothing to compound it.
"That was just weird," one NRA audience member told the New York Post about the phone interruption. Mr. Giuliani doesn't need more weird.
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Cocky - or Cuckoo?
Rudy Giuliani had such a good September -- from a triumphal tour of London to plaudits for his hard-nosed response to the MoveOn.org anti-Iraq War ad -- that it's astonishing how quickly his campaign has run onto the shoulder of the road.
First came last week's bizarre cell-phone incident in which the former New York mayor took a call from his wife, Judith, in the middle of his nationally televised speech to the National Rifle Association. Team Giuliani tried to spin the incident as a light-hearted and "spontaneous" moment that humanized their man, but it quickly developed that Rudy has pulled the same stunt in many other states, demonstrating rudeness to his audiences and raising questions about his campaign's self-discipline.
Then, in an interview with the Associated Press, he refused to rule out raising taxes to offset a Social Security deficit. "I am opposed to tax increases, but I would look at whatever proposal they came up with and try to figure out how we can come up with a bipartisan way to do it,'' Mr. Giuliani said. That very approach has been tried many times before -- most notably by the Greenspan Commission in 1983 -- and always the resultant higher payroll taxes have far outweighed any modest reforms imposed on future Social Security obligations.
Mr. Giuliani's stance may explain why he has refused to sign the "no new taxes" pledge made famous by Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. But he should realize that since almost every Republican in both the House and Senate has signed it, the maneuvering room for a GOP president to push for tax increases is quite limited. In the meantime, look for the next round of GOP primary debates to become more contentious as candidates who signed the Norquist pledge -- Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee -- line up against those, such as John McCain and Mr. Giuliani, who have not. Fred Thompson, the newest entrant in the GOP field, hasn't made clear what his position will be.
political journal WSJ
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-- Collin Levy
A Slightly Less Favorite Son
It's no secret former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's strategy for winning the Republican nomination hinges on racking up early wins in both Iowa and New Hampshire. But two recently released polls indicate Mr. Romney may be losing his grip on the Granite State, despite years of familiarity from nearby Boston TV coverage.
A Rasmussen Reports survey released last Tuesday showed Mr. Romney's lead over Rudy Giuliani dwindling over the course of the last month from 12 points to just three points. A survey by CNN and WMUR TV released yesterday indicated a similar downward trend: the 15-point lead Mr. Romney held over Mr. Giuliani in July is now down to a single point. Overall, Mr. Romney's lead in the RealClearPolitics Average for New Hampshire has slipped to 4%, its lowest level since the end of May.
Should Mr. Romney be worried? Yes. Is it time to hit the panic button? Not quite. The linchpin of his strategy is a win in Iowa, and right now the big lead he's built up in the Hawkeye State over the summer appears to be holding. Since winning the Ames straw poll at the beginning of August, Mr. Romney has extended his lead in the RealClearPolitics Average in Iowa by more than five points, now holding a 15.4% lead over his nearest competitor, Rudy Giuliani.
Conventional wisdom says that a win in Iowa will provide a bounce heading into New Hampshire. But one need look no further than the 2000 Republican primary -- when George Bush won the Iowa caucuses only to be trounced by John McCain by 18 points the following week in New Hampshire -- to see that's not always the case.
One factor working in Romney's favor this year is that a sizable majority of Independents -- the largest voting bloc in the state and eligible to vote in either primary -- appear to be leaning toward participating in the Democratic primary, which would lessen the chances of an Independent-fueled upset like Mr. McCain's.
But unlike President Bush, who rebounded from the loss in New Hampshire eight years ago with a hard fought victory in South Carolina, Mr. Romney has no such firewall to fall back on. He's currently running a distant fourth in South Carolina and 16 points off the pace in Florida, two states that will set the tone for the heap of delegates up for grabs on February 5th.
On the other hand, the addition of Michigan to the early primary schedule is a boon for Mr. Romney, who was born in Detroit and is the son of a former Michigan governor. But the benefit of a win by the Wolverine State's favorite son could be short lived if Mr. Romney suffers a defeat in New Hampshire.
-- Tom Bevan, executive editor of RealClearPolitics.com
A Democratic Debate Parody - Er, the Real Thing
Last night's Democratic debate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire featured many memorable moments, including Hillary Clinton artfully dodging any specifics on how she would revamp Social Security -- a sure sign that voters won't like what she has in mind.
But what Republicans are likely to focus on is the bizarre answer that the candidates gave to a question from Allison King of New England Cable News: "Last year, some parents of second-graders in Lexington, Massachusetts, were outraged to learn their children's teacher had read a story about same-sex marriage, about a prince who marries another prince.... Would you be comfortable having this story read to your children as part of their school curriculum?"
Not a single Democratic candidate was willing to say he or she thought such instruction inappropriate for students in the second grade. The reluctance to offend a powerful Democratic interest group was striking. After the debate, MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan summed up succinctly: "[John] Edwards and these folks, the Democrats, they came off tonight as a nanny-state party. They're not going to let me smoke in public, they're not going to let an 18-year-old Marine have a beer, but they're going to give 6-year-olds -- teach 'em about homosexual marriage. I mean, you get the average American out there -- this might be big stuff at Dartmouth, but I can tell ya: That doesn't sell."
NBC Political Director Chuck Todd agreed: "I would be not shocked if in 24 hours... what Pat said is the script for a Mitt Romney radio ad to try to hit the Democrats on some cultural issues." MSNBC host Chris Matthews chimed in: "The catechism of the Democratic Party is: Lots of information about the gay orientation early in life, right?"
The media often utters clucks of regret when sensitive social and cultural questions are brought into presidential politics. But could voters really be blamed for reacting negatively after the eye-popping response of the Democratic field to last night's curriculum question? It would be the equivalent of every Republican candidate declining to oppose mandatory rifle training for second-graders in order to appease the gun lobby. It would be silly and bizarre and fully worthy of comment -- and condemnation.
-- John Fund
political journal WSJ
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Democrats and Iran
Hillary outsmarts her dovish competition.
Friday, September 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Kudos to Hillary Clinton--yes, you read that right--for her Senate vote this week urging the U.S. to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. That's more than can be said for her primary competition of Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and John Edwards, who assailed her on this score at Wednesday's Democratic Presidential candidates debate at Dartmouth. These are men who seem to fear the Netroots more than the mullahs.
Mrs. Clinton's vote was on a symbolic amendment offered by Connecticut maverick Joe Lieberman and Republicans Jon Kyl and Norm Coleman. After marshaling the evidence of Iran's terrorist activities in Iraq, the amendment stated that "it is a critical national interest of the United States to prevent [Iran] from turning Shi'a militia into a Hezbollah-like force that could serve its interests inside Iraq." Twenty-one Democrats, including Joe Biden and John Kerry, apparently found this too shocking to support and voted nay, as did Republicans Chuck Hagel and Dick Lugar.
We probably shouldn't complain when 76 Senators, including a majority of Democrats, show some foreign-policy sense. Still, it's telling that the Democrats only agreed to the amendment after demanding that its language be edited to remove a statement that "it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence" of Iran. Also left on the cutting-room floor, under Democratic duress, was a call "to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq" with respect to Iran and its proxies.
The mullahs are supplying the shaped-explosive charges to Shiite militias that are killing or maiming Americas in Iraq. But these Senators are afraid even to suggest that the U.S. might use some kind of military force to save the lives of American soldiers. And they want to be Commander in Chief?
At Dartmouth, Mrs. Clinton defended her vote by noting that it "gives us the options to be able to impose sanctions on the primary leaders to try to begin to put some teeth into all this talk about dealing with Iran." That's right. With Americans having just had a Close Encounter of the Third Kind with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it's no surprise that her relative hawkishness is only widening her primary lead.
WSJ
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Woof All:
I am deeply disappointed to read that Newt Gingrich will not be running for President.
Apparently one of the factors contributing to his decision was that the perfidious and insidious McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform :roll: :lol: :x Act means he could no longer head his foundation if he were to run. Some fcuking reform!
This leaves me with Fred, whose positions on many things are close to mine, but whom I doubt as having the fire in the belly, the communication skills, the breadth of appeal, and the political killer instinct necessary to beat Hillary Evita Clinton.
Rudy has the fire, the communications skills, broader appeal, and political killer instinct but is very suspect on two issues which matter to me greatly: gun rights and control of our borders.
McCain I respect on the Iraq war, but not only does he seem too old, but he is terrible on immigration and border control and is responsible for unAmerican anti-Constitutional disasters like McCain Feingold.
Romney says some things I like a lot e.g. supply side economics, but seems to me like a Ken doll who will say whatever he thinks will get him elected, but actually lacks conviction.
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Political Journal WSJ
Randy Evans, a close adviser to Newt Gingrich, had scheduled a media briefing today
to explain just how some $30 million in pledges could be raised in the next month in
order to convince the former House Speaker to run for president.
It was not to be. On Saturday, Mr. Gingrich announced he was definitely out of the
2008 presidential race, saying he had just received legal advice that any further
effort by him to explore a presidential bid would have jeopardized the non-profit
status of his American Solutions educational group. Mr. Gingrich said he was pleased
with the success of hundreds of issue workshops conducted by American Solutions over
this past weekend, and he did not want to be forced to leave the group to pursue a
presidential run.
It may simply be that Mr. Gingrich is bowing out after recognizing the difficulty of
securing enough money for a last-minute parachute jump into the presidential race.
But he's also a victim of the McCain-Feingold campaign law, which makes any mixing
of purely political work with educational political projects almost impossible.
This latest episode is a reminder of just how much McCain-Feingold has failed to
live up to its billing. Exactly how has the law, which restricts political speech,
creates endless bureaucracy and now has played a factor in blocking the
ever-interesting Mr. Gingrich from livening up the interminable 2008 campaign, been
a boon to our democracy?
-- John Fund
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Democrats on a Roll
Fundraising totals for presidential candidates during the summer months are coming
in, and most striking is what Rudy Giuliani concedes is the "phenomenal" ability of
Democratic candidates to outpace their GOP counterparts in the cash haul. Taken
together, Democratic candidates have raised some $225 million during the first nine
months of this year, eclipsing the estimated $145 million raised by Republican
candidates.
Money isn't everything in politics, but it provides a clue as to which side is most
energized. The unpopular Iraq war, Democratic anger at President Bush and the
state-of-the-art fundraising machines assembled by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
help explain the Democratic advantage. "They're on a roll," says Rep. Tom Cole of
Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. "But
things can change quickly once there's a Republican nominee people can rally around
and issue contrasts between the parties are drawn."
That said, the GOP has reason to worry that the vast majority of new donors appear
to be giving to Democrats. Barack Obama brought in donations from a staggering
93,000 people in the third quarter, for a total of $19 million. Rudy Giuliani and
Mitt Romney have yet to report their final fundraising totals, though Fred Thompson
has brought in a respectable number of checks from 70,000 different donors, raising
a total of $8 million. John McCain stabilized his fund-raising operation, bringing
in $5 million, enough to ensure he can fight on till the Iowa caucuses. The big
surprise fundraising success on the GOP side was Rep. Ron Paul, the iconoclastic
libertarian from Texas, who managed to raise $3 million, almost all in small
donations over the Internet and through direct mail.
-- John Fund
Coming Home to Hillary
A recent issue of the Economist includes a joke New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson
cracked two years ago: The Democratic Party has a lot of good presidential
candidates, he said. "There's Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa -- he'd bring back the
Midwest. There's Joe Biden -- he'd bring back the national-security voter. And
there's Hillary Clinton -- she'd bring back the White House furniture."
Mrs. Clinton may also bring back Ohio. With the latest fundraising numbers trickling
out, her campaign figures she raised somewhere between $17 million and $20 million,
giving her plenty of money to be competitive in the primaries. But beyond the bottom
line, Mrs. Clinton is also adding a few other valuable assets to her ledger -- she's
bringing back some Democrats who had drifted over to George W. Bush, including
notable donors in vote-rich Ohio.
One of them is venture capitalist James Gould, who helped Mr. Bush nail down the
Buckeye State three years ago. He's now backing Mrs. Clinton, telling a reporter
recently: "She's misunderstood." The Clinton campaign spent a considerable amount of
time courting the Cincinnati entrepreneur, even giving him several hours to talk to
Mrs. Clinton directly. He walked away thinking: "I liked her a lot more than I
thought I would. She's really smart. I was very impressed." He now plans to host a
fundraiser for her.
Rep. Ed Royce, a California Republican, dropped by the Journal?s offices this week
and told us the GOP had better make some cold calculations in coming months. Ohio is
slipping away, he says, thanks to various GOP scandals involving then-Gov Bob Taft
and Rep. Bob Ney, who pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff case. That means his party
must look anew at the electoral map and figure out which states a Republican
candidate has a real chance to carry. If Rudy Giuliani can carry New York, New
Jersey and Pennsylvania or put California in play, Mr. Royce tells us, that might
just replace the loss of Ohio.
-- Brendan Miniter
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Hillary vs. Limbaugh
Liberals continue to step up their Hush Rush campaign. First, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spent hours urging Clear Channel, Rush Limbaugh's syndicator, to repudiate him over what Mr. Reid claimed were comments that American soldiers who seek to end the war in Iraq were "phony soldiers."
That didn't work when Clear Channel pointed out Rush's long-standing support for and visits with U.S. troops and suggested that Mr. Reid's interpretation of his remarks was strained at best. Mr. Limbaugh notes that his broadcast referred to the specific case of an anti-war veteran whose exploits on the battlefield were found to have been fabricated.
Now liberals have deployed former General Wesley Clark, Bill Clinton's favorite man in uniform, to gnaw on Rush's ankles. Mr. Clark writes at HuffingtonPost.com: "It's time to put real pressure on Rush Limbaugh" by getting him kicked off Armed Forces Radio. "It's time to tell Congress to act swiftly to hold Rush Limbaugh accountable."
The liberal attempt to divert attention from the infamous MoveOn.org ad that twisted the name of General David Petraeus, the Iraq military commander, is driven by Media Matters, a left-wing media watchdog group. If anyone doubts that Media Matters isn't part of the Clinton attack machine, just consider that Hillary Clinton herself took credit for creating the group at last year's DailyKos blogger convention, when she was desperately trying to demonstrate her anti-war bona fides.
During her DailyKos speech, Senator Clinton proudly stated: "We are certainly better prepared and more focused on, you know, taking our arguments and making them effective and disseminating them widely and really putting together a network in the blogosphere and a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institutions that I helped to start and support, like Media Matters and Center for American Progress."
The Center For American Progress is the liberal think tank run by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. Its most visible recent effort was a lengthy report urging Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, the discredited FCC policy that required all broadcasters to provide equal time for all points of view. The major target of those who would revive the Fairness Doctrine? Rush Limbaugh.
Hillary Clinton is running for president, but she also apparently finds time to use surrogates to limit and control the reach of one of her most persistent media critics.
Opinion Journal
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“George McGovern, who parlayed his $1,000-in-every-pot proposal into a 49-state loss in 1972, should sue for copyright infringement after Sen. Clinton told the Congressional Black Caucus’ annual legislative conference that every baby born in America should be given a $5,000 ‘baby bond.’ Actually, Hillary’s $5,000 is just McGovern’s $1,000 adjusted for inflation. McGovern’s $1,000 was equivalent in 2006 to $4,808.90. By the time she is sworn in, she should be right on the mark. Hillary argued that wealthy people ‘get to have all kinds of tax incentives to save, but most people can’t afford to do that.’ So her ‘baby bond’ is designed to give the kids of people who can’t afford to save ‘a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on that first home.’ But to pay for that home they will have to go to work and pay taxes. Hillary doesn’t propose cutting their taxes or those of their parents. Nor does she propose increasing the dependent deduction on their federal tax form. What Clinton proposes is another brick in the cradle-to-grave wall envisioned by liberals—paid for by ever-rising taxes... In 2004 (the latest year for which official figures are available), there were 4,116,000 live births in the United States. That works out to a current price of $21 billion per year, every year. It is an amount that will get bigger, particularly if illegal immigration is allowed to increase unimpeded. Since we now have a budget deficit, this $21-billion-plus new entitlement will have to be funded by borrowing. So the $5,000 savings ‘gift’ in fact is a government loan to each new baby, payable in full through their taxes when they grow up. Happy Birthday!” —Investor’s Business Daily
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Lets see how Hillary can get away with robbing Paul to give to Jane.
Her trial balloon study (survey and or focus group) results showed that stealing government money to give $5000 to all children born in the USA (sounds like a Springsteen song) did not get her enough votes. So now she will steal money from increasing taxes on estates to give $1,000 to people for 401K. Geeze, she wonders how many votes this will buy her.
This of course is her way of coming up with "ideas" that will make this country better cry
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8S5TSGG0&show_article=1
The only one with real ideas as far as I've heard is Gingrich. And he just announced he will not run. Let's hope Romney or Guiliani are listening. I would think Romney will but I don't know about Rudy.
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Political Journal WSJ
Paul for the Long Haul
Could Ron Paul be considering a third-party run for the White House after the GOP primaries are over? After all, in 1988 he left the GOP to run as the Libertarian Party candidate. He is just ornery enough to do it again.
A hint of his dissatisfaction came last night during the CNBC debate when Chris Matthews asked him if he would promise "to support the nominee of the Republican Party next year." Mr. Paul's answer was a flat no. "Not unless they're willing to end the war and bring our troops home. And not unless they are willing to look at the excess in spending. No, I'm not going to support them if they continue down the path that has taken our party down the tubes."
When I saw Mr. Paul last Friday after a speech he gave to Americans for Prosperity in Washington, he was clearly feeling his oats on the public reaction to his stand opposing the Iraq war. He rejected my comment that his anti-war emphasis was crowding out his free-market message "Everything is tied to the war. It threatens our financial security as well," he told me. I left our brief encounter with the clear impression he wanted to continue to talk about his message well into the future beyond the GOP primary race.
Despite his libertarian views, a Paul third-party run might hurt the Democrats more than Republicans. If he emphasized his support for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq immediately, he would trump Hillary Clinton on the left. If he talked about his support for drug decriminalization, he would clearly appeal to a constituency ignored by both major parties.
The logistics of a Paul run are also there. The Libertarian Party national convention doesn't meet until late May in Denver, and becoming its nominee guarantees a spot on 26 state ballots immediately. Another 20 state ballot lines are fairly easy to obtain.
Mr. Paul could, of course, retire from the House if he ran for president. But Texas law also allows him to both run for president and seek re-election to the House, thanks to a statute rammed through by Lyndon Johnson. The GOP primary in which Mr. Paul is being challenged for his seat is held in early March, well before he would have to publicly announce any third-party intentions. Nothing prevents him from running as, say, a Libertarian for president and a Republican for the House at the same time.
It's also likely that Mr. Paul might be the rare third-party candidate who could actually raise his own money. He took in over $5 million in the last quarter, exceeding the fundraising totals of candidates such as John McCain and Mike Huckabee. A chunk of his money comes from liberals such as singer Barry Manilow, and he might find himself the recipient of some support in a general election from anti-Hillary Democrats who deplore the grip of the Clinton clan on their party.
-- John Fund
A Slimmed Down Huey Long
The clear bookends of yesterday's CNBC/Wall Street Journal GOP debate on the economy were Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee. For conservative Republicans, they could hardly have been more apart in their view of the country's economic future.
Mr. Thompson painted a blue-sky vision of the current economy, while making passing reference to the unemployment in Michigan, the site of yesterday's debate. He said voters should understand just how well the economy was doing: "It is the greatest story never told." His prescription for the future? "We should acknowledge what got us there and continue those same policies on into the future," he concluded, as he made a call for extension of the Bush tax cuts and a further decrease in internationally uncompetitive corporate tax rates. He also made a call for an adjustment in how Social Security benefits are calculated that would lead to a direct reduction in the amount of money recipients would receive.
Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who hails from a neighboring state to Mr. Thompson's Tennessee base, took a completely different tack. He practically cozied up to America's unions, which he said "are going to take a more prominent role in the future for one simple reason: A lot of American workers are finding that their wages continue to get strapped lower and lower while CEO salaries are higher and higher."
Mr. Huckabee believes that economic inequality is creating "a level of discontent that's going to create a huge appetite for unions." He also sounded cautionary notes about free trade and entitlement reform that are relatively rare for a Republican. Asked if he would support President Bush's veto of the budget-busting increase in the children's health care program SCHIP, Mr. Huckabee declined to say he would have issued a similar veto "because there are going to be so many issues we've got to fight. And the political loss of that is going to be enormous."
Translation: When it comes to tough political fights on spending, don't look for a President Huckabee to be there.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"First impressions are supposed to be 90 percent of politics. If that's the case, Fred Thompson should have a decent shot at the Republican presidential nomination. The impression he created in Tuesday's Republican debate in Detroit wasn't that of a dominant figure or a replica of Ronald Reagan. But he came across as likable, knowledgeable on issues but not wonky, and unexcitable. So Thompson passed the test of whether he could run with the big boys -- Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain -- in the Republican race" -- political analyst Fred Barnes, writing at WeeklyStandard.com.
Quote of the Day II
"This debate will be known for two things: 1) an uneven debut for Thompson; the opening answer he gave was that of a VERY nervous first-time candidate and there was a noticeable pause that was striking in a bad way; every evening newscast grabbed that moment and because of that some may believe Thompson's performance was worse than it actually was" -- political analyst Chuck Todd, writing at NBC.com.
Quote of the Day III
"Her very candidacy elicits memories of all the Clinton scandals, from Whitewater and Marc Rich to the gifts to the Rose Law Firm, the Chinese campaign contributions, the New Square Hasidic pardons, the Lincoln Bedroom and Monica. Why do Democrats willingly take on that baggage when two relative virgins [Barack Obama and John Edwards] beckon as alternatives? Democrats today are seeking a warrior, a gladiator, not a president when they cast their ballots in their primaries and caucuses. Angered by the so-called defeat of 2000 and scarred by the upset of 2004, there is an intensity to their desire to win that dwarfs all other emotions and considerations.... Hillary's demonstrated ability to overcome adversity and triumph is the quality that most appeals to Democrats. Her battle scars are her accolades" -- former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris, writing in The Hill newspaper.
The Reagan Party
The big winner in last night's Republican debate on the economy was... Ronald Reagan. How so? Because virtually all of the candidates sounded a pro-growth Reaganite message on tax cuts, regulation and free trade. Perhaps they are in tune with polls that find that more than 70% of Republican voters describe themselves as "Reagan Republicans."
Rudy Giuliani called himself a "supply-sider." Fred Thompson said government is too big and costs too much and promised big spending cuts. Both Mr. Giuliani and Mitt Romney borrowed a page out of the Gipper's playbook by touting economic optimism and by refusing to buy into the despair underlying many of the loaded questions from the media panel. Rudy even scolded CNBC's Maria Bartiromo for suggesting that New York City was surrendering its financial capital status to London. "Hold your head up, Maria," the former New York Mayor responded.
The fireworks came early when Messrs. Romney and Giuliani counterpunched over which has the better fiscal record. Both claimed to cut taxes more than the other. Mr. Romney scored points by attacking Mr. Giuliani for opposing a federal line item veto and even bringing a lawsuit against it in the late 1990s.
Still Mr. Giuliani had the best moment of the evening after Texas Congressman Ron Paul suggested that America has never been in "imminent" danger of attack. Mr. Giuliani responded: "Where were you on 9/11?"
Jay Leno cracked last night that the debate was between old white men and really old white men -- an attack that could hurt the GOP as it reaches out to independent voters, particularly the up-for-grabs "security moms." A more serious substantive problem for Republicans is whether their sunny-eyed optimism on the economy matches the mood of economically "stressed out" voters. As former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich told me last night: "Most voters don't believe the Republican message that things are wonderful. There's a disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street."
He may be right. But the Republican message of cutting taxes for the middle class is likely to resonate better than the Democratic promise of raising them. As pollster Scott Rasmussen notes: "When Democrats talk about raising taxes on the rich, the middle class doesn't believe them. Voters are convinced their own taxes will go up." That will be a central issue in the general election. It's a shame that whoever is left standing after the GOP primary brawls are over can't choose the Gipper as his running mate.
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Fred Thompson met the media yesterday, a day after the GOP debate in Orlando, and continued to be peppered by questions about whether he has the "fire in the belly" to run for president.
Mr. Thompson clearly showed his disdain for the question. "I'm glad we're dealing again with matters of real important national security and real important matters to our economy," he responded in a sarcastic tone. He proceeded to lecture the assembled press corps: "To hear some of these comments, you would not recognize the fact that I'm apparently second in all the national polls, that I've got over 100,000 contributors and I've been in the race for about eight weeks."
As for critics who cite his scant campaign schedule and short speeches as signs his bid for the nomination is troubled, he offered a simple response: "I'm going to do it the way I want to do it."
Evidence for that attitude soon arrived when he took a question about the Terri Schiavo controversy. Mr. Thompson had made headlines last month during a visit to Florida when asked if Congress had overstepped its bounds in 2005 over the court-ordered removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube. He said at the time: "Local matters, generally speaking, should be left to the locals," adding, "I don't remember the details of the case." His response left many to wonder, as ABC News put it, "if he had slept through what was a national frenzy."
Mr. Thompson pointed out yesterday that he was far from indifferent to the Schiavo case, having been intimately involved in a decision to end the life of his own daughter in 2002, after she entered the hospital due to an accidental drug overdose. "I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family," an emotional Mr. Thompson told reporters. "And I will assure you one thing: No matter which decision you make, you will never know whether or not you made exactly the right decision." He also decried those who would turn life-and-death medical decisions into a "political football," saying the federal government "should stay out of these matters."
As an unconventional candidate, Mr. Thompson can expect more questions about his work habits and speaking style. But I suspect questions about his knowledge of the Terri Schiavo case will now stop.
Political Journal WSJ
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Rudy?
Giuliani and religious right meet on the road to political adulthood.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, October 25, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
One school of thought on the religious right holds that if Rudy Giuliani would commit to an unequivocal anti-abortion position, they could vote for him. A second school of thought, articulated by Richard Land, a leading figure in the politically important Southern Baptist Convention, is that he won't vote for any pro-choice candidate "as a matter of personal moral conscience," though Mr. Land says other evangelicals might find a way to vote for Mr. Giuliani.
Among the reasons politicians such as Mr. Giuliani are sensitive to this issue was the revelation, from exit polls after the 2004 election, that values and morals ranked high among voters' concerns. Thus this past weekend the very conservative Family Research Council pointedly named its Washington convocation the "Values Voter Summit."
Into this den of reproach stepped Rudy Giuliani on Saturday, dragging various balls and chains--liberal "social" beliefs, three marriages, alienated children, New York City. No matter that Ronald Reagan had two marriages, alienated children, Hollywood pals and live-and let-live social views. A straw poll taken after the candidates' speeches put Mr. Giuliani next to dead last, before John McCain but well behind the attendees' top choice, former Baptist minister and future talk-show star Mike Huckabee.
The focus here is on the speech Mr. Giuliani delivered to the values summit. He's the front-runner. He's the candidate who somehow has to get people like these evangelicals to decide whether votes in a presidential election ought to be cast for one or two issues or for a governing philosophy. Then there's the little matter of the candidate's character.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think governing philosophy is more important than the endless Chinese puzzle of moving this or that issue forward and back. American politics, right and left, has become obsessive about nailing where candidates "stand" on standalone issues--abortion, gay marriage, immigration, the North Pole melting or pulling out of Iraq. Trying to pin politicians down is honest work. But last time I looked, the thing you win was still called a "government." That means it matters if the candidate is able to govern, which has proven a challenge the past 16 years or so, in part because proliferating factions refuse to be governed.
In the '60s, the left introduced the "non-negotiable demand" into our politics. It's still with us. It's political infantilism. In real life, the non-negotiable "demand" usually ends about age six.
Of necessity, Mr. Giuliani has to get voters on the right past this narrowed focus. Adult politics, though, runs in both directions. Rudy has to move toward them, too, and believably.
Mr. Giuliani didn't mention abortion--and adoption--until deep into the talk. He began by laying down a personal marker: "I can't be all things to all people. I'm just not like that. I can't do that." This opened the door a crack on the man behind the grand smile. He needs to do more of that (why in a moment). But his case against issues pandering is one of the better I've heard: "For me to twist myself all up to try to figure out exactly what you want to hear, and today say one thing and the next day another thing--if you do that too long, you lose the sense of what leadership is all about."
Then came the admission of their political legitimacy, and in a way they'd get. He told them that people of faith "should not be marginalized" in public debates. The "religious right" knows exactly what this means. This is what was at issue when this movement erupted at the GOP convention in Houston back in 1992. The no-apologies belligerence of the Christian right began then because they were marginalized, even mocked by the national press corps in Houston.
Mr. Giuliani, however, didn't exploit their enduring sense of alienation from the media. Instead, he argued with some force that their ideas deserved a seat at the national table. He didn't promise triumph, but he offered respect.
The speech's big set-up theme was "responsibility." Every right carries a duty, and every benefit brings an obligation. His argument to them was a "culture of personal responsibility" enhances both accountability and self-respect, and these in turn will result in less of the things that drive the evangelicals nuts. To the extent any politician can make it sound as if he actually believes this stuff, Mr. Giuliani does.
Still, there's a problem. "Responsibility" was a main theme of Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural speech. We believed him. A Wall Street Journal editorial, "Responsibility's Return," commented the next day: "It is good to hear any President, or anyone in a position of leadership in this country, talking about personal responsibility. Mr. Clinton is talking about it because in our recent history, there hasn't been enough of it." Then came the presidency.
Mr. Giuliani has a remarkable gift for political empathy. But I think he is acutely aware that no one talked this kind of talk better than Bill Clinton, and that the show-stopper ever after for charismatic presidential candidates will have to do with questions about character once in office.
So to the values voters he added: "We lose trust in political leaders not because they are imperfect; after all, they're human. We lose trust with them when they're not honest with us." A woman in the audience said, "That's right."
That's right. But twice in the speech, Mr. Giuliani tried to explain that his faith and his personal failings were difficult to discuss "because of the way I was brought up, or for other reasons." Other reasons? The way he was brought up--in the pre-Vatican II grade schools and high schools of New York City-- many of us understand. But he'll need to find a way to talk about "the other reasons."
It was a remarkable, effective and important speech. And more useful still if Mr. Giuliani and the religious right can reach some shared understanding of political and personal adulthood.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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Sometimes schisms within a political party aren't exposed until a candidate steps right into them. This week, Barack Obama stepped into one.
Donnie McClurkin is a Grammy-Award winning gospel singer and preacher highly respected within the black community, especially in the South where religious conviction runs strong. It probably seemed like a great idea to the Obama campaign to invite Mr. McClurkin to sing this weekend at an event during Mr. Obama's "Embrace the Change" Tour, aimed at religious blacks in South Carolina.
Except gay activists consider Mr. McClurkin a bigot for claiming to have been "cured" of his homosexuality and for preaching that other homosexuals can be cured as well through the power of prayer. Obama aides were quick to respond to the rising outrage and held several conference calls with gay activists this week to try to ease tensions. Eventually Mr. Obama released his own statement saying he "strongly disagreed" with Mr. McClurkin's views, but so far the campaign hasn't pulled the singer off the tour.
The reason for the campaign's hesitancy might have something to do with poll numbers showing that blacks in South Carolina strongly disagree with homosexuality. As the Politico's Ben Smith reported, last month's Winthrop/ETV poll found that 74% view homosexuality as "unacceptable," with 62% calling it "strongly unacceptable." Indeed, this episode illustrates a vast chasm in the Democratic coalition between black voters, mainly in the South, and the party's activist wing. This no doubt explains why none of the other Democratic presidential candidates have said a word about the controversy, perhaps feeling it wiser to just avoid the schism altogether.
Ditching Mr. McClurkin would present a particularly serious problem in a state where Mr. Obama trails Hillary Clinton by 13 points in the latest RCP Average. Among South Carolina black voters, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last month found that Mr. Obama trails Ms. Clinton by 11 points (43% to 32%). The "Embrace the Change" Tour was launched precisely to close that gap.
But with the nation's largest gay-rights groups like Human Rights Campaign now demanding that the campaign yank Mr. McClurkin, bringing unwanted national attention with each press release, what was supposed to be a fun voter outreach effort has suddenly become a public-relations mess.
-- Blake Dvorak, RealClearPolitics.com
Quote of the Day
"The filthiest, grimiest, most unpleasant job that any human being can ever suffer to perform: run for political office.... Because political power in modern America means the power to take money from A and give it to B, bevies of wannabe Bs swarm to get a piece of you. It must be suffocating and morally disorienting constantly to be hounded by people begging you to assist them in their efforts to take what doesn't belong to them. Worse, to keep or win office, you must actually engage in such dirty behavior (or promise to do so once elected). You must determine which innocent people are the easiest marks for your grabbing hand -- which people are least likely to be aware that you're picking their pockets -- and then grab fistfuls of their wealth, all the while assuring them that you're their boon companion and great protector. In short, in this job you must soil your honor and sell your soul by behaving foolishly and by saying things that you know to be false" -- Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The John Gotti Primary
Political consultants for Rudy Giuliani's opponents have long been licking their chops for the day when the mayor's controversial past is thrust before voters. "In the end, he will be viewed as just too 'New York' and too strange for Middle America voters," one opposition researcher for a rival campaign told me. This campaign adviser also mentioned in passing that "even though it's unfair," many voters might be rattled by the revelation that Mr. Giuliani's father served time in prison for robbery and later worked as a collector for the mayor's mob-tied uncle.
But for every Giuliani blemish there may well be a competing story line. "Rudy Giuliani is being smeared with the dishonest blood of family members," wrote columnist Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News in 2000, when the Giuliani family revelations first gained currency.
Now the New York Post reports that the Mafia clearly did not view Mr. Giuliani as anything other than a bitter enemy. Indeed, the paper cites FBI records that a gathering of mob bosses voted by only three to two not to kill him during his 1980s career as a federal prosecutor.
In documents released this week as part of an ongoing criminal trial, a long FBI memo reported: "On Sept. 17, 1987, sources advised that recent information disclosed that approximately a year ago all five NY LCN [La Cosa Nostra] families discussed the idea of killing USA [United States Attorney] Rudy Giuliani and John Gotti and Carmine Persico were in favor of the hit." The memo goes on to report that "the bosses of the Lucchese, Bonanno and Genovese families rejected the idea, despite strong efforts to convince them otherwise by Gotti and Persico."
Carmine Persico apparently didn't give up on his belief Mr. Giuliani should be whacked. In 2004, evidence surfaced that Joel "Joe Waverly" Cacace, a Persico "employee," had planned a failed assassination attempt on the prosecutor. Cacace is now serving a 20-year sentence on unrelated charges.
-- John Fund
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Another Man From Hope
Who is Mike Huckabee?
Friday, October 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential elections by running candidates who broadly fit the Ronald Reagan model--fiscally conservative, and firmly but not harshly conservative on social issues. The wide-open race for the 2008 GOP nomination has generated two new approaches.
Rudy Giuliani, for example, isn't running away from his socially liberal views, although he has modified them. But he is campaigning as a staunch, even acerbic economic conservative. Should he win the nomination, conventional wisdom has it he may balance the ticket by picking former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as a running mate.
Mr. Huckabee, on the other hand, is running hard right on social issues but liberal-populist on some economic issues. This may help explain why the affable, golden-tongued Baptist minister was the clear favorite at the pro-life Family Research Council's national forum last Saturday. And why Mr. Huckabee's praises have been sung by liberal columnists such as Gail Collins of the New York Times and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek.
Mr. Huckabee attributes his support to the fact he is a "hardworking, consistent conservative with some authenticity about those convictions." He is certainly qualified for national office, having served nearly 11 years as a chief executive. I have known and liked him for years; on the stump he often tells the story of how we first met outside his boarded-up office in the state Capitol, which had been sealed by Arkansas Democrats who refused to accept he had won an upset election for lieutenant governor in 1993. But I also know he is not the "consistent conservative" he now claims to be.
Nor am I alone. Betsy Hagan, Arkansas director of the conservative Eagle Forum and a key backer of his early runs for office, was once "his No. 1 fan." She was bitterly disappointed with his record. "He was pro-life and pro-gun, but otherwise a liberal," she says. "Just like Bill Clinton he will charm you, but don't be surprised if he takes a completely different turn in office."
Phyllis Schlafly, president of the national Eagle Forum, is even more blunt. "He destroyed the conservative movement in Arkansas, and left the Republican Party a shambles," she says. "Yet some of the same evangelicals who sold us on George W. Bush as a 'compassionate conservative' are now trying to sell us on Mike Huckabee."
The business community in Arkansas is split. Some praise Mr. Huckabee's efforts to raise taxes to repair roads and work with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. Free-market advocates are skeptical. "He has zero intellectual underpinnings in the conservative movement," says Blant Hurt, a former part owner of, and columnist for, Arkansas Business magazine. "He's hostile to free trade, hiked sales and grocery taxes, backed sales taxes on Internet purchases, and presided over state spending going up more than twice the inflation rate."
Mr. Huckabee told me yesterday he also cut some taxes, and has taken the Americans for Tax Reform no-tax pledge. Former GOP state Rep. Randy Minton is not impressed. In 1999, he was urged by the governor to back a gas-tax increase. "I'd taken a pledge against higher taxes, but he sniffed that my constituents didn't understand what we have to do in state government to make it work," Mr. Minton says. "His support for taxes split the Republican Party, and damaged our name brand." The Club for Growth notes that only a handful of the 33 current GOP state legislators back their former governor.
Governors who served with him praise Mr. Huckabee for his ability to work with others, but say he was clearly a moderate. "He fought my efforts to reform the National Governors Association and always took fiscal positions to my left," former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a supporter of Mitt Romney, told me.
Rick Scarborough, a pastor who heads Vision America, attended seminary with Mr. Huckabee and is a strong backer. But, he acknowledges, "Mike has always sought the validation of elites." When conservatives took over the Southern Baptist Convention after a bitter fight in the 1980s, Mr. Huckabee sided with the ruling moderates. Paul Pressler, a former Texas judge who led the conservative Southern Baptist revolt, told me, "I know of no conservative he appointed while he headed the Arkansas Baptist Convention."
Mr. Huckabee's reluctance to surround himself with conservatives was evident as governor, when he kept many agency heads appointed by Bill Clinton. Zac Wright, a spokesman for incoming Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe, was asked this year why 15 Huckabee agency heads had been retained. Most of them were "Clinton people," he replied, not "Huckabee people." Mr. Huckabee told me many of his agency heads had "apolitical" responsibilities.
Many Huckabee supporters have told me their man should be judged by what he's saying on the campaign trail today. Fair enough. Mr. Huckabee was the only GOP candidate to refuse to endorse President Bush's veto of the Democrats' bill to vastly expand the Schip health-care program. Only he and John McCain have endorsed the discredited cap-and-trade system to limit global-warming emissions that has proved a fiasco in Europe.
"It goes to the moral issue," he told an admiring group of environmentalists this month. Alan Greenspan blasts cap-and-trade in his new book as not feasible, noting that "jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained." Mr. Huckabee defends his plan as an "innovative" way to attain complete energy independence from foreign oil by 2013.
During a visit to the Journal last spring, Mr. Huckabee joked that one of his biggest challenges is that "like Bill Clinton I hail from Hope, Arkansas, and not every Republican wants to take a chance like that again." But it's Mr. Huckabee who is creating the doubts. "He's just like Bill Clinton in that he practices management by news cycle," a former top Huckabee aide told me. "As with Clinton there was no long-term planning, just putting out fires on a daily basis. One thing I'll guarantee is that won't lead to competent conservative governance."
WSJ
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Looking for Mr. Right
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, October 26, 2007
"I was conservative yesterday, I'm a conservative today, and I will be a conservative tomorrow," declared Fred Thompson to the Conservative Party of New York, billing himself as the "consistent conservative" in the GOP race -- in contrast to ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani.
In his defense, Rudy cites George Will as calling his eight years in office in the Big Apple the most conservative city government in 50 years.
And, truth be told, Thompson was reliably conservative in his Senate years. But so, too, has John McCain been, and Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo. Hunter, however, splits with Thompson and McCain on trade. Paul disagrees with all six of them on the war. And Tancredo assails McCain for backing Bush's amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens.
Will the real conservative please stand up? Or perhaps we should recall John 14:2, "In my father's house there are many mansions."
What does it mean to be a conservative -- in 2007?
Sixty years ago, Robert A. Taft was the gold standard. Forty years ago, it was Barry Goldwater, who backed Bob Taft against Ike at the 1952 convention. Twenty years ago, it was Ronald Reagan, who backed Barry in 1964. Reagan remains the paragon -- for the consistency of his convictions, the success of his presidency and the character he exhibited to the end of his life. About Reagan the cliche was true: The greatness of the office found out the greatness in the man.
Reagan defined conservatism for his time. And the issues upon which we agreed were anti-communism, a national defense second to none, lower tax rates to unleash the engines of economic progress, fiscal responsibility, a strict-constructionist Supreme Court, law and order, the right-to-life from conception on and a resolute defense of family values under assault from the cultural revolution that hit America with hurricane force in the 1960s.
With the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the breakup of the Soviet Union, anti-communism as the defining and unifying issue of the right was gone. The conservative crack-up commenced.
With George H.W. Bush came the advent of what Fred Barnes of The New Republic hailed as Big Government Conservatism. Some thought the phrase oxymoronic. But when Bush stood at the rostrum of the U.N. General Assembly in October 1991 to declare that America's cause was the creation of a New World Order, the old right reached reflexively for their revolvers.
In 1992, with foreign policy off the table, the Bush economic record a perceived failure and Ross Perot running on protectionism and populism, Bush refused to play his trump card with the Clintons: the social and moral issues he and Lee Atwater had use to beat Michael Dukakis senseless in 1988. And so, George H.W. Bush lost the presidency.
Now, 15 years later, what does it mean to be a conservative?
There is no pope who speaks ex cathedra. There is no bible to consult, like Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative" or Reagan's "no-pale-pastels" platform of 1980. At San Diego in 1996, Bob Dole told his convention he had not bothered to read the platform. Many who heard him did not bother to vote for Bob Dole.
And so, today, the once-great house of conservatism is a Tower of Babel. We are big government and small government, traditionalist and libertarian, tax-cutter and budget hawk, free trader and economic nationalist. Bush and McCain support amnesty and a "path to citizenship" for illegals. The country wants the laws enforced and a fence on the border.
And Rudy? A McGovernite in 1972, he boasted in the campaign of 1993 that he would "rekindle the Rockefeller, Javits, Lefkowitz tradition" of New York's GOP and "produce the kind of change New York City saw with ... John Lindsay." He ran on the Liberal Party line and supported Mario Cuomo in 1994.
Pro-abortion, anti-gun, again and again he strutted up Fifth Avenue in the June Gay Pride parade and turned the Big Apple into a sanctuary city for illegal aliens. While Ward Connerly goes state to state to end reverse discrimination, Rudy is an affirmative-action man.
Gravitating now to Rudy's camp are those inveterate opportunists, the neocons, who see in Giuliani their last hope of redemption for their cakewalk war and their best hope for a "Long War" against "Islamofascism."
I will, Rudy promises, nominate Scalias. Only one more may be needed to overturn Roe. And I will keep Hillary out of the White House.
A Giuliani presidency would represent the return and final triumph of the Republicanism that conservatives went into politics to purge from power. A Giuliani presidency would represent repudiation by the party of the moral, social and cultural content that, with anti-communism, once separated it from liberal Democrats and defined it as an institution.
Rudy offers the right the ultimate Faustian bargain: retention of power at the price of one's soul.
Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .
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Pedestrian Down
Democrats who are nervous about having Hillary Clinton as their nominee had their fears confirmed last night. Mrs. Clinton finally stumbled in her seventh Democratic debate once the other candidates decided to chew on her.
Mrs. Clinton responded to the criticism by retreating to her briefing books, giving rehearsed answers to questions in a too loud, slightly shrill voice. She was pummeled for not releasing White House records kept by the National Archives that would shine light on her claim to be the most experienced candidate based on her service as First Lady.
But her worst moment came when she gave a bizarre answer to a question about a proposal by her fellow New York Democrat, Governor Eliot Spitzer, to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Pressed by Tim Russert about whether she still favors his plan, as she told a New Hampshire paper, she launched into a long defense of it. Then, after Senator Chris Dodd attacked her stance, she interrupted and said: "I did not say that it should be done."
NBC's Tim Russert, one of the debate moderators, jumped in and said to her: "You told [a] New Hampshire paper that it made a lot of sense. Do you support his plan?"
"You know, Tim," Mrs. Clinton replied, "this is where everybody plays 'gotcha.'"
John Edwards quickly pounced: "Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes. America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them."
Chris Matthews of MSNBC concluded that Mrs. Clinton had put herself in a box: "She will have to come out against giving . . . people in the country illegally a driver's license. It doesn't sell."
I'm not so sure. Mrs. Clinton has always had a soft spot for measures that many election officials say compromise the integrity of the ballot box. She sponsored a major bill to strip states of their right to bar felons from voting, a right many legal scholars say is enshrined in the Constitution.
Governor Spitzer's plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens is equally controversial, in part because anyone with such a license could probably vote in elections with impunity. In order to register to vote, a person must sign an affidavit stating that he or she is an American citizen. "You assume that people don't lie, and that's what the form says," state Board of Elections spokesman Lee Daghlian told the New York Post. "It would be [tough to catch] if someone wanted to . . . get a number of people registered [to vote] who aren't citizens and went ahead and got them driver's licenses." Mr. Daghlian conceded that "nobody checks it" to determine if someone registering to vote is truly eligible.
Because of the federal Motor Voter Law, everyone getting a driver's license in New York is automatically handed a voter registration form. With New York being home to upwards of 500,000 illegal aliens, the potential for mischief is great, especially since the Spitzer administration has reversed a policy that would have barred the Department of Motor Vehicles from handing out motor-voter registration forms to anyone without a Social Security number.
Politically speaking, supporting driver's licenses for illegal aliens is an untenable position in a general election. But in the Democratic primaries, the issue is a litmus test for many liberal and immigrant groups backing Mrs. Clinton's candidacy. That helps explain her bizarre obfuscations in last night's debate, when she showed the first chink in her armor, her first failure to square her appeals to the liberal base with attempts to portray herself as a moderate.
"If she loses the nomination, [last night's debate] will go down in history as the first step to her defeat -- no fatal 'Dean Scream' catastrophe, but far from her finest moment, to say the least," concluded Time magazine political handicapper Mark Halperin.
-- John Fund
Political Journal/WSJ
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This Sunday, Fred will be on NBC's Meet the Press as part of their "Meet the Candidates" series. Judging by the questions asked at Tuesday's Democratic Presidential debate any topic could come up: immigration, taxes, national security, even UFOs.
Unlike the debates and the typical news shows, Fred will have time to talk to the American people in a way that doesn't require slick, 10-second sound bites.
What will Fred talk about? The same issues he's talking about when campaigning across the country: securing our borders; ending sanctuary cities; keeping taxes low; taking on the impending entitlement crisis; the protection of life; and abiding by the principles of our Founding Fathers.
Specifically on immigration reform, Fred will continue his fight against letting illegal immigrants get drivers licenses. Hillary Clinton is wrong to allow people who already are breaking the law to get a license that would give them the opportunity to register to vote. Fred will not let lawbreakers continue breaking the law. He has a plan to secure the border and reform the nation's immigration process.
Meet the Press this Sunday will give Fred another opportunity to show Americans why he's a consistent conservative. Out on the trail one of his most well-received lines is "That's what I was yesterday, that's who I am today, and that's who I will be tomorrow." Unlike other candidates who came late to the conservative movement Fred's track record proves his consistency.
Watch Fred Sunday on NBC.
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Hillary Reveals Her Inner Self
It's startling. It's still 1993 in there, the year before her fall.
BY PEGGY NOONAN
Friday, November 2, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
The story isn't that the Democrats finally took on Hillary Clinton. Nor is it that they were gentlemanly to the point of gingerly and tentative. There was an air of "Please, somebody kill her for me so I can jump in and show high minded compassion at her plight!"
Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois--Adlai Sevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game. Mr. Obama is like someone who would write in his diaries, "I shall point out Estes Kefauver's manifold inconsistencies, then to luncheon with Arthur and Marietta."
The odd thing is it's easier to be a killer when you know exactly what you stand for, when you have a real philosophy. The philosophy becomes a platform from which you can strike without ambivalence. Mr. Obama seems born to be mild. But still, that's not the story.
Nor is it that John Edwards seems like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he's getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored.
The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.
The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what's inside.
It was startling. It's 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.
I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it's a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.
Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn't back it, she then called it a good start, or rather "I support and admire" the person proposing such a tax for his "willingness to take this on."
She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.
But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later."
For a few years now I've thought the problem for the Democrats in general but for Mrs. Clinton in particular is not that America is against tax increases. They've seen eight years of big spending, of wars, of spiraling entitlements. They've driven by the mansions of the megarich and have no sympathy for hedge fund/movie producer/cosmetics empire heirs. They sense the system is rigged toward the heavily protected. They sense this because they're not stupid.
The problem for Mrs. Clinton is not that people sense she will raise taxes. It's that they don't think she'll raise them on the real and truly rich. The rich are her friends. They contribute to her, dine with her, have access to her. They have an army of accountants. They're protected even from her.
But she can stick it to others, and in the way of modern liberalism for roughly half a century now one suspects she'll define affluence down. That she would hike taxes on people who make $150,000 a year.
But those "rich"--people who make $200,000 and have two kids and a mortgage and pay local and state taxes in, say, New Jersey--they don't see themselves as rich. Because they're not. They're already carrying too much of the freight.
What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn't-been-wounded-yet. It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she'll be making war on. And this--much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling--could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?
A quick word here on why the scandals I refer to above do not deter Mrs. Clinton's rise. There are people who've made quite a study of her life and times, and buy every book, from the awful ones such as Ed Klein's to the excellent ones, such as Sally Bedell Smith's recent "For Love of Politics," a carefully researched, data-rich compendium on the Clintons' time in the White House.
People who've studied Mrs. Clinton often ask why her ethical corner cutting and scandals have not caught up with her, why the whole history of financial and fund-raising scandals doesn't slow her rise.
In a funny way she's protected by her reputation. It's so well known it's not news. It doesn't make an impression anymore. People have pointed out her ethical lapses for so long that they seem boring, or impossible to believe. "That couldn't be true or she wouldn't be running for president." This thought collides with "And we already know all this anyway." Her campaign uses the latter to squash the latest: "old news," "cash for rehash."
I've never seen anything quite like this dynamic work in modern politics. But the other night, for the first time, I had the feeling maybe it isn't going to work anymore, or with such deadening consistency.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
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Giuliani Judges Lean Left
By: Ben Smith
March 3, 2007 12:23 AM EST
When Rudy Giuliani faces Republicans concerned about his support of gay rights and legal abortion, he reassures them that he is a conservative on the decisions that matter most.
"I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am," he told South Carolina Republicans last month. "Those are the kinds of justices I would appoint -- Scalia, Alito and Roberts."
But most of Giuliani's judicial appointments during his eight years as mayor of New York were hardly in the model of Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito -- much less aggressive conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia.
A Politico review of the 75 judges Giuliani appointed to three of New York state's lower courts found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 8 to 1. One of his appointments was an officer of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges. Another ruled that the state law banning liquor sales on Sundays was unconstitutional because it was insufficiently secular.
A third, an abortion-rights supporter, later made it to the federal bench in part because New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a liberal Democrat, said he liked her ideology.
Cumulatively, Giuilani's record was enough to win applause from people like Kelli Conlin, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, the state's leading abortion-rights group. "They were decent, moderate people," she said.
"I don't think he was looking for someone who was particularly conservative," added Barry Kamins, a Democrat who chaired the panel of the Bar Association of the City of New York, which reviewed Giuliani's appointments. "He picked a variety from both sides of the spectrum. They were qualified, even-tempered, academically strong."
That is the kind of praise that will amount to damnation (not necessarily faint) among some of the people Giuliani will be trying to impress in Washington on Friday, when he addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference. The group is filled with social conservatives, for whom the effort to recast the ideological orientation of the federal judiciary has been a generation-long project. Giuliani already faced a high threshold of skepticism from many of these activists because of his comparatively liberal record on such hot-button issues as abortion rights, tolerance of gays and gun control.
Giuliani's judicial appointments continue to win good reviews in New York legal circles for being what conservatives sometimes say they want: competent lawyers selected with no regard to "litmus tests" on hot-button social issues. Many of these people were in the mode of Giuliani himself: tough-on-crime former prosecutors with reformist streaks and muted ideologies.
"He took it very seriously -- he spent a lot of time with these candidates," recalled Paul Curran, a Republican and former U.S. attorney who chaired Giuliani's Commission on Judicial Nominations. "He was looking for judges who were willing to enforce the laws."
The mayor of New York appoints judges to three of the state's lowest courts, the Criminal Court and Family Court, which deal with lower-grade crimes than the state's Supreme Court, the main trial court and the Civil Court, which deals in relatively small financial disputes.
When Giuliani took office in 1994, he inherited a system of judicial appointments created by one of his predecessors, Ed Koch, and designed to insulate the courts from political influence. Under the system, the mayor appoints members of an independent panel. Aspiring judges apply to the panel, which recommends three candidates for each vacancy. The mayor chooses among the three.
Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, and top aides who remain close to him, Dennison Young and Michael Hess, reviewed the applications.
Giuliani cast himself in New York not as a conservative (he had actually run on the Liberal Party line) but as a reformer. Though at least 50 of his 75 appointees were registered Democrats (only six were registered Republicans), Giuliani also won praise for, some say, appointing fewer judges with ties to local Democratic politics than his predecessors.
"It was not people coming out of the clubhouses, which is what I'd seen earlier," said Charles Moerdler, a member of the Commission on Judicial Nominations who had served other mayors in the same capacity. "I did not support Rudy (the first time he ran) because he was too conservative for me, so I was very alert to that, but I didn't see any litmus tests on his part," he said.
Giuliani's judges serve across New York's courts, where they're more likely to encounter misdemeanant celebrities -- Boy George and Naomi Campbell have appeared recently in front of his appointees -- than they are to tangle with the Establishment Clause. Some, like a Family Court judge who ruled that an unmarried couple couldn't adopt, would please national conservatives. But many of their occasional forays into jurisprudence would likely make Scalia wince.
Charles Posner, a Brooklyn judge appointed by Giuliani, made the kind of decision that keeps conservatives up nights when he was asked to levy a fine against a shopkeeper, Abdulsam Yafee, who had illegally sold beer at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday. In an unusual, lengthy 2004 ruling, Posner found that "there is no secular reason why beer cannot be sold on Sunday morning as opposed to any other morning."
Noting that Sunday is only the Christian Sabbath, Posner continued, "Other than this entanglement with religion, there is no rational basis for mandating Sunday as a day of rest as opposed to any other day."
Giuliani was out of office at the time of the decision and, in any case, had no say over his appointees' rulings. His spokeswoman, Maria Comella, declined to comment on the difference between the judges he appointed and those he promises to appoint.
Another Giuliani appointee reached a socially conservative verdict by a means that might not please strict constructionists. Judge Michael Sonberg denied a motion by two Bronx strip-club owners to dismiss prostitution charges against them that were based on dancers' offering "lap dances" to an undercover officer.
Sonberg ruled that the changing "cultural and sexual practices" of the previous two decades permitted him to alter the definition of prostitution.
"Statutory construction cannot remain static while entrepreneurial creativity brings forth heretofore unimagined sexual 'diversions,' " he wrote in a ruling that would have pleased social conservatives while, perhaps, alarming strict constructionists and strippers alike.
More troubling to some of the social conservatives Giuliani is courting, however, would have been Sonberg's other affiliation: When he was appointed in 1995, he was already an officer of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges, a professional group. After his appointment, he became the group's president.
Laboring in the state's lower courts, few of Giuliani's other appointees show signs of ideological leanings. Two, however, were appointed to federal district courts -- one of them, Richard Berman, by President Bill Clinton. The other, Dora Irizarry, was a Bush nominee considered so liberal that Schumer pushed her nomination through.
Irizarry, appointed by Giuliani to the Bronx Criminal Court in 1996, had disclosed that she considers herself "pro-choice" during her 2002 campaign for New York state attorney general. Her appointment to the federal bench was almost derailed when the American Bar Association ruled her "not qualified" on the grounds that as a state judge, she had been "gratuitously rude and abrasive" and "flew off the handle in a rage."
But to Schumer, who led the fight against Bush's appellate judges, Irizarry was a Republican he could live with.
"Temperament is not at the top of my list," Schumer explained at the time, when asked why he supported the former Giuliani appointee. "Ideology is key."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2957.html
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“Despite her muddled comments [last] week, there’s no doubt where Mrs. Clinton stands on ballot integrity. She opposes photo ID laws, even though they enjoy over 80% support in the polls. She has also introduced a bill to force every state to offer no-excuse absentee voting as well as Election Day registration—easy avenues for election chicanery. The bill requires that every state restore voting rights to all criminals who have completed their prison terms, parole or probation.” —John Fund
“Senator Clinton is determined not to tell us where she stands on anything. Instead, she has come to believe, probably correctly, that if we knew what she really wants to do as president, we would never vote for her.” —Dick Morris
It’s all about Hillary: “I had a dream that before I died I would see a woman as President of the United States. I think you are the woman and I think this is the time.” —ABC’s Carole Simpson to Hillary Clinton “When [Hillary] Clinton was asked why she wouldn’t release her White House records from the time she was First Lady, her answer was, ‘Well, that’s not my decision to make.’ Baloney, whose decision is it, the Easter Bunny’s? Come on.” —CNN’s Jack Cafferty “The notion that there’s stuff that’s being restricted potentially opens the door to asking questions about, well, the travel office where the independent counsel said she had been factually false. How did her brothers get pardons for two felons after being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars? How did she raise $100,000 trading cattle futures? This stuff hasn’t come up in the campaign, but you could almost hear the opponents beginning to chomp at the bit, waiting to ask, ‘What is she hiding?”’ —CBS political correspondent Jeff Greenfield “[Hillary Clinton] is in a bit of a conundrum, is she not, because she doesn’t want to stake out positions that may haunt her later on if, in fact, she gets the nomination, you know? And at the same time, she risks coming across as if she has no core values or beliefs.” —CBS’s Katie Couric **That’s because she has no core values or beliefs.
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Things Are Tough All Over
But Mrs. Clinton is no Iron Lady.
Friday, November 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they'd like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, "I will have beef."
Yes, said the waiter. "And the vegetables?"
"They will have beef too."
Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don't want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as "unafraid."
She was a leader.
Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.
She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn't symbolic but actual.
In fact, she wasn't so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she'd relax after a late-night meeting and you'd walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan's funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.
The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don't use what they are. They don't hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he's not criticizing me, he's criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.
When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. "When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the 'boys club.' " But when "legitimate questions" are asked, "she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules."
Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: "Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops." It was all so incongruous--can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn't that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?
But even better, and more startling, people began to giggle. At Mrs. Clinton, a woman who has never inspired much mirth. Suddenly they were remembering the different accents she has spoken with when in different parts of the country, and the weird laugh she has used on talk shows. A few days ago new poll numbers came out--neck and neck with Barack Obama in Iowa, her lead slipping in New Hampshire. There is a sense that Sen. Obama is rising, a sense for the first time in this election cycle that Mrs. Clinton just may be in a fight, a real one, one she could actually lose.
It's all kind of wonderful, isn't it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn't buy it. It's as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk.
This is a victory for true feminism, in its old-fashioned sense of a simple assertion of the equality of men and women. We might not have so resoundingly reached this moment without Mrs. Clinton's actions and statements. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton.
A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher's case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton's toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man.
I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.
I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: "We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well." But we won't. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.
I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama's new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton's generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don't think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.
Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
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WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Consultant in Chief
What Mitt Romney seems to have in mind is a turnaround project for Washington.
BY BRIAN M. CARNEY
Saturday, November 10, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
"I love data." Mitt Romney has been speaking for less than two minutes when he makes this profession.
The former Massachusetts governor is meeting with the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal to discuss his campaign for the presidency. And he starts not with the economy, "global jihad" or the country as a whole, but with himself.
While some have questioned Mr. Romney's authenticity, the immediate impression he gives is that he speaks straight from the heart. Especially where data are concerned. "I used to call it 'wallowing in the data,' " Mr. Romney continues. "Let me see the data. I want to see the client's data, the competitors' data. I want to see all the data."
This is not only a description of his approach to business. It sums up his political outlook: "You may ask me questions about topics that I haven't studied in depth. I'll be happy to give you my assessment of what I think at this point. But before I would actually make a decision on a very important topic, I would really study it in depth."
At one level, this is a caveat so obvious that most politicians wouldn't bother offering it. But Mr. Romney gives the impression that this is a methodological first principle so important to how he does things that he wants everyone he meets to understand it about him.
Having established his biography, he turns without pause to the question, which he asks himself, "Why am I running for president?"
The answer to this question is as abstract as his overture was personal. The "I" in the question seems to disappear: "I think what America faces now are extraordinary challenges, which, if we deal with appropriately, will allow us to remain the world's military and economic superpower for an indefinite period of time."
Mr. Romney does then introduce a personal element, but it's not his own person. "If we instead take the course that Hillary Clinton would prescribe," he warns, "it would lead to America becoming the France of this century--having started as a superpower, ending up as a second-tier power."
Those challenges include: "global jihad" and "the emergence of Asia as an economic challenge." On the domestic front, he lists: "entitlement-driven financial distress," "overuse of foreign oil" and "the inability of our school system to prepare our kids for the jobs of today, let alone tomorrow." To that, Mr. Romney adds, "the inability of the health-care system to rein in the explosive growth in costs." Needless to say, he thinks "we have a good prospect of solving all of them and remaining the world's power."
Those, then, are the problems that, in his word, "drive" him. And it's a pretty good list. But rather than explain why he is the person to solve them, Mr. Romney shifts gears to talk about himself in another sense.
Politicians don't like to describe themselves as ideological, but most have a core of political precepts. Mr. Romney describes his thus: "Obviously, I have--just like in the consulting world--I have 'concepts' that I believe. I believe the free market works and government doesn't--that when government takes over a function which can be effectively managed in the free market, we make a huge mistake. I think government is almost by necessity inefficient, inflexible, duplicative, wasteful, expensive and burdensome." This is fairly traditional small-government, free-market conservative talk--or would be, if it weren't framed as a "concept," like those used in consulting.
Which makes it seem at first a curious way to describe why one is running for president of the United States and leader of the free world. But it turns out to be a perfect encapsulation of the Romney campaign.
Mr. Romney spent a decade as a consultant, and later ran a private equity concern that grew out of that. For most of his adult life, then, Mr. Romney has been figuring out how to run businesses better. It is not much of a stretch to say that he views the federal government as just one more candidate for a data-driven makeover.
In fact, it may not be a stretch at all. When asked for details about how he would reduce the size of government if elected, he mentions two things: The organizational chart of the executive branch, and consultants. "There's no corporation in America that would have a CEO, no COO, just a CEO, with 30 direct reports."
Running a government organized like this is, he explains, impossible. "So I would probably have super-cabinet secretaries, or at least some structure that McKinsey would guide me to put in place." He seems to catch a note of surprise in his audience, but he presses on: "I'm not kidding, I probably would bring in McKinsey. . . . I would consult with the best and the brightest minds, whether it's McKinsey, Bain, BCG or Jack Welch."
This is not a new idea. The New Democrats too became enamored of the idea of "reinventing government," and Al Gore extolled the potential to making government work more like business as vice president. Except in that case, the larger goal was to show that government need not be sclerotic, bloated and inefficient. Mr. Romney seems to view it more as a turnaround project--trim the fat, reduce expenditure and shrink the organization.
Mr. Romney's data-driven world-view, however, really stands out when he starts talking foreign policy. In a debate last month, he responded to a question about the president's legal authority to attack Iran by saying, "You sit down with your attorneys" and figure out what authority you have.
But this was not merely a dodge--if it had been, it would have been a clumsy one at best. It was a glimpse into the workings of Mr. Romney's mind. At his meeting in our offices this week, he was asked how Candidate Romney would respond upon learning that President Bush had launched an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
"I would hope that the president would have outlined a great deal of information," was Mr. Romney's response. "I have very little information, for instance, on: How many nuclear facilities are there? Where are they? Can we take them out? Can we not? What is the capacity of the Iranian military to respond? Are our 160,000 troops in Iraq safe, or are they going to get hit?" Coming from someone else, it might sound like evasion.
But given Mr. Romney's habits of mind, it sounded, instead, perfectly natural. He continued: "It's such a wide array of information I'd need to know whether something is a good idea or a bad idea. . . . So it depends."
He then proceeded to outline examples of good and bad scenarios for attacking before coming around, at last, to what passes for a traditional political assessment of the situation, to wit: He thinks sanctions could still work if we can get other nations on board, and if we can pressure Iran diplomatically and economically, "then I think we have a good shot of getting Iran to behave more responsibly."
The charge that Mr. Romney lacks "authenticity" emerges from the fact that he has flip-flopped over the years, especially on social issues. He famously tried to run to the left of Ted Kennedy on some of those issues in his unsuccessful 1994 Senate race. At that time, he also expressly disavowed being a "Reagan-Bush" Republican.
These days, of course, Mr. Romney is right with "the base" on abortion, same-sex marriage and the whole panoply of "social" issues, which has led to suspicions that Mr. Romney, the businessman, is simply tailoring the product, himself, to the customer--then, the Massachusetts electorate, and now, the national Republican Party.
The impression he gives in person is not, however, that of a salesman tailoring his message to his audience. It is, instead, precisely the person he described in the opening moments of our meeting: A man who goes first to the data, who refers to what some would call their "core beliefs" as "concepts."
At any rate, his response to a question about his former disdain for "Reagan-Bush" is consistent with that version of the man. "Reagan gets a lot smarter the older I get," he allows. He then explains what bothered him then: "I was concerned about what seemed to be looming deficits and inability to rein in spending in those days. And as time has gone on, I've recognized that he was brilliant and did the right thing for our economy. And so I may not have been entirely in sync with Reagan-Bush back at the time, but as time has gone on, I think what they proposed was smarter and smarter."
Framed in that way, what was a flip-flop becomes an openness to reconsider former positions. That may not do much to mollify those who worry about his ideological reliability--he's changed his views before, so what's to stop him from changing them again? But it is a kind of Romneyian consistency--belief in what works, belief in praxis over abstract theory or ideology.
This frame of mind seems to make politics both a befuddlement and a great challenge for the businessman in Mr. Romney. "My wife says," he explains, "that watching Washington is like watching two guys in a canoe on a fast-moving river headed to a waterfall and they're not paddling, they're just arguing. As they get closer to the waterfall, they'll finally start to paddle."
That's characteristically optimistic. But in business, most of the time, everyone agrees on the goal, or which way the waterfall is. The goal is profits at a minimum, and ideally growth too. In politics, the two men in the canoe are probably arguing because they can't agree which way to paddle. Mr. Romney encountered this while governor of Massachusetts, as he acknowledges when describing how he vetoed certain elements of the state's health-care reform law, only to have his vetoes overridden.
And then there is the fact that, in his words, "government is almost by necessity inefficient, inflexible, duplicative, wasteful, expensive and burdensome." And yet he speaks hopefully of whittling down the "342 economic-development programs in this country," the 13 teenage [pregnancy] prevention programs" and the like.
It probably takes a consultant to believe that we have 342 economic-development programs because no one ever hired a consultant to explain that maybe one, or five, or none, would do. And even Mr. Romney is not that naive. There is even something attractive about a politician who is driven by the facts of the case; an excess of ideology is never appealing, and in the worst cases leads to fanaticism of the ugliest sort.
The question for the electorate is whether Mitt Romney is the man of the hour. But when asked whether his "nuts-and-bolts" approach can possibly succeed in an ideological, divided age, he returns to the nuts and bolts.
"I think I'm the only guy who can win the general election," he explains. "That may seem strange, but I think it's going to take someone from outside Washington to win. I think it's going to take someone who's not a lifelong politician to win . . ." Then he goes tactical: "Of course we have to win Florida. And I think almost all of the leading contenders could win Florida with the right running mate and the right policies and the right effort.
"But we also have to win Michigan or Ohio. Winning both would be critical. I don't see how you get there without winning Michigan or Ohio. And I can win Michigan, and I may be able to win Ohio too . . ."
At this point, Mr. Romney may have started to worry that it sounded like he was bragging, because he abruptly shifted to a strange form of self-deprecation: "I can win those states--and by the way, not because of me, but because of my dad," he says. George Romney was governor of Michigan in the 1960s. "My dad's reputation is better than mine will ever be in Michigan. His reputation for integrity and can-do accomplishment is what I think helps me win Michigan. And that's what it takes to win the White House."
Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
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More Taxes vs. More Savings
One debate we'd like to see is Barack Obama versus Fred Thompson. Both men have just unveiled approaches to Social Security reform that couldn't be more sharply distinct.
Mr. Obama told "Meet the Press" on Sunday that higher Social Security taxes are the answer to the system's looming insolvency. "I think the best way to approach this is to adjust the cap on the payroll tax so that people like myself are paying a little bit more and people who are in need are protected," he said.
Currently, only the first $97,500 of a person's annual income is taxed. He properly zinged Hillary Clinton for saying publicly she doesn't favor raising payroll taxes, but quietly telling an Iowa voter this month that she would look favorably on the idea.
Fred Thompson spent much of last Friday explaining the details of his own Social Security plan. He'd leave untouched the benefits of near-term retirees 57 and older, but would reduce benefits for younger workers by indexing them to inflation, not wage growth. Younger workers would also be given the option of contributing up to 2% of their monthly wages, matched by the federal government, into personal retirement accounts similar to a 401(k) plan.
"My plan to protect Social Security guarantees promises made to our seniors and gives today's workers more choice and greater opportunity for their future," said Mr. Thompson.
No doubt Mr. Obama would attack the Thompson plan's resemblance to the personal-accounts proposal put forth by the Bush administration in 2005, which flopped in Congress. Mr. Thompson's plan is also aimed at increasing private retirement savings so Americans can enjoy a more comfortable retirement than Social Security can provide. But his approach doesn't involve diverting payroll tax receipts into private accounts. "There's no reason to run for president of the United States if you can't tell the American people the truth about complex issues like Social Security," he said in a statement released with his plan.
Of course, hoping for such a debate is no doubt a pipe dream. But the media has now been put on notice that at least some candidates have decided to touch the third rail of Social Security and actually want to talk about it.
-- John Fund
The Case for Disqualifying Hillary
Two generations after anti-nepotism laws began to open up civil-service positions to excluded groups like Jews and blacks, "the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way," says Adam Bellow, author of a book entitled "In Praise of Nepotism."
But there are countervailing pressures springing from the deep-seated American distrust of those who seem to ascend to high office in part through artificial privilege. More and more voters are bringing up the fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected and re-elected as president, two dynastic families will have shared the White House for an amazing 28 years.
That's why Grover Norquist, the conservative who runs Americans for Tax Reform, is a few weeks away from unveiling a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban family members from succeeding each other to elected or appointed office. As a parallel, he points out that term limits for the president were once unneeded because office-holders observed the Founders' wishes voluntarily. That changed when FDR broke the unwritten rule by running for a third and fourth term. Today, says Mr. Norquist, we need a formal ban on nepotism in the form of a "Protection From Families" amendment to our governing document.
"We're the United States of America. How can we say to President Mubarak [of Egypt], 'You can't hand off the presidency to your son,'... or, 'Hey Syria and North Korea, you've got to knock this stuff off and be like us,'" he told the London Times.
Mr. Norquist agrees nothing will change the natural human impulse to seek advantage for one's kin. But political dynasties don't sit well with most Americans. In 1960, a Scripps-Howard reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for the shocking revelation that one in five members of Congress had relatives on the official payroll.
Though his version wouldn't technically ban Hillary's run this year (since she wouldn't be directly succeeding her husband), Mr. Norquist, a long-time Republican strategist, knows such a debate would highlight an unattractive aspect of her candidacy. The issue is underlined by the recent presidential election in Argentina, where Cristina Kirchner, wife of current president Nestor Kirchner, will switch roles with him early next year. Her case shows the danger is high with presidential office, whose glamour and power can be handed off to one's relatives. Americans like to think of themselves as having a more mature democracy than that. Mr. Norquist's proposed amendment is a good starting point for a needed debate.
Political Journal/WSJ
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First, regarding the previous post - Thompson v. Obama is exactly the matchup I'd like to see.
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Here is a TIME magazine piece on Hillary that I found to be sympathetic, but somewhat objective. A little long (4 pages) and dull, and a little bit enlightening. Then at the end they strangely predict Edwards will win Iowa on electability because he is "the white guy".
What Hillary Stands For
Wednesday, Nov. 07, 2007 By JOE KLEIN
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1681670,00.html
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NATION'S COPS APPLAUD PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RON PAUL
By Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
November 14, 2007
NewsWithViews.com
While most of the politicians vying for their party's nomination for President of the United States pay lip service to the nation's law enforcement officers, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is actually doing something to earn the respect and gratitude of America's cops, according to many police officers and organizations.
For example, the American Federation of Police -- with well over 100,000 members -- recently praised Ron Paul for introducing a bill that would help cops obtain topnotch body armor that would withstand rounds fired from most firearms. Rep. Paul's bill -- HR 3304 -- would amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide for a tax credit to law enforcement officers who purchase their own body armor.
"I urge all police officers and concerned citizens to contact their congressmen and ask them to support Rep. Paul's bill," said Deputy Sheriff Dennis Wise, president of the American Federation of Police.
"I would also like to applaud Congressman Ron Paul for his support and forward thinking in trying to help make law enforcement officers across our nation safer each day," said Wise.
Rep. Ron Paul appears to be popular with many US cops. "He's never found it necessary to force police officers to stand with him for photo opportunities the way other presidential candidates such as Hillary Clinton do," said New York Police Officer Edna Aguayo.
One police officer claims cops in New York and other states are forced to pose with the likes of Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. If an officer refuses, he or she is charged with insubordination by their superiors.
"It's a joke how these cops are used as props during election campaigns. But Ron Paul doesn't pay cops lip service -- he actually works to help them enforce the law," said another cop forced to pose with Sen. Clinton during one of her staged "rallies."
Public opinion service Rasmussen Reports recently released data from its October 12-14 polling that indicates that Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul leads his GOP opponents against Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton among likely voters ages 30-49. He is the leading White House contender for the key demographic, polling higher than Clinton among baby boomers. Congressman Paul polls in at 47%, compared with Clinton's 44%, among likely voters aged 40-49.
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The 30-49 demographic has been a key indicator in recent elections, and one in which Republicans tend to fare well in hotly-contested elections. In 2004, exit polls reveal that George Bush beat John Kerry 53% to 46% among 30-44 year olds, and all accounts indicate that this will be the most instrumental demographic in the 2008 presidential election as well.
"Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton," claims political strategist Kent Snyder.
More than 3,000 police officers' lives have been saved by body armor since the mid-1970s when the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) began testing and developing body armor and performance standards for ballistic and stab resistance. Recognition and acceptance of the NIJ standard has grown worldwide, making it the performance benchmark for ballistic-resistant body armor.
Body armor can provide protection against a significant number of types of handgun ammunition, but law enforcement personnel must keep in mind that armor is categorized and rated for different threat levels. Additional protection should be worn for SWAT team operations, hostage rescues, or Special Operations assignments, when officers may be exposed to a weapon threat greater than the protection provided by regular duty armor, according to the National Institute of Justice.
Rank-and-file police officers also applaud Rep. Paul for his pro-sovereignty stance. "The talk must stop. We must secure our borders now. A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked," said the Texas congressman during a campaign rally.
In addition, Congressman Ron Paul believes that the Second Amendment is "not about duck hunting." It is an individual right that is guaranteed. He stated that he believes it is about the citizenry having the ability to restrain tyrannical governments and would be dictators.
He believes the Second Amendment is about self-defense from criminal attack and from governments that break away from the chains of the Constitution. According to a poll conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, more than 75% of the nation's police officers agree with Rep. Paul's stance on gun ownership including private citizens carrying concealed weapons for personal protection.
Just recently Congressman Paul opposed the reauthorization of the Clinton-Feinstein semi-auto gun ban. He opposes gun and gunowner registration. And Paul opposes government permission systems that force law-abiding citizens "prove" their innocence before buying or owning firearms.
AFP president Dennis Wise agrees with Rep. Paul's stance on gun control. "When our founding fathers assembled to write one of the greatest papers ever written -- our Constitution -- they put down the amendments ... in the order of their importance," said Wise.
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Rudy's Gamble
Giuliani's audacious strategy for the nomination.
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, November 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Give Rudy Giuliani this: He's living his campaign slogans. The flinty ex-mayor keeps telling America he's fearless, a risk-taker, the guy who can accomplish the impossible (say, cleaning up Sin City). As if to prove it, he's betting the shop on a high-stakes path to the Republican nomination.
Ever since a relatively unknown Georgia peanut farmer used the early primary states to garner the national spotlight, the track to the presidential nomination has run square through Iowa, New Hampshire and (more recently) South Carolina. Go to Des Moines, get famous. Yet there was Giuliani campaign manager Mike DuHaime this week telling reporters that times have changed. His boss is doing it His Way.
It's been clear for some time that Mr. Giuliani was putting his chips on bigger, if later, primary states such as Florida, California and New York--where a less ideological Republican electorate might prove more open to his social record. Still, there was something about Mr. DuHaime confirming this approach--and by extension dissing the usual three-state slingshot--that had a national press corps blinking. It also earned the Giuliani camp a scoffing dismissal from rival Mitt Romney, himself running a textbook, and so far winning, campaign in every early race.
Some scoff is in order. There's a reason presidential hopefuls have for so long genuflected at the Davenport and Concord and Columbia altars: It works. The momentum that accompanies those early wins is often unstoppable, and it makes the Giuliani plan an audacious gamble. Then again, there's a pragmatism to Hizzoner's approach, one that has wisely recognized that times have indeed changed. If there were ever a chance of shattering the old primary mold, this is the year, and Mr. Giuliani is the man, to do it.
Let's be clear, some of this is simple necessity. You might even say Mr. Giuliani didn't have a choice. Iowa's caucus system, dominated by social conservatives, was never going to blow kisses at the pro-choice, antigun New Yorker--Pat Robertson notwithstanding. Especially so if presented with a true-blue social conservative like Mike Huckabee, who in the latest polls is nipping Mr. Romney's shoes. South Carolina's southern conservatives present a similar challenge. Add to this that if Mr. Giuliani had vowed to conquer those citadels, and failed, his campaign would've taken a blow. You can't lose what you never said you'd win.
At the same time, this year's primary fight, and in particular the Republican race, are unique. The Giuliani wisdom, if that's what it proves to be, has been in recognizing those differences early on and toiling ever since to ply them to the mayor's advantage.
Changed circumstance No. 1 is this year's hypercompressed primary season. Whereas winners once got to bask in the glow of their early victories--and rake in the cash--for many weeks before Super Tuesday, this year they'll get to bask a few hours. Mr. Giuliani's Florida, his "firewall" where he has spent his biggest chunk of cash and currently holds a 17-point lead over Mr. Romney, will take place on Jan. 29, just 10 days after South Carolina.
Meanwhile the races on Giga Tuesday (Feb. 5) alone, which include other big Giuliani prospects such as California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, represent nearly half the delegates necessary to secure the nomination. The Giuliani bet is that the time frame has collapsed enough that he can check any rival "momentum" by cleaning up big in the mega-states.
Changed circumstance No. 2 is the unusual nature of the Republican field itself, in which there is no clear front-runner and voter confusion. Evangelical endorsements are scattered. Terrorism is also making its debut in a Republican primary, and has splintered the usual cohesion of social conservatives and single-issue voters. No one candidate has been able to break away, which means no one is likely to emerge with early landslide victories. Mr. Giuliani is counting that this muddle will deny a Mr. Romney or Fred Thompson the decisive victories they'd need to later challenge in bigger states. It might also allow the mayor some respectable finishes in the early races.
Finally, there's Mr. Giuliani, superstar. The big seduction of the early primaries is that they allow candidates who aren't well known to catapult into the news, thereby becoming household names. Thanks to September 11, Mr. Giuliani is right up there in household names with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. While a onetime Southern governor like Mr. Huckabee has to get a ticket out of Iowa if he wants a shot, Mr. Giuliani may have more flexibility.
The caveats? The New Yorker's ability to pull this off hinges on his ability to truly clean up in the mega-states. His campaign is already boasting that his leads in some of those places are "momentum-proof." But that's the sort of bold statement that borders on hubris. Even with a sped-up primary schedule, five hard-fought contests (the usual three, plus Nevada and Michigan) will still go down before the nation ever bats an eye at Florida. Allowing a campaign to go 0 for 5 in the run-up to that big day gives a new meaning to the word "risk."
The very idea is apparently giving even the Giuliani campaign the cold sweats. So much so that now that the mayor has built up his position in the bigger states, he's working backward. Yesterday the campaign unveiled its first television ad, and its home will be . . . New Hampshire. It's even hinting it hopes to take the state.
This is itself risky. Of all the early plays, New Hampshire's the best bet for Mr. Giuliani, and his TV spot about his economic and crime success in New York is designed to appeal to state Republicans looking for a fiscally sound tough guy. Think of it, too, as a potential death blow to one or more competitors. Mr. Giuliani sure is. Mr. Romney needs to show he can win in his own backyard (and he currently holds a double-digit lead), while John McCain continues to count on the state he won by 19 points in 2000. The downside is that the Giuliani campaign is now playing the expectations game, and losing will only give a boost to the winner.
Primaries are inherently unpredictable, and Mr. Giuliani's foes have no intention of letting the mayor set the rules. But win or lose, Mr. Giuliani deserves marks for daring to play big.
Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, based in Washington. Her column appears Fridays.
WSJ
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"NATION'S COPS APPLAUD PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RON PAUL"
Not THIS cop! Et tu, Crafty? :evil:
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I notice they didn't endorse him, they applauded him for a particular stand :-) I happen to think he is quite right on a number of issues (not 911 or the War with Islamic Fascism) and the second amendment is one of them.
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I agree with him on multiple points, including the 2nd. I don't like his neo-isolationism and I sure don't like his pandering to the Trufers and nazis.
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What ‘That Regan Woman’ Knows
New York Times
By FRANK RICH
Published: November 18, 2007
NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful “America’s Mayor” cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.
Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton ’tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray, a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.
Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson “If I Did It” fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what’s most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”
Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush’s short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan’s charge about that unnamed Murdoch “senior executive” is true or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence — her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.
Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I’d written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, “The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice,” was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.
What I didn’t know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we’d later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in “The Lost Son” — published before the revelation of their relationship — there was “one hero who is missing” from his book’s tribute to “courage and honor” and “her name is Judith Regan.”
Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani’s side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city’s $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.
Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik’s pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, “In the Line of Duty.” Though that project’s profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik’s royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable deductions were bogus.
Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik’s association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.
Ms. Regan’s knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn’t limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996. A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city’s cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes’s wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox’s early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, “That Regan Woman.”
Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy’s secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated “Hannity & Colmes.” That show’s co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.
Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan’s lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as “a gossip column story,” and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit’s reference to that “senior executive” at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.
During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper’s brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled “A Journal Briefing — Whitewater.” You’d think the controversies surrounding “America’s Mayor” are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We’ll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper’s Murdoch era.
But beyond New York’s dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani’s checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It’s astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.
One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York’s municipal archives. Historians told The Tribune there’s no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.
Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton’s papers has received all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it’s hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of “Whitewater,” an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.
The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.
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Another one from today's NY Times-- this one by arch liberal Maureen Dowd:
Shake, Rattle and Roll
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 18, 2007
WASHINGTON
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd
Go to Columnist Page » The debate dominatrix knows how to rattle Obambi.
Mistress Hillary started disciplining her fellow senator last winter, after he began exploring a presidential bid. When he winked at her, took her elbow and tried to say hello on the Senate floor, she did not melt, as many women do. She brushed him off, a move meant to remind him that he was an upstart who should not get in the way of her turn in the Oval Office.
He was so shook up, he called a friend to say: You would not believe what just happened with Hillary.
She has continued to flick the whip in debates. She usually ignores Obama and John Edwards backstage, preferring to chat with the so-called second-tier candidates. And she often looks so unapproachable while they’re setting up on stage that Obama seems hesitant to be the first to say hi.
With so much at stake, she had to do it again in Vegas, this time using her voice, gaze and body language to such punishing effect that Obama looked as if he had been brought to heel. It was a mesmerizing display, and at an event that drew the highest television ratings of any primary debate this year. The momentum Obama had gained from a vivid speech at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Iowa drained away by the end of the first half-hour.
Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t even be looking for a chance to greet Hillary, as Obama always does. Other guys, like Rudy, wouldn’t care if she iced them.
But she can tell that Obama does care, that he doesn’t want her to not like him or be mad at him, that he responds to the sort of belittling treatment that she sometimes dished out to her husband and his male aides at the White House, yelling at them and calling them wimps if they disappointed her.
Obama may be responsive to Hillary’s moods because he lives with another strong woman who knows how to keep him in line. Michelle said she let her husband run for president only when he agreed to give up smoking, and she’s a master at the art of the loving conjugal put-down.
When Hillary walked onstage Thursday, Obama stood to her left waiting to shake hands and say hi, as he and Edwards had done with Chris Dodd. She turned her body away, refused to meet his eyes and froze him out. Again. And he looked taken aback. Again.
For the rest of the night she owned him. He was so off his game that he duplicated her dithering performance from the last debate on the issue of whether illegal immigrants should get driver’s licenses. After a tortured exchange with Wolf Blitzer, he ended up saying he favored it — one more sign that the law professor is oblivious to the visceral nature of campaigns.
Hillary brazenly leapt away from that politically devastating position and said she didn’t support the licenses anymore. And Obama didn’t even call her out on her third reversal on the matter.
She was willing to absorb the flip-flop criticism to cut her losses on an issue that could have dragged her to defeat in the general election.
Obama and Edwards, who both seemed shaken by a few seconds of pro-Hillary booing, let the front-runner set a ludicrous standard: that any criticism of her shifts on issues is “mudslinging” and a character attack.
She is a control freak — that’s why her campaign tried to coach wonky Iowa voters to ask wonky questions — and her male rivals are letting her take control.
The Democrats should not be afraid to mix it up now, while they have a chance, and get all the doubts and disputes out on the table. Taking some flak clearly made Hillary stronger.
If Rudy’s the nominee, he will go with relish to all the vulnerable places in Hillary’s past. At the Federalist Society on Friday, he had barely spoken the word “she” before the audience began tittering appreciatively.
He went through a whole faux- bemused riff on Hillary’s driver’s license twists without ever uttering her name: “First, she was for the idea, and supported Governor Spitzer, who wanted to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Then she was against the idea. Then she was for and against the idea. And then finally she said it should be decided on a state-by-state basis. This is the only time in her career that she’s ever decided anything should be decided on a state-by-state basis. You know something? She picked out absolutely the wrong one. Right? I mean, this is one of the areas that is given to the federal government to deal with under our Constitution, the borders of the United States, immigration.”
Rudy laced his speech with faith references, including the assertion that America has “a divinely inspired role in the world” and a mission to “save a civilization from Islamic terrorism.”
Hillary has her work cut out for her. Rudy will not be so easy to spank.
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November 19, 2007
Ron Paul is a Useful Man for Democrats
By Andrew Walden
The Ron Paul story never seems to end -- and yet never seems to quite make it into the mainstream media. That's because, in the political equivalent of a bank shot, Paul's fringe support helps bleach embarrassing stains from the Democrats.
First there is the revelation that Jim C Perry, the "Orthodox Jewish" head of "Jews for Paul" also calls himself a gay pagan Unitarian.
Now it turns out that Perry, Paul's point man in response to questions raised by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, is also accused of stealing money from the local New Hampshire branch of the Libertarian Party. What a great guy! It's only an accusation. And the "Libertarian" Perry was in 2006 running for New Hampshire Legislature as a Democrat.
Oh yes: Then the federal raids started.
It turns out that some folks actually buy-in to Ron Paul's blither about US dollars being "phony money". Here Paul is talking about "phony money" at a recent Ron Paul rally outside the Philadelphia Mint with a large crowd including -- surprise, surprise, -- some more white supremacists. (Who show they fully understand the New Orleans protocol.)
Some of Paul's gold bug supporters been trying to pass so-called "Liberty Dollars" off as real currency at stores nationwide. Sleepy clerks have given them change in US currency for purchases. Raids have been conducted in the last few days by the FBI and Secret Service at Liberty Dollar HQ in a strip mall office in Evansville, Indiana, (that's not where I would be keeping three pounds of gold, but I digress) as well as Asheville, NC (here the segregationist ‘Council of Conservative Citizens' is very concerned) and a private mint located in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Arrests were also made recently in Wisconsin (on their blogsite, these geniuses detail three places where the spent Liberty Dollars as if they were legal tender). In 2006 two arrests had been made in Buffalo, NY. The Evanston raid netted a huge load of "Ron Paul Dollars" apparently just delivered from Idaho and backed perhaps by the full faith and credit of... Ron Paul?
Ron Paul's Evanston supporters went to Liberty Dollar HQ to protest with Ron Paul-for-president signs. At the Evansville Ron Paul site one of their leaders explains the defense strategy:
"I sent an email to infowars.com, so with any luck we'll make it on prisonplanet.com and go viral. If nothing else should come of this, maybe the LD can get a case before the Supreme Court and settle once and for all and maybe Ron Paul's name will be on more people's minds and lips."
And, yes Ron Paul donor 9-11 "troother" Alex Jones did post it. And it did go ‘viral'. But no that doesn't mean the 9-11 "troothers" are integral to the Ron Paul campaign because ...uh...uh... (insert Paulite rationalization here).
Meanwhile over at Reason Magazine, they seem to have lost all of theirs. Writes Jeff Taylor:
"As such, accounts of the (Evansville) raid focused on the Ron Paul angle seem off-base, at least given the available facts."
Sure, just close your eyes and it will all go away. Let yourself get sucked down the toilet with the frauds, and scammers. Reason wants us to believe that Ron Paul has absolutely nothing to do with Ron Paul dollars. But Paul's "troother" supporters believe that George Bush and ‘the Jooos' personally crawled through the ductwork at the World Trade Center to wire the explosives for controlled detonation.
Apparently they didn't get the message at the Daily Paul. Their response to the raid:
"This is pretty scary stuff and reminiscent of a time in Germany...I wonder if the motivation was our wonderful $4.3M day?"
The Street writes;
"...if the raid results in the conviction of anyone involved, it is possible that the Paul campaign may have to return a cash donation made by Liberty Dollar....So far, Liberty Dollar has donated $2,300 to the Paul campaign, a fact confirmed by both Paul's office and Bernard von NotHaus, who runs Liberty Dollar."
No connection there?
No tough questions for Paul, but plenty of fluff. Rolling Stone writes: "Republican takes the lead against the war." This comes after Bill Maher physically chased "troothers" from his studio audience October 19 shouting "out, out, out" and Bill Clinton stared down troother hecklers October 24 with: "An inside job? How dare you?"
The Democrats and their media are using the Paul campaign to scrape six years of accumulated "toother" scum off the Democrat Party, deposit it into the Libertarian movement make a little mess for the GOP. With Obama, Hillary and Edwards all refusing to promise to withdraw troops from Iraq by 2013 Democrats dream of losing the "surrender monkey" tag.
Here is a Chicago Tribune fluff piece with this gem of verbal judo:
"to a growing, Internet-based pool of supporters, the silver-haired obstetrician turned politician is the sanest man at the Republican debates and perhaps in all of Congress. Paul attracts an unusual political potpourri of people of all ages and viewpoints, including a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists and other extremists whose views Paul's campaign disavows."
No anti-Semites, KKKers, or FBI raids in sight anywhere -- just ‘conspiracy theorists'--but all neatly "disavowed." Really? Was that when Jesse Benton -- Ron Paul's national communications director -- said "I cannot say that we will be rejecting Mr. Black's (Stormfront) contribution?"
Well actually Ron Paul appears to be disavowing some contributions: those given by bankers and Wall Streeters. Corporate money is too dirty for Ron Paul to accept but KKK money is not?
The Chicago Tribune also offers this nugget:
"Paul appears financially comfortable but not exceedingly wealthy, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Most of his holdings are in about two dozen gold and silver firms, many valued at less than $15,000 and none valued at more than $250,000."
Do those firms benefit from the sale of Ron Paul Dollars? Of course they do; someone has to bring in the wrong way crowd to buy gold and silver at the top of the commodities cycle.
Meanwhile the mainstream media is mostly ignoring the cesspool of neo-Nazis, Klanners, Holocaust deniers, and gold-bugs-with-the-FBI-pounding-on-their-door, surrounding Paul. Why? The Democrats can unload some of their whack-job fringe to the GOP via Ron Paul and in their dreams, hang these nut jobs around the GOP's neck like a dead albatross. At the same time they assist Hillary or Obama in trying to move to the center for the general election.
Timing is everything. Paul has staked $1.1 million on the NH primary. His big fundraising push November 5 and now December 16 come conveniently before the Jan 1 reporting deadline. That deadline is too close to the Iowa and NH votes for evidence about Paul's supporters to make a difference.
The hard work is done. The information about Paul is on line neatly organized for even the laziest reporter in America to confirm, write up and look like a genius.
Writes WaPo:
"As if Ron Paul's supporters needed any more motivation to storm the battlements and wreak havoc on the Republican presidential primary, now comes this: the feds are trying to take away their money."
Antonio Gramsci would be very proud.
Andrew Walden is editor of Hawai`i Free Press in Hilo.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/ron_paul_is_a_useful_man_for_d.html at November 19, 2007 - 10:28:26 AM EST
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Ron Paul has been the anti-Republican in the race so I am surprised they think his errors and misfortunes hurt the cause of where the party ought to be going. All the fireworks in the debates seemed to be about Paul opposing Republican foreign policies.
OTOH, I heard a Ron Paul radio commercial traveling in Las Vegas yesterday. His don't-tax-tips bill may never pass, but the radio spot is smart. I'm sure there is a huge number of service workers in that market and the message broadcast is that they are being unfairly and excessively taxed. His anti-war message is not very unique but his ant-tax message could be the first that many people hear.
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I'm quite bummed to learn of the extent that bigotry supports RP's campaign. That said, I think much of his appeal is in his originalist based approach to our Constitution. His positions on gun rights, cutting taxes and cutting back government are strong and clear.
I saw last night that he is polling at 8% in , , , New Hampshire? Iowa? where Fred is polling at 4%.
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I had such hopes for Thompson. His campaign has been a comedy of errors though. I'd be surprised if he was viable anymore.
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I wish I had been wrong but I predicted that Fred was not going to measure up. To make things worse, I suspect his entry into the race may have contributed to Newt's decision not to run because they would be competing for many of the same voters. I really wish Newt would have run.
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In mid December last time, a month later than now, Howard Dean was measuring the west wing for drapes and John Kerry was dull and unexciting. Okay, bad analogy. Anyway, back to issues and candidates:
I watched Fred Thompson on Meet the Press a couple of weeks ago and found him to be wise, thoughtful, independent and consistently conservative. (I watched Obama the following week.) Here is Fred in a different interview today in Iowa:
Fred Thompson on Bloomberg TV
PETER COOK: Let me ask you first of all, if I could, about the economy. You have said that national security is the number-one issue facing the country right now. Where does the economy rank after that?
MR. THOMPSON: Number two, yeah.
MR. COOK: And what is it right now you see in the U.S. economy? Are you confident in the state of the economy? Not everyone is.
MR. THOMPSON: Yeah, I am. I think that we - the underlying factors there that the experts look at, as best I can tell, are strong. We are part of a good world economy now, and I think as long as our fiscal policies and our monetary policies make sense, that we'll continue to be strong. I think it's going to be a very bad time over these next couple of years for a tax increase, and that is what concerns me most.
MR. COOK: President Bush's handling of the economy? What sort of grade would you give President Bush?
MR. THOMPSON: I think that he would get an A as far as tax cuts are concerned. And I think he'd probably get a C-plus as far as spending is concerned. I wish he'd done better on the spending side of the ledger. I think he's doing quite good now with some of the bills that are coming across his desk. But we've got some long-term problems that he has tried to highlight in times past in terms of Social Security that are going to overtake us if we don't do better on the mandatory side of things. They don't just have to do with the everyday fiscal policies but have to do with the locked-in entitlement programs that we're facing.
So as we're concerned day-to-day with what we're doing to affect the economy in terms of fiscal policies, we have to really understand that a little bit further out, we have some drastic things that are going to happen to our economy if we don't get a handle on our mandatory spending.
MR. COOK: I know you've talked about some of these entitlement programs. You were the last one into the race, yet you've been given credit for being the first to talk about Social Security. And you've highlighted your own plan to deal with Social Security over the long term. Yet there's still some experts in Washington and elsewhere who say Medicare is actually the bigger problem right now. How are you going to fix Medicare?
MR. THOMPSON: So we hop right off into that? Medicare is a bigger problem. There's no question about it. I think that we would probably do ourselves a lot of good in addressing the Medicare problem if we could prove that we could deal with the lesser problem of Social Security. Social Security is going to go bankrupt. I mean, you consider it a lesser problem because it's somewhat easier to fix, although nobody else has stepped up to apply a fix other than myself.
But once we do that, then we need to do things like the hard choices. I think that we're going to have to ask the more affluent to pay a bigger share of the cost in the future for one thing. There's some other features of our Medicare program that -
MR. COOK: But you're not talking about a tax increase there or you are?
MR. THOMPSON: No, I'm talking about means testing some of our benefits. The deductibility, you know, at what point the person has to start kicking into his own retirement solutions - those are the issues I think that we're going to have to look at first. Tax increases, of course, always the first thing the Democrats look at. They want to means test everything. And 5 percent of our people now are paying about 60 percent of our taxes, so I don't know how progressive they want it to be, but they're in danger of hurting the economy; they're in danger of hurting small businesses and individual entrepreneurs if they keep going the tax increase route.
So we have to look at the spending side of the ledger and doing some common sense things now before we have to really hurt anybody, instead of waiting until later when we'll have to hurt everybody when we'll have drastic benefit cuts or astronomical tax increases or astronomical deficits and borrowing from abroad.
MR. COOK: You've talked already about taxes, and Democrats plans to raise taxes, as you and other Republicans suggest. What about your own differences with Republicans on tax policy? Rudy Giuliani is leading in national polls; Mitt Romney leading here in Iowa. How does Fred Thompson differ from those two when it comes to tax policy?
MR. THOMPSON: I think I'm the only one, for example, who has actively and specifically promoted a corporate tax cut. People have been talking around the edges about that for some time, but I came forth a considerable time ago and talked about it in specific detail. I said that -
MR. COOK: What's a corporate tax rate that is appropriate in Fred Thompson's mind?
MR. THOMPSON: Well, I look at what's going on with regard to our international competitors, and I see that 28 percent would be the norm instead of the 35 (percent) that we have now. We have the second real highest tax rate in the industrialized world. We're only one of two countries that hasn't lowered its tax rate since 1994. All of our competitors are doing that. I mean, they've caught on to the game. And why we haven't done that, I don't know. I see today that some officials in the Treasury once again are saying that we need to do that. And it looks like they're getting closer to a proposal.
MR. COOK: They've also talked about eliminating loopholes, if you will - some of the tax breaks that companies enjoy in exchange for lowering that corporate tax rate. Would you support that?
MR. THOMPSON: No, no, that's what Charles Rangel, I think, is promoting. I'm not sure that the Treasury Department.
MR. COOK: Mr. Secretary Paulson has suggested something along those lines as well.
MR. THOMPSON: Well, today, from what I heard - I didn't see any proposals for offsets so far. I don't think you need to approach it from that standpoint. You're going to have to do something about competitiveness. You're going to have to do something about economic growth. And raising taxes at the same time that you're cutting taxes I don't think promotes either one of those things. So I don't believe in the static accounting that goes on in Washington. I don't believe that you have to raise revenue every time you cut taxes. I think that we're still at a level now where a tax cut in the right way and the right amount is beneficial for the overall economy in terms of economic growth. And as far as the corporate tax rate is concerned, it's certainly beneficial to us from a competitiveness standpoint. We just stick out like a sore thumb in terms of the high corporate tax rate.
Other than that, a lot of us are saying pretty much the same thing now in terms of lower taxes. I guess the difference is that I had eight years on the national scene with regard to national tax issues, where I was saying the same thing eight years ago, 10 years ago, 12 years ago. When I was in the Senate, we had a chance to pass about four major tax cuts including the one in 2001, which I think in large part helped lay the groundwork for the prosperity that we have right now. So I was walking the walk back sometime ago before others were even talking the talk, even though on most things, except the corporate tax cut, a lot of us are saying the same things today.
MR. COOK: All right, are we going to see more specifics from your campaign over the next few days with regard to tax policy, and do you care to share any with us right now?
MR. THOMPSON: No, we've got a couple of details to work out yet, but I think it's fair to say over the next several days we'll be putting something out that's specific along those lines, and especially will involve a corporate tax cut.
MR. COOK: Let me ask you about the question of income inequality. There are Democrats on Capitol Hill right now still talking about the Bush tax cuts and how they unfairly were tilted towards the wealthy. They'd like to remedy that, at least some of the proposals on Capitol Hill. Do you believe income inequality is a problem in America right now?
MR. THOMPSON: Well, the Democrats always want to focus on the redistribution of wealth. And they don't recognize the fact that people come up through the system in our country and they come from the lower end to the high end - and go often times to the higher end. And the overwhelming majority of people move one direction or another.
And in a free and open economy and in a growing economy, people have the opportunity to make a determination for themselves as to how far they want to go economically in this country. That's not to say that there's some people that don't need some help and some people that can't help themselves; and we have ways to address those particular problems. But you can't just say that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in this country. I don't think that that's happening that way. I think all levels are moving up.
The IRS just did a study not too long ago, as I recall, that showed just from the income tax forms that they traced back and looked at over a period of time that people were moving from lower income levels to higher income levels throughout their career in this country, which is what you would expect. So I'm more interested in policies that promote that, that let a small-town boy with very meager prospects - one might think - who grew up in a little town like I did and started working in a factory to have the opportunity to live the American dream, as so many of us have. That's what I want to promote today.
MR. COOK: Let me ask you about a couple other issues, if I could, domestic issues. Energy policy - I looked on your website and there are references to energy policies. There are not a lot of specifics there. I'd like to ask you what as president Fred Thompson would do to try and end America's addiction to oil. And I'll start with one specific. Would you support higher vehicle fuel economy standards?
MR. THOMPSON: No, again, taxes are not the way to go. I don't think that - the cost-benefit relationship is not there, which is what I think we always have to look at. I think in terms of our energy policy in general that we're not going to immediately turn our addiction to oil around. We might as well get over that notion. What we've got to do is have greater diversification, working more toward independence and less dependence on the wrong parts of the world.
There's such problem spots like the Middle East, right now. That's going to involve several things. We're going to have to start doing several things better than we have in the past. I think we're going to have to use our own resources more than we have. We can do that -
MR. COOK: But setting higher fuel standards is not one of those steps?
MR. THOMPSON: No, I don't think so. I think that the effect of that, what that would do to the consuming public in terms of the driving habits, what it would do in terms of the increased money that they would be having to pay, what that would do to the economy, what effect that would have on other parts of the economy, I just don't see the cost-benefit there. But I do see greater protection in a more economic environmentally friendly way than we've been able to do in the past of our own resources. It can't solve all of our problem, but certainly part of it. We're making headway, I think, with regard to the cleaner coal technology.
I think nuclear has got to be put back on the table, alternative, renewables, all of those things have got to be put on the table and we have got to do all of those things simultaneously I think in order to become more diversified.
MR. COOK: Related issue, global warming, how big a challenge is global warming? How big a problem is it, do you think?
MR. THOMPSON: I don't think anybody knows yet exactly how big it is. I think it's something that we have got to get answers to. We know that the globe is warming. We don't know whether or not that is part of a cycle. The -
MR. COOK: Do you think humans are responsible?
MR. THOMPSON: The earth has cooled in times past. This could be a part of a warming cycle that we will come out of some day. I don't know how long it would be. We don't know what extent - undoubtedly humans are contributing to it, but we don't know how much and what percentage. And we do know that unless we get other countries growing large economies, like China and India, to cooperate in any solutions that it's not going to be economically realistic for us to try to do things that would harm our own economy and have very little effect unless they join with us in some kind of a solution. But we have got to do everything that we can to get the answers to these questions, to see the nature of the problem, the extent of it, and what we can realistically do about it.
MR. COOK: Immigration, I know you're up with an ad here in Iowa citing your own views on the immigration issue and the proposal that came out of the Senate a couple of months ago. Again, talk to me about the - contrast your - your background, your history on this issue with that of your opponents, most notably, Mr. Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney.
MR. THOMPSON: Well, the mayor and my backgrounds are in sharp contrast on some points. Nineteen ninety-six, I was passing a bill outlawing sanctuary cities. The mayor went to court to try to overturn that bill, and fortunately, he lost that lawsuit. Sanctuary cities were outlawed, but we still have them in this country in violation of federal law.
I simply think we are in high-tech-growing economy. We have an economic competitiveness issue that education is going to have to solve in part. It is not going to be in our long-term interests to be bringing millions and millions of people in this country who are lower-tech and lower-educated. That is the economic part of it. There is also a fairness part to people who have played by the rules to become a part of our society. They should not be disrespected. Then there is the national security part. A small amount of material in the wrong kind of hands can destroy an American city. We have virtually open borders. So we have to secure our borders and enforce our laws and stop providing inducements for people to come here such as sanctuary cities and driver's licenses and things of that nature.
MR. COOK: As you know, there are a lot of businesses out there who say they need these workers right now; this is important to the U.S. economy, the workers who are here even right now. If you can secure the borders, what happens to the 12 million illegal immigrants already here?
MR. THOMPSON: Enforcement by attrition. Over a period of time, if you enforce the law, if you secure the border, if you require employers to use a system that they have now called e-Verify so that they can readily determine whether or not someone is legal or illegal. If you do away with sanctuary cities, as is really the federal law, and stop providing inducements for people to come here, over a period of time, the numbers will be moving in the right direction and the problem will greatly rectify itself.
MR. COOK: Let me ask you if I could some political questions before we wrap this up here, specifically your take on what is going on in New Hampshire. I know there is a new poll out today that suggests you may be down to 4 percent support there. What is going on in New Hampshire? Are you putting all of the marbles here in Iowa?
MR. THOMPSON: Well, I'm putting a lot of marbles in Iowa, and we've been spending a lot of time in South Carolina where we are doing very well, usually running first in most of the polls there. We're going to have to wait and see. Every day is a new day. You know, Mayor Giuliani is doing well in the national polls but I'm running second in most of the national polls to Mayor Giuliani. So we're about where we need to be overall right now. We have some strength in places and some weaknesses in places and every day is a new day; you just have to do the best you can. It's very, very hard to handicap these races anymore, especially in a place like Iowa. Howard Dean was the odds on favorite in mid-December, and of course that didn't work out too well for him. And you can say the same thing about some of the early primary states in other parts of the country too. So who knows what to make of it.
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Fred on immigration http://www.fred08.com/virtual/Immigration.aspx
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Here is an interview yesterday by Human Events, a conservative publication, with Mitt Romney covering all the large issues: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23541.
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Calculates which candidate is closest to your positions.
http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html
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The Wolverine Primary
Michigan's early vote is good news for George Romney's son and Bill Clinton's wife.
Monday, November 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
What if we look back on the 2008 presidential nomination contests and conclude one or both were effectively decided by a single vote--and among a group of judges at that?
Democratic partisans still argue that the 2000 presidential contest was decided by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, even though media recounts of Florida ballots showed that the outcome would not have been changed if Bush v. Gore had gone the other way. But there's no doubt that a 4-3 ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court last Wednesday saved that state's Jan. 15 presidential primary, which was in danger of being scrapped over a dispute about whether it adhered to the state constitution. The winners are likely to be Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton
Mr. Romney pushed hard for an early primary because he has a natural advantage in Michigan. He was born in Detroit, and elderly voters still fondly remember George Romney, his father, who served as governor in the 1960s. Mr. Romney is counting on winning Iowa on Jan. 3--he has more paid workers there than all the other GOP candidates put together--and he plans to use his advantage as a former governor of next-door Massachusetts to win New Hampshire's Jan. 8 primary. Winning Michigan would then give Mr. Romney three straight victories before the critical Jan. 19 South Carolina primary.
Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton is for now the only leading Democratic candidate to appear on Michigan's ballot. The other top-tier contenders withdrew, following the guidance of the Democratic National Committee, which is threatening to take away Michigan's delegates because it is scheduling a primary against the party's rules. But few observers believe the state will actually be stripped of its delegates in the end, so if she remains the only significant name on the ballot, Mrs. Clinton may pick up some momentum, a publicity bounce and some delegates to boot by exerting almost no effort.
Democratic National Committee member Debbie Dingell, wife of Rep. John Dingell, will try to persuade the state Legislature to amend the primary law to restore the names of Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. But that could be a tough sell given that Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, the state's top elections officer, says the primary is already well behind schedule and any further delay will make it impossible to get absentee ballots out.
John McCain could also benefit from the Michigan primary should he do well enough in New Hampshire to remain viable. Michigan has no party registration, and in 2000 the votes of independents and Democrats helped Mr. McCain crush George W. Bush in Michigan's primary. Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson are less likely to be able to capitalize on the Michigan primary because they have not built large grass-roots organizations in the state. Similarly, Mike Huckabee has not spent any significant time or money in the Wolverine State.
In allowing the primary to go forward, Michigan's high court overturned two rulings that had held that it would be unconstitutional because the two major political parties would have exclusive access to the list of those who voted in the primary. The Supreme Court, using dubious reasoning, said the public's interest in having open primaries as opposed to conventions of party activists outweighed the need to provide equal access to what are clearly public records. It sided with those who wanted publicity for the state over those who wanted public disclosure. (The law setting the primary had a "nonseverability" clause, so that the courts could not order the vote to go forward in compliance with disclosure laws.)
Michigan has now shaken up the primary calendar in a fundamental way. Among Democrats, look for Mrs. Clinton's rivals to work behind the scenes to get their names on the Michigan ballot, whether or not delegates are at stake. Media coverage has become the true currency of politics, and no Democratic opponent of Mrs. Clinton wants to hand her an uncontested victory.
Among Republicans, the pressure will be for Mitt Romney to win Iowa and New Hampshire. He is saturating Iowa with mail and ads and is currently spending $200,000 a week on ads on New Hampshire's ABC affiliate. If he wins both, he will then try for a triple slam with Michigan. Rudy Giuliani, who is trailing badly in Iowa, may now have to focus on winning New Hampshire to avoid giving Mr. Romney a clean sweep in the early states. The pressure on Messrs. McCain and Thompson to poll well somewhere is now more intense.
Iowa and New Hampshire are often said to be the launching pads for successful presidential nominees. This year Michigan may rival them in importance.
WSJ
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The hookers don't bother me, but , , ,
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WSJ
Political Whores
"Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, an underdog Texas congressman with a libertarian streak, has picked up an endorsement from a Nevada brothel owner," the Associated Press reports from Reno:
Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite BunnyRanch near Carson City, said he was so impressed after hearing Paul at a campaign stop in Reno last week that he decided to raise money for him.
"I'll get all the (working girls) together, and we can raise him some money," Hof told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "I'll put up a collection box outside the door. They can drop in $1, $5 contributions."
The Wall Street Journal reports on some of Paul's other backers:
The Paul campaign has also drawn support from antigovernment fringe groups and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Since mid-September, a large "Ron Paul for President" banner has flashed at the bottom of white-supremacist Internet forum Stormfront.org. "Really, we haven't seen a candidate like Ron Paul in some time. The closest would have been Pat Buchanan" in 2000, says Don Black of West Palm Beach, Fla., the group's founder and a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who donated $500 to Mr. Paul's campaign.
It's enough to give the Moonlite BunnyRanch a bad name.
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Flat Tax Fred
Thompson's reform leads the GOP field.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Fred Thompson's Presidential campaign has been struggling, in part because of a sense that he lacks passion and an agenda. But late last week he unveiled a tax reform that is more ambitious than anything we've seen so far from the rest of the GOP field.
Mr. Thompson wants to abolish the death tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax and cut the corporate income tax rate to 27% from 35%. But his really big idea is a voluntary flat tax that would give every American the option of ditching the current code in favor of filing a simple tax return with two tax rates of 10% and 25%.
Mr. Thompson is getting aboard what has become a global bandwagon, with more than 20 nations having adopted some form of flat tax. Most--especially in Eastern Europe--have seen their economies grow and revenues increase as they've adopted low tax rates of between 13% and 25% with few exemptions.
The main political obstacle to such a reform in the U.S. has come from liberals, who favor punitive taxes for "class" reasons, and K Street corporate lobbyists who want to retain their tax-loophole empires. The housing and insurance industries, states and localities, charities, bond traders and tax preparers are all foes of low tax rates.
That's why the idea of a voluntary flat tax--introduced on these pages a dozen years ago--makes political sense. The Thompson plan would allow taxpayers to keep their mortgage and charitable deductions if they prefer, by adhering to the current tax code and rates. But it would also allow the option to abandon those credits and deductions except for a single allowance based on family size ($39,000 for a family of four). Most taxpayers would pay a 10% rate on income above that allowance, with a 25% rate kicking in at $100,000 for a couple. There would only be five lines on the tax form and most taxpayers could fill it out in minutes.
Liberals are already objecting that the plan is not "paid for," by which they mean it doesn't raise taxes the way they hope the next President will. But Mr. Thompson is right in refusing to play by the "static revenue" scoring game that demands that one dollar in estimated tax cuts be offset by one dollar in estimated tax increases somewhere else. "The experts always overrate the revenue losses from tax cuts," Mr. Thompson says, and history supports him going back to the Mellon reductions of the 1920s, the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s, the Gipper's in the 1980s, and this decade's success with President Bush's reductions.
Mr. Thompson's plan is based on one introduced by GOP Representatives Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling that is in any case not designed to lose revenue. It is intended to allow federal receipts to grow at the rate of the economy, which would leave them at some 18% or 19% of GDP--roughly their average of recent decades. When critics object to revenue losses, they are really saying that the tax share of GDP should be allowed to rise to 20% and higher, which is where we are headed if the Bush tax rates expire.
We'd prefer a flat tax with one rate instead of Mr. Thompson's two. Once the concession is made that richer people should pay a higher tax rate, the political temptation is always to raise the rate on the wealthy. The virtue of the single-rate flat tax isn't merely its efficiency but also its moral component: It treats all taxpayers equally. If a person makes five times more money than his neighbor, he should pay five times more taxes, not 10 or 20 times more.
However, what's refreshing about the Thompson plan is that it goes well beyond the current Republican mantra to make "the Bush tax cuts permanent." That is certainly needed, but the GOP also needs a more ambitious agenda, especially with economic growth slowing. The flat tax has the added political benefit of assaulting the special interests who populate the Gucci Gulch outside Congress's tax-writing committee rooms. Lower rates and simplify the tax code, and you instantly reduce the opportunities for Beltway corruption. It is both a tax policy and political reform.
The two apparent Republican front runners, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, should be paying attention. Both have called for tax cuts in general but have dodged any endorsement of the flat tax--presumably because they think it is too politically risky. The politically calculating Mr. Romney has questioned whether the flat tax is "fair." Mr. Giuliani is more open to the idea, saying the flat tax "would be a lot easier. It would probably bring in a lot more revenue and it would not have some of the burdens on the economy that the massive tax code has." That's right, so why not go all the way?
Mr. Thompson's voluntary proposal is one way to deflect some of the inevitable political opposition. Anyone who prefers the current tax code can stick with it. The rest of us can have a better choice.
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Second post of the day:
NY Times shadings and all, still an interesting piece:
By the time Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York stepped before a wall of television crews in the Public Hearing Room at City Hall on May 19, 2000, there were no surprises left.
Skip to next paragraph
The Long Run
A New York Moment
This is part of a series of articles about the lives and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.
In the course of three tumultuous weeks, Mr. Giuliani had been told by doctors that he had prostate cancer. He had announced he was leaving his wife after tabloids reported he was having an affair. And now, he had come to withdraw from the Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, bringing a sudden end to what was arguably the most anticipated Senate campaign of modern times.
But the 12 months leading to Mr. Giuliani’s departure are as instructive today as they were riveting then: a blistering year of mental gamesmanship, piercing attacks, contrasts in personalities and positions, and blunders, played out by two outsize political figures in a super-heated atmosphere.
It was a year in which both Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton gained many of the political skills the nation is seeing now as they campaign for president. It was a time in which they took a measure of one another as opponents. And it was a shared chapter in their lives that offers a window into what a 2008 White House contest between these New Yorkers might be like, should they each win their party’s nomination.
On the morning when Mr. Giuliani quit, the two sides were deep into preparing for a fall campaign. After an uncertain start in which Mr. Giuliani kept her off balance, Mrs. Clinton had found her way to handle the gibes thrown at her by the confrontational mayor. Rather than engage him, Mrs. Clinton became the foot-tapping, arms-folded sighing mother of a forever misbehaving teenager, a mien intended as much to infantilize Mr. Giuliani as to provoke him.
“I can’t be responding every time the mayor gets angry,” Mrs. Clinton said, smiling as she campaigned in upstate New York a few days before Christmas 1999. “Because that’s all I would do.”
Both sides were prepared for the battle. Television advertising scripts had been drafted (“She says she is a Yankee fan, but she hasn’t even been to a Yankee game,” was the tag line of one Giuliani advertisement), vulnerabilities had been identified and campaign themes tested. Mr. Giuliani’s aides had prepared an indexed 315-page dossier compiling positions and potentially damaging quotes from throughout her life, according to people who saw it. (It included an 11-page chronicle titled “Stupid Actions and Remarks.”)
Mr. Giuliani was going to portray Mrs. Clinton as inauthentic, inexperienced, a liberal champion of big government and a carpetbagger, his advisers said in interviews. Mrs. Clinton was going to paint Mr. Giuliani as divisive and undignified, temperamentally unsuited for the Senate, and profoundly uninterested in national and international affairs, her advisers said.
More than anything, the early stages of the 2000 Senate race offered a lesson on the politics of psychological warfare, as each campaign sought, in the words of one Clinton adviser, to “get inside the head” of the other’s candidate.
Mr. Giuliani pounced on Mrs. Clinton’s slightest misstep, sensing vulnerability in this new and nervous candidate. The mayor, a former prosecutor, often exaggerated her misdeeds and slightly mischaracterized her positions, aides said, in a deliberate effort to goad her into correcting his version of her record — while Mr. Giuliani skipped on to his next attack. He was brash and theatrical, flying to Little Rock one day to announce that he would fly the Arkansas flag over City Hall in New York to highlight the fact that Mrs. Clinton was running for office in a state where she had never lived.
In announcing his withdrawal from the race to succeed Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, Mr. Giuliani said he wanted to turn his attention to fighting his cancer. But some of his aides and senior Washington Republicans say today they had concluded weeks before that he had lost interest in the race, in part because he had become enamored of Judith Nathan, the woman with whom he was having an affair, but also because he realized that he was drawn to the campaign more by the sport and distinction that would come with beating a Clinton than he was by the prospect of serving in the Senate.
As the spring came, Mr. Giuliani would joke gloomily, over cigars, about life as a junior senator and the transition of going from chief executive to one of 100 people, one friend said. He complained about the burdens of fund-raising, while his aides grew frustrated at his reluctance to campaign outside of New York City or discuss federal issues.
As their presidential campaigns look to the past in preparation for a possible renewal of their aborted contest, they have reached strikingly similar conclusions about their potential opponent: Eight years older and more experienced, Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton are each far tougher and more rounded candidates than they were in 2000.
“She is a great candidate now,” said Frank Luntz, who was Mr. Giuliani’s pollster in 2000. “She is a tough-as-nails candidate today. She has learned how to turn people who were openly hostile to her into supporters.”
====
Page 2 of 3)
Anthony V. Carbonetti, one of Mr. Giuliani’s chief political advisers, said Mrs. Clinton’s lack of executive experience was a critical liability with New York voters in 2000, and would be again with national voters.
“But she is a completely different person,” Mr. Carbonetti said. “You have to give her credit for the Senate experience now. She is not the demon now that she was coming out of the White House. I would not underestimate her at all.”
Much the same sentiment is voiced about Mr. Giuliani by Mrs. Clinton’s advisers. “I’m not going to dispute you on this: He seems like a more disciplined candidate now,” said Howard Wolfson, who worked as Mrs. Clinton’s communications director in 2000, where he frequently tangled with Mr. Giuliani, and is serving the same role again. “I am surprised at the way he has kept his anger in check.”
Ready to Run
It was the start of 1999, and Mr. Giuliani, like Mrs. Clinton, was approaching a turning point in his career. Term limits prevented him from running a third time for mayor, and his advisers said there was never much debate about what he should do next. He viewed the prospect of running against a Clinton as irresistible.
He instructed two of his top consultants from the 1997 campaign for mayor — Adam Goodman and Rick Wilson — to prepare a comprehensive catalog of her public statements, writings and positions going back to when she was a student at Wellesley, a road map into her foibles and vulnerabilities. (Turn to Page 39 for the Lincoln Bedroom; 139 for Whitewater.)
But Mr. Giuliani was trying to plan his campaign as he was running a city, and often seemed to make little effort to find time for his political advisers. They would hop into Mr. Giuliani’s Suburban as it whisked him around the city, where he would turn from talking about the best way to go after Mrs. Clinton to how to deal with the threat of a transit strike at the end of 1999. Mr. Luntz said Mr. Giuliani would arrive at Gracie Mansion after 10 p.m. for campaign planning meetings.
In these sessions, Mr. Giuliani and his aides concluded that Mrs. Clinton would run a highly ordered, meticulous and policy-driven campaign, make an appeal to women on Long Island, and seek to discredit Mr. Giuliani by identifying him with Washington Republicans.
In Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Giuliani’s aides told the mayor, he was facing a smart, cold and tentative opponent, unprepared for the maelstrom of a New York City campaign. The issue of her residency became more than a way to win tabloid headlines: Mr. Giuliani saw it as a way to underline voter perceptions of her as inauthentic, opportunistic and untrustworthy. When Mrs. Clinton flew to New York from Washington for a parade, Mr. Giuliani welcomed her with sarcasm. “I hope she knows the way,” he said. “I hope she doesn’t get lost on one of the side streets.”
Candidate in Training
Mrs. Clinton began that spring with a series of talks with advisers about what she should do now that her husband was leaving the White House. By late spring, the discussion — typically a half-dozen people gathered in the Yellow Oval Room in the second-floor family quarters of the White House — had evolved into a political tutorial on how to be a candidate, how to run in New York and how to deal with Mr. Giuliani.
Her advisers could not have been better suited to the task. Four of them had worked in tough New York campaigns, and two of those had worked in campaigns against Mr. Giuliani. (They remain the nucleus of Mrs. Clinton’s political cabinet today.)
Mandy Grunwald, Mrs. Clinton’s media adviser, was the media consultant to Ruth W. Messinger when she ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Mr. Giuliani in 1997. Mark Penn, who was Mrs. Clinton’s pollster and is today her chief strategist, advised David N. Dinkins when he defeated Mr. Giuliani in the 1989 mayor’s race.
Mr. Wolfson was communications director for Charles E. Schumer when he beat Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato in 1998. Harold Ickes, a longtime close adviser to the Clintons, has been a warrior in New York City politics for 40 years.
This group had observed Mr. Giuliani in three mayoral campaigns, and there was little disagreement about how to run against him: focus on his temperament, his identification with Republican policies and the notion that he was running for a job that did not interest him. Perhaps more significant, when viewed in the context of a potential 2008 rematch, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers suspected that the first lady, who grew up in suburban Chicago, would be a culturally more appealing candidate to rural voters than Mr. Giuliani.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reached many of the same conclusions about her weaknesses that Mr. Giuliani’s advisers had.
================
Page 3 of 3)
So it was that Mrs. Clinton began her campaign that summer not in New York or its suburbs, but in rural Republican upstate New York, sitting down with small groups of voters. The ostensible purpose of what was called her listening tour was to defuse the criticism of her residency. But it allowed her to learn how to be a candidate and test her upstate appeal.
Yet her low-profile, make-no-waves campaign style worried New York Democrats as they watched Mr. Giuliani gleefully goad her from City Hall.
Those worries peaked in November, when Mrs. Clinton traveled to the West Bank city of Ramallah and sat silently as Suha Arafat, the wife of the president of the Palestinian Authority, accused Israel of deploying carcinogenic gases to control Arab protesters in Gaza and the West Bank. It took 12 hours before Mrs. Clinton rebuked Mrs. Arafat; by that point, she had been repeatedly assailed by Mr. Giuliani.
In the weeks after her return, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers determined that they could not win the race unless they turned attention away from Mrs. Clinton and on to Mr. Giuliani: to cast him in “the angry frame,” as one described it. At every opportunity, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers suggested that Mr. Giuliani was slightly out of control, a characterization that was intended to raise doubts about Mr. Giuliani and knock him off stride.
And there were signs it was working. Mr. Giuliani suggested he was the victim of a Clinton-directed conspiracy that included pushing the Brooklyn district attorney, a Democrat, to investigate his campaign manager, Bruce Teitelbaum. “You’ve got to be living on Mars not to figure out what’s going on,” Mr. Giuliani said.
As spring arrived, Mr. Giuliani had yet to give a major speech on federal issues. He was barely campaigning upstate. Mr. Giuliani dismissed the concerns of Republican leaders, explaining that he, unlike Mrs. Clinton, had a full-time job.
Mr. Giuliani’s campaign began to falter in March. New York police officers shot and killed an unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, after he ran from undercover agents who asked if he had any drugs to sell. Mr. Giuliani authorized the release of Mr. Dorismond’s sealed criminal records from when he was a juvenile and went on Fox News Sunday, where he proclaimed that Mr. Dorismond was “no altar boy.” The remarks ripped across an already polarized city.
Mr. Clinton had already been scheduled to appear the next night at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harlem. The church was packed with cameras and reporters as Mrs. Clinton, clasping hands with prominent black leaders, walked in singing “We Shall Overcome,” before delivering a speech accusing Mr. Giuliani of dividing the city.
Mr. Giuliani headed upstate, for a Republican dinner in Binghamton. He spoke for exactly 22 minutes, stood for an eight-minute news conference, and then turned for home. Less than a week later, he abruptly canceled four upstate events because, he said, he wanted to attend the rescheduled opening game of the Yankees.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign pounced. Overnight, aides arranged a trip for her to the cities Mr. Giuliani had snubbed and worked the telephone with upstate reporters to stoke the story.
The End
By the time Mr. Giuliani stepped in front of the cameras to announce he was dropping out, Republicans had already concluded that the mayor would not stay in the race: indeed, many were praying he would not. His cancer seemed almost beside the point.
Evidence of his lack of interest had been building for months: the erratic campaign schedule, his treatment of upstate voters, the public way he was carrying on his relationship with Ms. Nathan. His poll numbers were sinking (a New York Times/CBS News poll taken after the Dorismond episode found Mrs. Clinton leading the mayor by 10 points statewide), and he had become a punch line on late-night talk shows.
It was a frazzled end for Mr. Giuliani’s aides, concerned about the health of a friend, bewildered by the humiliating political meltdown they were witnessing, and frustrated that all their preparation for this epic battle would be put aside and that Mrs. Clinton would be left with a relatively easy start for her solo political career.
To this day, their aides quarrel over how the race would have ended had Mr. Giuliani not withdrawn. “If he would have stayed in the race, we would have won,” Mr. Penn said. Told of that, Peter Powers, Mr. Giuliani’s longtime political adviser and close friend, responded, “We viewed her as somebody we can easily beat — not easily, but someone we could beat.”
Mr. Giuliani’s advisers said he could have overcome the collapse of his marriage, assuming he was physically well enough to stay in. But they are not sure they could have overcome another obstacle: that Mr. Giuliani was running for a job that he did not seem to want.
Should their status as their parties’ national front-runners bear up under the actual voting in the primaries, Mr. Giuliani could get the fight against Mrs. Clinton he has been spoiling for. And this time, it is for a job that he by all appearances covets. That may well be the most significant difference between the Clinton-Giuliani race that almost was and that Clinton-Giuliani race that could now be about to unfold.
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Third post of the day:
Political Journal/WSJ
"From day one, I have been convinced that [former Arkansas Gov. Mike] Huckabee, who is an amazing talent, is running for president to further his career, not serve in the Oval Office. Landing hefty speaking fees and handsome book deals, and perhaps his own cable television gig, are assuredly in his future. It's not that Huckabee is beneath the presidency; it's that he operates in a different orbit. He longs for the spotlight. He loves to entertain and is less concerned with the substance of what he says than with the impression he leaves.... He is a modern-day populist who delights in the sowing-and-reaping praise of others, especially those from the left, but for what, to advance some sort of ideological cause? No, it's about advancing Mike Huckabee" -- David Sanders, a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and a former aide to Mike Huckabee.
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A quick comment on the most recent posts here in the next President's thread:
I agree with the observation about Mike Huckabee. He has nothing to lose; he is gaining a national audience and prominence that will be valuable no matter what he does next. They always say that all 100 Senators deal with national issues everyday and see themselves as the perfect next President but I refuse to believe that every governor of Arkansas thinks it is realistically the next step for him. The fact that it actually happened one President ago makes it even more improbable IMO.
Excellent piece about the two front runners, Hillary and Rudy, having already faced each other in a campaign; it's a story long overdue. The electorate in NY is different than the electorate in the USA, but it still it reminds me that Rudy is not necessarily the most electable Republican. In some ways he doesn't offer enough contrast, he targets some of the same voters and he carries some of the same flaws. Hillary's people are experts on Rudy and ready to go. By now all Republican consultants are experts on Hillary so that is not as big of a deal.
Thanks for posting the Fred-friendly piece with the WSJ praising his tax plan. He had a rather contentious sitting with Chris Wallace Sunday morning that I watched. Chris asked about him dropping in the polls and about some negative comments that Fox commentators had made and Fred responded quoting another source, National Review, who had given him high marks for being the only candidate with a good plan for tackling the entitlement problems that we face. Now add a great tax plan to that. My first reaction was that he dodged the poll question but after pondering it I realize he answered with what he is doing to compete for the vote and to set an agenda for if he should win. As disappointing as the pundits say he is doing, he has consistently stayed in second nationwide which is the best place possible (for those who aren't in first).
Last, my comment on one more post going back. I didn't like the political calculator. I answered it rather impatiently the first time through and it told me my candidate was Huckabee. I didn't like that so I went back and filled in with more detail marking high importance on my key issues and remembering which side of 'net-neutrality' I was on. Then it came back with a big smiling face of Mitt Romney. Looking further I found out it had the exact same score to the one hundredth of a point for second place, my own personal favorite, Fred Thompson. I just think there are subtle differences and personal preferences that don't come through on 'yes, no or unsure' choices on big issues. JMHO.
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The Moonlight Bunny Ranch's support of Ron Paul hurts my opinon of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch.
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Fred's Folly
Too bad Thompson won't sell his good ideas.
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, November 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
On Fox News this Sunday, Fred Thompson laid out the most creative tax proposal yet in the race for president. It should have been an important moment, the point at which GOP aspirants finally dug into a core issue and went a few rounds over marginal rates and corporate levies.
Instead, nothing. The Thompson plan inspired little fanfare, less press and didn't even merit time during this week's GOP debate. The black hole says everything about the mess that is the Thompson campaign, and just as much about today's intellectually bereft Republican primary campaign.
The standard rap on the former Tennessee senator is that he's lazy. This is meant to explain why--despite movie-star status, Southern conservative credentials, and Beltway experience--his campaign has been as fizzy as day-old cherry Coke. The reality is more complex--and more concerning for Mr. Thompson's presidential prospects.
The Watergate attorney has made himself into this election's Don Quixote, the impractical idealist tilting at "the system." Even as he announced his run on the Jay Leno show in September, Mr. Thompson quipped he "wasn't in the room when they made the rules" that resulted in today's sped up, big-money, 24-hour-news-byte primary. He has refused to play nice--declaring late and declining to join rivals in the media hoopla and nonstop campaign. It has proven a case study in the folly of trying to single-handedly buck modern politics.
It might have helped if Mr. Thompson, who stated his intention to trust in "the people" to give him a hearing, had offered those people something more than personality at the start of his tardy campaign. It has instead only been very recently that he has, admirably, tried to craft himself into the ideas candidate.
He's proposed revitalizing America's armed forces by increasing the core defense budget, building up a million-member ground force, and instituting sweeping missile defense. He went where no other GOP candidate has yet gone with a detailed plan to shore up Social Security, by changing the benefits formula and offering voluntary "add on" accounts for younger workers. He would re-energize school vouchers. His border security blueprint certainly matches Mitt Romney's or Rudy Giuliani's in its, ahem, creativity and thoroughness.
This week's tax proposal was decidedly fresh, going beyond the run-of-the-mill candidate promise to extend the Bush tax cuts, and calling for the end of the death tax and the AMT, a cut in the corporate tax rate and even a voluntary flat tax. According to a campaign source, in upcoming weeks Mr. Thompson will unveil plans to reduce federal spending by limiting nondefense growth to inflation, earmark reform, and a one-year freeze on the hiring of non-essential civilian workers and contractors.
There's plenty here to get conservative voters and bloggers and pundits engaged in some healthy, even lively, debate. That is, if they'd heard any of this. Most haven't, and for that Mr. Thompson has mostly himself to blame.
While it isn't clear who set the "rules" for this manic election, they're set. Voters may only pay attention at the end, but having an infrastructure to make sure those voters hear you in the final months is the work of years. By sitting back, Mr. Thompson allowed his rivals to scoop up the well-connected policy wonks, committed state activists and aggressive fund-raisers that oil a campaign. His own refusal to "do" the media and public-event circus has muzzled his message, as the failure of his tax-plan announcement shows.
Think back to 1999, when Gov. George W. Bush--who knew something about campaigns--unveiled his own tax outline. His people had a dozen brainy conservative economists at the ready to blitz the media. Outside business groups stood by with glowing press releases. Average families were found to serve as real-life examples of how the tax cut would help. The campaign staff fanned out and joined local activists to manage the grass roots. The candidate himself devoted endless time to flogging his idea in public appearances and to every press person and editorial board around.
None of this happened in the wake of Mr. Thompson's Fox announcement. The campaign simply didn't have the stuff to pull it off. Worse, its own leader refused to do what is expected. A look at Mr. Thompson's schedule revealed not a single public appearance for three days after the release, right up to Wednesday's highly uninformative CNN debate.
Speaking of dull debates, that's Mr. Thompson's other problem. To the extent he is now trying to float ideas (and he could use even more), the rest of the field wants nothing of it. The GOP went into this race thinking itself the likely loser, and that fear has defined the primary. The candidates aren't vying to lead a wayward party out of malaise, or energize voters with new ideas. They're instead trying to be the answer to a question: Who can beat her?
That's made the race about biography, in particular on issues like national security and immigration, where Republicans hope a Hillary Clinton will be weak. Mr. Giuliani's campaign is about his past as a New York tough guy who can face down terrorists. Mr. Romney's, his past as an MBA who can manage our border. Mr. McCain's, his past as a Vietnam vet who recognized the problems in Iraq. There's no future in this present, and Mr. Thompson's lackluster delivery of his own agenda has allowed the front-runners to continue avoiding the big debates.
Mr. Thompson's inertia has meant his campaign is no longer in control of its destiny. His best shot now is that Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Romney go nuclear, leaving him with a ticket out of Iowa and some hope. He still ranks second behind Mr. Giuliani in national polls. But putting himself in a position to build off any lucky outcomes will involve trying to play the game he so detests. If he believes his ideas are as important for the country as he says they are, he will.
Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, based in Washington. Her column appears Fridays.
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It might have helped if Mr. Thompson, who stated his intention to trust in "the people" to give him a hearing, had offered those people something more than personality at the start of his tardy campaign.
Hahahaha!!!
In defense of Fred, he's pretty open about his ideas (even if he's not always very specific). As a rebuttal to the opening assertion of this article, Fred is hardly the first to say anything meaningful with regards to taxes. He stands in a field where only the top cash earners have said little about taxes (other than "I'd cut taxes" - whatever that means) and all the others have more radical ideas, from endorsing the Fair Tax plan (Huckabee, et al) to abolishing the IRS & income tax, and replacing it with nothing (Ron Paul).
Interesting debate the other night.
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The fluff is gone. Now the real Clinton machine will get going. Clinton insists on being President - amazing - no clinton has ever achieved a greater than 50% popular vote in a Presidential election - yet we had her and Bill for 8 years already:
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/?p=202
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071202/NEWS/71202009/-1/SPORTS01
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The Meaning of Fiscal Conservatism
By RUDY GIULIANI
December 3, 2007; Page A21
With economic uncertainty weighing on the minds of many Americans, Congress is preparing to recess after another year of profligate spending, protectionist talk and promises of higher taxes. No wonder some people feel like we're moving in the wrong direction. But I'm optimistic as I look to the future. It's not our country that's moving in the wrong direction -- it's Congress, and Washington's culture of wasteful spending.
Over the last decade, nondefense spending has increased by 65% -- the federal government currently spends $24,000 per household -- while the number of earmarked pork projects rocketed from close to 1,000 to a height of nearly 14,000. This year, with only one appropriations bill enacted, earmarks already number 2,161.
A return to fiscal conservative principles can put America back on the right track, while giving Washington a much-needed dose of discipline.
Fiscal conservatism is based on two fundamental principles -- cutting taxes and controlling spending. In recent years, the Republican Party has successfully cut taxes, but we have fallen short when it comes to controlling spending. The next president will need to strengthen both sides of the fiscal conservative equation, while reforming the culture of wasteful government spending with transparency and accountability. I believe I can do it because I've done it, and in a place that might even be more difficult than Washington.
We need to keep taxes low for our economy to grow. It's not just a theory for me. I cut taxes 23 times as mayor of New York City with a Democratic City Council and State Assembly, and saw that lower taxes can result in higher revenue. Amid fears of an economic slowdown, now is the time to cut taxes, not raise them. But the Democratic presidential candidates all seem determined to impose an unprecedented $3 trillion tax hike on the American people.
Republicans have a clearer understanding of how our economy works. This summer, I unveiled my tax plan, which committed to making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, while aiming for still-lower marginal rates. We'll give the death tax the death penalty, index the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation as a step toward eliminating it entirely, expand tax-free savings accounts, and expand health-care choice through tax reform. We also need to reduce the corporate tax rate -- which is currently the second highest in the industrialized world, behind Japan -- to at least the average of the other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, or 28%. These actions will protect American jobs, empowering us to compete and win in the global economy.
Controlling spending must be a chief executive's priority or it doesn't get done. That's a lesson I learned from Ronald Reagan, and put into action when I was mayor. Real per capita spending actually fell during my administration. We cut the city bureaucracy by 20%, excluding cops on the street and teachers in the classroom.
We can do the same thing in Washington. Over the course of the next two terms, 42% of the federal civilian workforce is due to retire. We'll only hire back half, taking the opportunity to right-size government by taking advantage of technology like the private sector did in recent years, and ultimately save taxpayers $21 billion annually.
We also need to return to spending controls and caps, a proven way to make Washington set priorities. As president, I will direct all federal agency heads to find 5% to 10% efficiency savings. If they come back to me and say it's impossible to find 5% savings in a $2 billion agency, I'll call on the Office of Management and Budget to identify the cuts. It's time to put the "M" back in OMB.
Reforming a culture of wasteful spending requires standing up to special interests and insisting on transparency and accountability. Congress spent $29 billion on earmarks last year alone. Earmarks are the broken windows of the federal budget, signs of dysfunction and distress. Recent examples range from the absurd ($1.1 million in 2005 for researching baby food made from salmon) to the self-congratulatory ($2 million for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service). The American people want us to end earmarks once and for all.
But more needs to be done. We need to root out wasteful spending and fraud in benefit payments and contracts by convening a Government Waste Commission, such as the one that closed military bases. It can require Congress to vote up or down on a whole package of recommended cuts, beginning by considering the 3% of programs currently rated "ineffective" by the federal government itself.
Finally, we can both save money and provide better services by consolidating duplicative programs. We don't need 342 economic development programs or 130 programs serving at risk youth or 72 federal programs dedicated to ensuring safe water (according to a 2004 report). No doubt many of these programs are worthy, but citizens shouldn't have to navigate a maze of overlapping bureaucracies. Digital one-stop-shop centers will provide better citizen service at lower cost, while transforming industrial age bureaucracies to fit the information-age citizen.
Returning to principles of fiscal conservatism is not an end to itself. We believe these ideas ultimately help government work better for all Americans. Cutting taxes and controlling spending creates a government that is smaller and smarter, more efficient and more effective. It can help balance the budget and reduce the deficit. Most of all, a healthy combination of pro-growth policies and fiscal discipline unleashes the genius of America's free-market economy -- empowering not government, but the citizens it exists to serve.
Mr. Giuliani is the former mayor of New York and a Republican presidential candidate.
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When I first met Mike Huckabee, now the GOP frontrunner in the Iowa caucuses, it was 1993 and he had just been elected Arkansas's first GOP lieutenant governor in a stunning upset. He spoke glowingly at the time of his political consultant, Dick Morris. But Mr. Morris soon went back to his old client Bill Clinton, like Mr. Huckabee a man born in Hope, Ark., to help Mr. Clinton repair his battered presidency.
Flash forward 14 years: While Mr. Morris underwent a famous falling-out with the Clintons, he remains a favorite of Mr. Huckabee and Politico.com reports the two men "have been holding private conversations" on a regular basis. It's no surprise then that Mr. Morris has been extolling Mr. Huckabee's virtues in his newspaper columns and Fox News appearances. Just last week, he defended the former Arkansas governor against attacks on his tax record by the free-market Club for Growth. "Mike Huckabee is a fiscal conservative," Mr. Morris insisted.
Few would be shocked if Mr. Morris, a famously flexible political advocate, were soon defending Mr. Huckabee against charges that he had a curious habit of pardoning convicted felons. In one famous case, Mr. Huckabee pushed for the freedom of Wayne Dumond, a convicted rapist -- who, 11 months later, sexually assaulted and murdered a woman.
Mr. Morris told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday that Mr. Huckabee's sometimes left-leaning record on spending and criminal justice would be an overall plus because many voters agree with the former governor in the power of forgiveness. "He puts all of the Bible into play," Mr. Morris told the Times. "It's not just 'thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not,' but it's the positive aspects of his religion, too -- which is 'love thy neighbor,' and 'when I was naked you clothed me,' and a sense of helping poor people."
Mr. Morris is often brilliant, but his knowledge of internal Democratic Party politics is stronger than his expertise on the reactions and behavior of GOP primary voters. Mr. Huckabee is on a roll now, but voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have only just begun to be told about his surprisingly liberal record in Arkansas. Since some 40% of Iowa caucus goers in the past have been strong Christians, it will be interesting to see if Mr. Huckabee's faith and background as a minister will continue to trump evidence of his often liberal views.
-- John Fund
Huckabee's Tax Challenge
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is good at one-liners. When asked if Jesus would have supported the death penalty, he shot back: "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office." When asked if NASA should land on Mars, he said yes and Hillary Clinton should be on the first rocket. Asked by a reporter what he thought about former Sen. Fred Thompson's attack ad that shows an old news clip of Mr. Huckabee as governor before he lost 100 pounds listing one tax after another he would support raising, the governor got off one of his better lines: He said that he must have been under the influence of sugar at the time.
It's a good line, but not good enough. Mr. Huckabee's easy style, quick wit and solid support from Christian conservatives have propelled him into serious contention for the GOP nomination. He's running strong in Iowa and within striking distance in New Hampshire. He now represents the biggest threat to Mitt Romney's strategy of winning the nomination by winning big in Iowa and New Hampshire. But to put the race away, Mr. Huckabee will need to unite fiscal conservatives and Christian voters -- the coalition that sent the last three Republican presidents to the White House.
That coalition could fracture, however, unless Mr. Huckabee quickly addresses his record on taxes. He likes to point out that as governor he cut taxes some 90 times. What he doesn't say, however, is that he also raised more than 20 different taxes for a net tax hike during his tenure of about $500 million. He also left it to his successor -- Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe -- to cut the state's hated sales tax, which Mr. Beebe did shortly after taking office.
When we pressed Mr. Huckabee on his tax record a few months ago, he said he "won't apologize" for raising taxes because he needed the money to repair his state's decrepit highways. Fresh asphalt always seems to appeal to Republican elected officials -- especially those who love earmarking federal highway funds. But it's not something that will win over fiscal conservatives. What Mr. Huckabee needs now is to offer a plausible explanation on why he won't raise taxes as president for similar reasons -- what he needs, in short, is a big tax reform commitment that can appeal to both wings of the Republican Party.
-- Brendan Miniter
Quote of the Day I
"In the biggest surprise of the campaign so far, the election that almost everyone thought would be about Iraq is turning out not to be.... The result is that both the Democratic and Republican campaigns are looking more like the campaigns of the 1990s. The Republican who has benefited most from Iraq's slide [to a lower ranking in the concerns of voters] is Mike Huckabee, who this summer was in low single digits in Iowa and is now running neck and neck with Mitt Romney for first place. A few months ago, commentators were saying that conservatives no longer cared as much about abortion, gay marriage and the like; they were more focused on the 'war on terror.' Rudy Giuliani has bet his whole campaign on that proposition. Romney's competence theme is a not-so-subtle critique of the way President Bush has handled the war. Huckabee, by contrast, has virtually no national security profile. In an Iraq-dominated campaign, it's hard to imagine him as a serious contender" -- Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart, on polls showing a sharp decline in the number of primary voters who say Iraq is their top concern.
Political Journal/WSJ
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Still a Dangerous World
Democrats imply the U.S. can talk its way out of global threats.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, December 6, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
The most disturbing thing about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wasn't the news itself, but how the episode displayed the wild and manic swings that now characterize American politics. A regular watcher of our politics could be forgiven for feeling that one isn't watching a serious country but a place that conducts its internal affairs like a Saturday morning cartoon show. Thunk! Boooinng!
For some time, the conventional storyboard drawn for the Bush presidency has been that the U.S. is led by a bumbling Elmer Fudd, who outlandishly overestimates the danger from such imagined threats as Saddam Hussein, Syria or Iran's mysterious-looking mullahs. Prominent political figures here design their comments on world events to fit inside cartoon dialogue balloons. John Edwards, after the NIE story broke, denounced the Bush-Cheney "rush to war with Iran." Sen. Harry Reid demanded a "diplomatic surge."
These wide, all-or-nothing swings may serve the melodramatic needs of politics and the press, but they don't much help an electorate that will vote a year from now to send a new U.S. president out into the world. With or without the NIE's opinion of Iran's nuclear program, that world is still a dangerous place.
Let's assume for argument's sake that Iran did stop its nuke program in 2003. Why, then, in 2006 was Iran performing test flights of the Shabab-2 and Shabab-3 ballistic missiles, the latter with a range of some 1,200 miles? Commenting at the time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Iranians "are not unaware that the security environment is one in which if they actually were to do something, Iran would suffer greatly." But as of this week, they might not.
Indeed last week, just as the U.S. intelligence professionals were preparing to tell the world it could forget about Iran (as yesterday's news reports made clear the world is about to do), the Iranian defense ministry announced it has built a new 1,200-mile missile, the Ashura. In September, it put on display the 1,100-mile-range Ghadr-1 missile. If this is all an inconsequential feint, it's a remarkably big one.
North Korea in July 2006 tested the long-range Taepodong-2, a nuclear payload-capable ballistic missile. North Korea has exported its missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. And of course Hezbollah, in the same month North Korea was testing the Taepodong-2, fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israel, re-establishing the operational viability of short-range bombardment.
China is developing three strategic, long-range missiles--the JL-1, and the DF-31 and DF-31A; the latter two are mobile ICBMs. This technology did not go away with the Cold War.
In January, after much effort to do so, China successfully used a kinetic-kill vehicle launched from a ballistic missile to destroy a satellite orbiting at 500 miles altitude.
The Bush administration's effort to place a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe as counterweight to Iran's missiles was conventionally mocked by elite opinion as a rerun of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars scheme." In fact, Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Israel and Denmark are all attempting to develop antimissile technology. France is building a short-range ballistic missile defense system, the SAMP/T. What are they all afraid of?
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, indeed virtually all the nations of the Middle East are seeking nuclear-power capability. Possibly it's all just to keep the lights on in the tourist hotels, but nuclear-energy production is still a dual-use technology. It is now believed that Israel bombed Syria in September to destroy a nuclear-bomb facility built in part by North Korea.
This is a more complex and hair-trigger world than the Cold War years between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The idea that George Bush's handling of all these volatile moving pieces has been "incompetent" and has "isolated" the U.S. is a dangerous caricature, though that caricature is the way our Roller-Derby politics has chosen to talk about the world. The NIE/Iran drama this week is a case study--reduced in press reports to another Bush intelligence "flip-flop," as though the president wrote this stuff himself in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and even Mike Huckabee want us to entrust them with managing the world's flourishing threats. Has any offered sufficient reason why we should? In other political systems, a candidate's strategic policies tend to flow from his party. Here we mostly get whatever these hyper-ambitious individuals choose to reveal during a campaign--and the foreign-policy views of their party in Congress.
This Wednesday, after the NIE's release, the Democratic candidates had a fresh opportunity at an Iowa debate to describe how their presidencies would address Iran and the world. John Edwards chose to attack Sen. Clinton for voting in September to label Iran's Revolutionary Guards as terrorists. She and Sen. Obama, along with Democrats in Congress, said the new Iran intelligence estimate now mandates diplomacy only. Sen. Obama: "They should have stopped the saber rattling, should have never started it. And they need, now, to aggressively move on the diplomatic front."
But in a July essay for Foreign Affairs, Sen. Obama said nuclear weapons "in the hands of a radical theocracy" is "too dangerous." While he favored "tough-minded" diplomacy with Iran, "we must not rule out using military force."
Which version is one supposed to believe? The candidates seeking votes from their party's pacifists, or the person who wants to represent his country's interests in a hostile world?
One would like more on this than we're getting from the candidates in both parties. But the Democrats especially have tied themselves to the word "diplomacy," giving the impression that the U.S. can literally talk its way out of any bad outcomes that Iran, Syria, North Korea or free-agent terrorists have planned for us.
Put it this way: Would they, like Israel, have bombed that factory in Syria without pre-discussing it with Bashar Assad or Kim Jong-Il? No candidate's answer to that will make everyone happy. But the more than 100 million Americans who'll vote next year need a better idea than they've got of how the next president plans to deal with the world. Not the cartoon world, but the real world.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
WSJ
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Redefining Conservatism
Mike Huckabee is far from being Reagan's heir.
WSJ
BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Friday, December 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
DES MOINES, Iowa--Stepping out for a press conference here Monday, Mike Huckabee fielded the ultimate question. Just how conservative are you?
"I'm as conservative as anyone could hope to be, or want to be, or needs to be," replied the smiling former Arkansas governor, never missing a beat, and following up with a boilerplate summary of his belief in "lower taxes," the "sanctity of human life" and a "strong military"--before moving ever so swiftly on to the next question.
It was trademark Huckabee: Sounds great, explains little. It's a strategy that has so far served him well, rocketing his campaign in recent weeks to the top ranks of the Republican presidential field. The question is whether he can continue to pull off that trick, now that he's receiving belated media scrutiny. A few days following the candidate on the Iowa campaign trail suggests it could prove tough. If Mr. Huckabee does turn out to be everything Republicans "want" or "need" in a conservative, it will only be because the definition of a conservative has morphed to include tax hiking, protectionism, corporate scolding and an unserious approach to foreign policy.
What aren't in doubt are Mr. Huckabee's social-values credentials. He has an undisputed record on questions of abortion and gay marriage, and he's spent no small portion of his limited advertising money making sure Iowa voters know it. Christian conservatives make up an estimated 40% of the state's GOP vote, and by all accounts he's slowly locking up that vote. That alone accounts for a fair share of his recent rise in the polls.
Mr. Huckabee is the charisma candidate. Like another man from Hope, Ark., the onetime pastor is an extraordinary speaker. He's self-deprecating and funny, has perfect timing, and never struggles for an answer. He has that rare ability to pull out just the right story in response to any situation, and to deliver it in a folksy, Southern way.
At a meeting in Newton, Iowa, when talking about the importance of marriage, Mr. Huckabee notes that in his 34 years with his wife, Janet, she'd never been "wrong." He waits a beat and throws in that he likes "sleeping on the bed, not the couch." People chuckle. When one attendee praises Mr. Huckabee as the "nicest" GOP candidate, Mr. Huckabee quips "I tend to agree. I know these guys, they're bums." More laughter. Along with values, the vast majority of the voters interviewed after these events said their top reason for supporting Mr. Huckabee was that he was the only candidate who struck them as "genuine" and "sincere."
The yawning questions are Mr. Huckabee's stances on those other big GOP-voter concerns--national security and the economy. When he can get away with it, Mr. Huckabee is vague, broadly supporting "school choice," "health-care reform," "lower taxes" and a "strong America." It's when he's pressed for details that things get dodgy.
On the stump, Mr. Huckabee likes to point out that we are in a "world war" against terror, and that his first duty would be to protect Americans. Yet don't expect the Arkansan to stand firm against liberal opinion over America's more controversial strategies. On Monday, he became the only Republican candidate to attend a meeting with retired military officers who have complained about the Bush administration's supposed use of "torture." At an ensuing press conference, Mr. Huckabee quickly jumped on the politically popular bandwagon to condemn "waterboarding," and to further declare his support for closing down Guantanamo Bay because of the "symbol" it "represents" to the "rest of the world."
On other questions of foreign policy, the Arkansan has yet to prove he is ready for international prime time. Asked how he'd handle the Iranian nuclear threat, his stock answer is that America needs to become "energy independent in 10 years," thereby denying Iran oil money. "Iran, I promise you, they wouldn't have enough money to build a reactor just by selling rugs," he explained. (No word on why this didn't stop North Korea.) When asked at a media dinner about the front-page news that the latest National Intelligence Estimate had downgraded Iran's nuclear threat, Mr. Huckabee admitted he didn't even know about the report.
A populist at heart, Mr. Huckabee claims he's "no protectionist," but over and over this week he complained about the U.S. trade deficit with China and vowed, in the best Democratic tradition, to only sign "fair trade" deals. To bring up big companies is to invite a Huckabee lecture on the "greed" of corporate executives who tower over "average employees."
Mr. Huckabee likes to say he cut taxes in Arkansas 94 times, and has collected devotees around his promise for sweeping tax reform via the "fair tax." He promises to abolish the IRS, and along with it all current income, corporate, payroll and other taxes--to be replaced with a 23% national sales, or consumption, tax. He's also promised repeal of the 16th amendment--which established the income tax--to ensure Americans don't get double-taxation.
The chances of actually accomplishing this are about as likely as Christmas three times a year. But the benefit of Mr. Huckabee's dreamy tax proposal is that it has, until now, allowed him to avoid talk of his own checkered tax past in Little Rock. That tenure included sales tax hikes, strong support for Internet taxation, bills raising gas and cigarette taxes, etc. By this week, Mr. Huckabee had been slammed on this tax history so much he was no longer disputing the details. When asked if he didn't have a "mixed" record, Mr. Huckabee shot back: "Most everyone who has ever governed does," before insisting that even the great Reagan had raised taxes while at the helm of California.
Another benefit is that Mr. Huckabee hasn't had to talk about what he'd do with the existing, messy tax system. When I pointed out the unlikelihood of a fair tax, and asked how he'd handle the real-world questions of the Bush tax cuts, the exploding AMT and high corporate taxation, Mr. Huckabee allowed that he'd keep the Bush cuts, said something about the problems Democrats face with the AMT, and launched back into a discussion of the virtues of the fair tax.
Voters are only now beginning to hear some of this, and Mr. Huckabee, with little money or infrastructure in other primary states, is still a long way from the nomination. But if by some chance he keeps up this surge, Republican voters need to understand they are signing up for a whole new brand of "conservatism."
Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, based in Washington. Her column appears Fridays.
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WSJ
Homeland Insecurity
By BARACK OBAMA
December 8, 2007; Page A10
America is in a defining moment. This is the wealthiest nation in history. Yet many Americans feel that the dream so many generations fought for is slowly slipping away.
I've spoken with folks across this country who have worked all their lives to put their children through college, but now can't afford the rising tuition. I've spoken with many others who've done everything right, but fell into bankruptcy once they became sick, because they couldn't afford their skyrocketing medical bills. And since working Americans have to pay these rising costs with incomes that remain stagnant, many are falling deep into debt, unable to set anything aside for savings.
So at a time when many Americans have no margin for error, it's no surprise that the downturn in the housing market has done enormous harm. In the coming years, over two million Americans could face foreclosure.
The larger risk, however, is that what is happening in housing could spill over elsewhere. A number of firms borrowed huge sums to make investments tied to the housing market. They are now suffering big losses that could trigger a slowdown of the entire economy. We're already seeing some troubling signs. Consumer confidence is the lowest it's been in years. Pension funds are losing money, threatening retirement security. And banks are also losing money, resulting in a credit crunch. That means businesses have less money to invest and people can't get loans, which could lead to significant job losses in the months ahead.
This is a moment of challenge. But it's also a moment of opportunity which we must seize, to make sure our economic future is secure. That starts with addressing the source of our economic woes -- the crisis in the housing market. For most Americans, a home is not just a place to live; it's their most valuable possession -- so preventing a larger crisis in the housing market means providing greater economic security for middle-class families.
This week, President Bush outlined a limited agreement with lenders to ensure that some families don't face higher mortgage payments they can't afford. It is a start. But we need to do more. That's why, several months ago, I proposed tax breaks to help millions of homeowners make their payments, direct relief for the victims of mortgage fraud, and counseling so homeowners know what options are available to avoid foreclosure and refinance. And I have outlined a program to help make it easier for middle-class families, not speculators, to renegotiate or refinance their mortgages.
To prevent the current problems in the housing market from spreading, shaking confidence in other sectors of the economy, we need to put money in the pockets of middle-class Americans. In September, I proposed a middle-class tax cut that would offset the payroll tax that working Americans are already paying. It would give every working family a tax cut worth up to $1,000. It would also make retirement more secure by eliminating income taxes for any senior making less than $50,000 per year. And over the long term, I've called for an automatic workplace pension enrollment policy, which would include a federal government match for part of the savings of middle-class families so they can count on more savings when they retire.
But the test of judgment and leadership isn't just how you respond to problems; it's what you do to prevent them. That's why, last spring, I called for a summit on housing with representatives from the government and private sector similar to the one that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson attended earlier this week. I also introduced a bill that would treat those who commit mortgage fraud like the criminals they are -- a measure that might have prevented the current crisis from escalating. Three months ago, I asked lenders to show flexibility to Americans trying to sell or refinance their houses.
In the last several months, I've also proposed a number of steps to prevent another economic crisis. These include restoring market transparency by making sure there's adequate government oversight over the rating agencies, so we can avoid practices that can mislead investors. We also need to stop credit-card companies from engaging in deceptive practices that push middle-class Americans further into debt. In addition, we need to update our regulatory system to reflect a 21st-century marketplace where so much credit comes from nonbank lenders, rather than traditionally regulated banks. And as we reform our regulatory rules, let's do so with an eye toward the global economy in which we're operating.
It's going to take a new kind of leadership to strengthen our middle class and make sure America's economic future is secure -- leadership that can challenge the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and rally this nation around a common purpose. And that is exactly the kind of leadership I intend to offer as president of the United States.
Mr. Obama is a senator from Illinois and a Democratic presidential candidate.
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That Does Not Compute
Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle.
WSJ
BY JEFFREY LORD
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process.
In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: "His idea of the perfect deal is not when one side wins but when 'you find a new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go. That doesn't always happen.' "
Indeed.
Mr. Barnes says Mr. Romney's "approach to government is not ideological." A Romney adviser is quoted as saying of his candidate: "He's super-pragmatic. He's an eclectic conservative." And Mr. Romney himself says flatly that as president he would "insist on gathering data . . . and analyze the data looking for trends."
Uh-oh.
Make no mistake. If the leading candidates in the GOP presidential race are to be litmus-tested as conservatives, all would cause conservatives sleepless nights. If the Reagan coalition was of economic and social conservatives combined with national security hawks, each group has something to be disturbed about with this batch of front-runners. Rudy Giuliani famously has his issues with social issues, John McCain his prickly insistence on First Amendment censorship and an addiction to sounding like Al Gore on global warming and Hillary Clinton on immigration. Mike Huckabee amazingly sounds like Ted Kennedy in his attack on supporters of economic growth as greedy, while Fred Thompson was not only assisting the pro-choice movement as a lawyer, but has an apparent bent for trial lawyers.
Yet the Romney approach as described not only by Mr. Barnes but more importantly by Mr. Romney himself is an approach that goes far beyond any particular issue. It is, as Mr. Romney himself freely admits, all about process. Whatever the issue--economic, social or national security--Mr. Romney would gather the data, look for a trend and thus "you make better decisions."
This should cause conservatives to break out in cold sweats.
Let's take Mr. Romney back to two of the most important Republican presidencies in the history of America. Let's make him a ghostly observer as the presidents in question deal with "the data" being presented to them by their advisers.
Mr. Romney's first visit would be to the Lincoln White House in 1864. There was no Oval Office in 1864, so Mr. Romney finds Old Abe in his office upstairs on the second floor of the residence. Lincoln has just been handed a memo by his secretary of war, and the data look pretty grim
Lincoln is staring at a sheet filled with numbers. The numbers are of Union casualties in the 10 most casualty-filled battles of the Civil War thus far. The banality of ink-on-paper belies the horrific human impact behind the figures. Over 13,000 Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh, 16,000 at Second Manassas, 12,000 at Antietam and yet again at Stone River, 17,000 at Chancellorsville, 23,000 at Gettysburg. And so on in one battle after another stretching over the past three years.
So as our ghostly Mr. Romney studies these "data"--now what? The conservative fear, of course, is that the "superpragmatic" Mr. Romney who places such faith in the process of data and trends would say to Lincoln exactly what the Democratic nominee of 1864, a battlefield general of the war, was saying in his campaign against Lincoln. The war is a "failure," said George McClellan. Stop it--right now. The numbers, the kind of data so prized by a possibly future President Romney, are unmistakably ghastly. Union kids and Confederate kids--Americans all--are being slaughtered on a scale that dwarfs the imagination.
But what of principle here? What of the passion for the principle--and passion plays no small role in Lincoln's adherence to principle--that no man, woman or child should be a slave in America? What about the fundamental principle of human freedom? What about keeping the Union together? The startling thought occurs that Mr. Romney would be whispering to Lincoln that the data speak for themselves. Passion should yield to process. And that would be that, if Mr. Romney carried the day as Lincoln's adviser.
Move Mr. Romney back to the future, or at least the relatively recent past. This time his ghost is hovering over Ronald Reagan's shoulder. President Reagan is one happy guy. His tax and budget cuts have passed, and he signed them into law. The Reagan revolution has begun. But it's now 1985, and there's a problem. David Stockman, Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, a former congressman from Mr. Romney's native Michigan, the state where Romney's father was a star of the Republican liberal movement, is staring at reams of data. The results, as Mr. Stockman would write shortly after his angry departure from the Reagan White House, were--from Mr. Stockman's view--"frightening." The very idea that Reagan would stick with his tax cuts was a sign the president was in "dreamland." He was campaigning for re-election in 1984 on "false promises." Mr. Stockman--both in real time and in his bitter memoirs published in 1986--was nothing if not a fountain of data. And the data's conclusion, insisted Mr. Stockman, was that the Reagan revolution was a "failure." Reagan should abandon his passion for the principle of low taxes and cutting federal spending while restoring the military. Presumably, the Romney ghost sitting in the room with Reagan and Mr. Stockman would have agreed with . . . Mr. Stockman.
If decisions were all about data, then the McClellan/Stockman view of the world--a worldview that is apparently Mr. Romney's as well--would be the triumphs most celebrated in American history. Lincoln and Reagan would be rated not at the top of the presidential greatness scale but somewhere well down towards the bottom.
They are, of course, not viewed that way at all. The principles of Lincoln and Reagan carried the day precisely because each man was able to stare at the "data"--however gruesome or frightening they might be--and not blink. They are seen as great presidents and great leaders today because they understood at a visceral level that they should hold fast, refuse to yield to overwhelming demands from critics that they follow the data or that they adhere to a process that used something other than casualties or deficit projections as a measuring stick. Lincoln would not cave in on the principles of holding the Union together and the most basic principle of America--freedom. Reagan would not yield on the central conservative principle that tax cuts and less government spending were in fact the keys to America's future economic vitality.
In other words, in a battle between data and principle, both men rated recently in a poll as the top two greatest presidents in American history (Lincoln first, Reagan second) chose principle. They have not only been vindicated but are held out as treasured exemplars of what a president is supposed to be. Mr. Romney, already struggling with charges he has changed his principles on abortion and gay rights and indeed on when he decided it was OK to admit he was an enthusiastic Reaganite, is basing his entire campaign on the very notion that process is everything.
Gulp.
One of the subtle images of Mr. Romney's recent speech on religion is perhaps not understood by Mr. Romney's advisers. Where did Mr. Romney go to deliver his talk on principle? And who introduced him? The site was the presidential library of former president George H.W. Bush--the former president himself in his always gracious fashion introducing Romney.
Yet Mr. Romney did not need a visit to the Bush Library to understand why the Library does not contain the papers of a two-term president. The reason, of course, is that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush campaigned for the presidency in 1988 on the principle he phrased as "read my lips--no new taxes." He won. Yet in the name of precisely the process Mr. Romney lovingly describes--gathering data and looking for trends--the first President Bush was persuaded by Romneyesque advisers like then-Treasury aide Richard Darman to surrender bedrock conservative principle and raise taxes. The senior Mr. Bush was advised to choose data and process over principle. He did--and in short order had lots of time on his hands to decide the process for building a library about a one-term president while Bill and Hillary Clinton took charge.
Not to be left out of this point is the Democrat who successfully campaigned for president based on fixing the process in Washington--Jimmy Carter. As a nuclear engineer, naval officer, successful businessman, Mr. Carter's central point in the 1976 election was about his devotion to process. Then there was that Romney predecessor as governor of Massachusetts, Democrat Michael Dukakis, who earnestly campaigned in 1988 against Bush I on a process issue, competence in government.
Would Mitt Romney make a better president than anyone on the other side? With no disrespect for Oprah, of course.
But if conservatives have learned anything since 1964 it is this: principles count. A principle presidency always trumps a process presidency. Lincoln did better than Hoover, Reagan did better than Bush I or Carter. Better heading in the right direction with a faulty process than zipping along in the wrong direction simply because the process and the data are telling you things are wonderfully efficient. A train making exceptional time to Boston is useless if in fact you wanted to go to Miami.
Mitt Romney is clearly one decent guy, one very, very accomplished human being. He has announced where he stands on the issues of the day, putting himself head and shoulders above a Clinton, Obama or Edwards. But as conservatives head into caucus and primary season, they should not be hesitant to question what appears to be his addiction to process for the sake of process.
Go back to Fred Barnes's Romney quote, the one in which Mr. Romney says he looks for a "new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go." What Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan shared was a core belief that in fact it was a better thing for some principles to triumph over others. "Everybody" did not agree with Lincoln that freedom was better than slavery, that keeping the Union together was better than not, or with Reagan that the free market and tax cuts philosophy was a better philosophy than one of big government and tax increases. But they went ahead anyway.
Is there a place for data? Is there value in process? Sure.
But base an entire presidency on the importance of data and process over principle? Is this what Mitt Romney would do? Is this where a Romney presidency would lead? If so, conservatives have been here before.
It is not a good place to be.
Mr. Lord is creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative, user-generated video site. A former Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania.
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The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village
Would Reagan survive in today's GOP? And is Mrs. Clinton in for a fall this winter?
Friday, December 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
What is happening in Iowa is no longer boring but big, and may prove huge.
The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.
Mike Huckabee is in the lead due, it appears, to voter approval of the depth and sincerity of his religious beliefs as lived out in his ministry as an ordained Southern Baptist. He flashes "Christian leader" over his picture in commercials; he asserts his faith is "mainstream"; his surrogates speak of Mormonism as "strange" and "definitely a factor." Mr. Huckabee said this summer that a candidate's faith is "subject to question," "part of the game."
He tells the New York Times that he doesn't know a lot about Mitt Romney's faith, but isn't it the one in which Jesus and the devil are brothers? This made me miss the old days of Gore Vidal's "The Best Man," in which a candidate started a whispering campaign that his opponent's wife was a thespian.
Mr. Huckabee has of course announced that he apologizes to Mr. Romney, which allowed him to elaborate on his graciousness and keep the story alive. He should have looked abashed. Instead he betrayed the purring pleasure of "a Christian with four aces," in Mark Twain's words.
Christian conservatives have been rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they helped elect Jimmy Carter. They care about the religious faith of their leaders, and their interest is legitimate. Faith is a shaping force. Lincoln got grilled on it. But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.
But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.
The great question: Does it make Mr. Huckabee, does it seal his rise, that he has acted in such a manner? Or does it damage him? Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere will decide that. And in the deciding they may be deciding more than one man's future. They may be deciding if Republicans are becoming a different kind of party.
I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.
This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton's entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn't actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don't feel deep affection for her. That she's scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has "mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent" and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.
This is true of Mrs. Clinton and her Iowa campaign: They thought it was a queenly procession, not a brawl. Now they're reduced to spinning the idea that expectations are on Mr. Obama, that he'd better win big or it's a loss. They've been reduced too to worrying about the weather. If there's a blizzard on caucus day, her supporters, who skew old, may not turn out. The defining picture of the caucuses may be a 78-year-old woman being dragged from her home by young volunteers in a tinted-window SUV.
This is, still, an amazing thing to see. It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.
A thought on the presence of Bill Clinton. He is showing up all over in Iowa and New Hampshire, speaking, shaking hands, drawing crowds. But when he speaks, he has a tendency to speak about himself. It's all, always, me-me-me in his gigantic bullying neediness. Still, he's there, and he's a draw, and the plan was that his presence would boost his wife's fortunes. The way it was supposed to work, the logic, was this: People miss Bill. They miss the '90s. They miss the pre-9/11 world. So they'll love seeing him back in the White House. So they'll vote for Hillary. Because she'll bring him. "Two for the price of one."
It appears not to be working. Might it be that they don't miss Bill as much as everyone thought? That they don't actually want Bill back in the White House?
Maybe. But maybe it's this. Maybe they'd love to have him back in the White House. Maybe they just don't want him to bring her. Maybe they miss the Cuckoo's Nest and they'd love having Jack Nicholson's McMurphy running through the halls. Maybe they just don't miss Nurse Ratched. Does she have to come?
It is clear in Iowa that immigration is the great issue that won't go away. Members of the American elite, including U.S. senators, continue to do damage to the public debate on immigration. They do not view it as a crucial question of America's continuance. They view it as an onerous issue that might upset their personal plans, an issue dominated by pro-immigration groups and power centers on the one hand, and the pesky American people, with their limited and quasi-racist concerns, on the other.
Because politicians see immigration as just another issue in "the game," they feel compelled to speak of it not with honest indifference but with hot words and images. With a lack of sympathy. This is in contrast to normal Americans, who do not use hot words, and just want the problem handled and the rule of law returned to the borders.
Politicians, that is, distort the debate, not because they care so much but because they care so little.
Hillary Clinton is not up at night worrying about the national-security implications of open borders in the age of terror. She's up at night worrying about whether to use Mr. Obama's position on driver's licenses for illegals against him in ads or push polls.
A real and felt concern among the candidates about immigration is a rare thing. And people can tell. They can tell with both parties. This is the real source of bitterness in this debate. It's not regnant racism. It's knowing the political class is incapable of caring, and so repairing.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
WSJ
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Of Pork and Patriotism
John McCain doesn't mince words when it comes to Iraq, the State Department and spending.
BY BRIAN M. CARNEY
Saturday, December 15, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
John McCain sits across the table from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, fielding questions on everything from taxes to torture to terror. He's asked what surprised him the most about the behavior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with regard to Iraq. His answer--"their lack of patriotism"--is of the characteristically impolitic kind that often defines his personality. Over the course of a 75-minute conversation, it's on display time and again.
For a candidate who was mostly written off by the media only six months ago, the senior senator from Arizona seems remarkably confident of his primary chances.
Mr. McCain is 71. But the tired, sluggish, former front-runner you may have read about was nowhere in evidence when the senator came to the Journal's offices yesterday. In his place was a combative and--yes--straight-talking candidate with no qualms about rising to a challenge or speaking his mind. In short, he looks once again like the spry 63-year-old who nearly knocked off front-runner George W. Bush eight years ago.
When asked whether he would tag Hillary Clinton as well with a "lack of patriotism," Mr. McCain does dial it down a notch. "Maybe 'lack of patriotism' is too harsh," he allows. "'Putting political ambitions ahead of the national interest' may be a more subtle way" of putting it. He then adds, with a chuckle, "And we all know how subtle I am."
Just how subtle comes across in expanding on Mrs. Clinton's stance on the war and on the surge. "She had that very clever line--I don't know who wrote it for her--that you'd have to suspend disbelief in order to believe that the surge is working. Well, you'd have to suspend disbelief that it's not now." And then, as if confronting her in a presidential debate, he addresses the absent senator from New York directly: "Do you still stand by that statement, Senator Clinton? Do you still believe you'd have to suspend disbelief to believe that this surge is working?"
Mr. McCain is almost as scathing about his own party's behavior in power as he is about Congress's current leaders. Of the Republican congressional majority that was voted out in 2006, he says: "We let spending get out of control. . . . And we would have won the 2006 elections if we had restrained spending. Our base didn't desert us because of the war in Iraq. Our base deserted us because of the Bridge to Nowhere. I'll take you to a town hall tomorrow and I'll say 'Bridge to Nowhere' and everyone in that room will know what I'm talking about. That bridge is more famous than the Brooklyn Bridge."
That version of the events of November 2006 is not universally shared, even within the GOP, but it does serve Mr. McCain's interests pretty well. He has been one of the most prominent and unapologetic supporters of the war in Iraq, even though he at times disagreed with the administration about tactics and strategy.
And he voted against the Bush tax cuts--even though he admits that they helped the economy in the midst of a recession. "We all know that [they helped]. Without a doubt. Without the slightest doubt. Absolutely."
Even so, he defends his opposition to them on the grounds, he told us, that Congress couldn't get spending under control. "I opposed the tax cuts because there was no spending restraint. . . . If we'd enacted spending restraints, we'd be talking about more tax cuts today. And to the everlasting shame and embarrassment of the Republican Party and this administration, we went on a spending spree and we didn't pay for it. . . . And every time I called over to the White House and said, look, you've got to veto these bills, the answer was, 'We'll lose the majority, we'll lose this election, we'll lose the speaker.' Well, you know what happened."
The words "I told you so" don't quite pass his lips, but his sense of vindication is plain enough.
As for the tax cuts themselves, he now pledges that he would fight to make them permanent. "I will not agree to any tax increase," he says. And then once more for emphasis: "I will not agree to any tax increase."
His combativeness is on display again when the subject of interrogation techniques is raised. It's a subject on which the Journal's editorial board has been critical of Mr. McCain in the past. Does he assert, he is asked, that techniques such as waterboarding never produce reliable information?
He turns it back on the questioner: "I do assert that America's moral image in the world is badly damaged when it comes out that we torture people. . . . I do assert that we're going to win this battle against al Qaeda on ideological grounds."
Then he adds: "So my assertion is that it's fascinating, it's fascinating, that those who have served in the military--particularly in positions of responsibility--almost all of them say, 'Don't do it.' Those who have never served, those who have never heard a shot fired in anger and never will, say, 'Let's torture the hell out of them. Let's take them to the rack. Let's do what the Spanish Inquisition invented.' "
That last is a caricature, and given the jab at "those who have never served," it might even come across as a mean-spirited one, but Mr. McCain manages to put it across without any evident derision in his demeanor or voice. On the contrary, it is said almost amiably.
Likewise, when he's asked what he thinks about the State Department, he delivers the jab with a smile: "Sometimes you have a little personal bias when you find out that they nearly rebelled when the secretary of state said all of them had to go serve in Iraq. I mean, please. Please." He continues: "I think we ought to have a State Department that understands that service to the country is what they're all about. And if that means going into countries where there may be some danger in serving, then by God that's the place they should want to go first." It helps to have volunteered for service in Vietnam if one wants to say that kind of thing.
He doesn't pull any punches with the CIA, either, asking whether it has become a "rogue agency" when queried about the intelligence community's handling of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. On the NIE, he adds: "I want to know why in the world we should have any relaxation with regards to Iran just because they have had a pause in the quickest part of the program to build a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile the enrichment goes on. And they're still exporting the explosive devices. They're still supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. They're still dedicated to the extinction of Israel. What's the change?"
As for direct talks between President Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. McCain is once again scathing: "That is the most overrated thing in the world. We know who's going to profit from that. . . . Who gains in stature from face-to-face meetings? That is the ultimate question. . . . If they want to negotiate"--an open question, it would seem, in Mr. McCain's eyes--"we can find lots of ways to negotiate. But say we have to have face-to-face? Come on. Come on. That's just foolishness. And I would not do one thing that would enhance the prestige of the president of Iran."
In Iraq, meantime, Mr. McCain sees events at long last moving in the right direction. "I think this is a seminal moment in American history. I really do. Because we've got a long way to go. Al Qaeda is on the run but they're not defeated, OK?
"And we've got really a long way to go. But I'm telling you, if we could keep going like this for another nine months to a year or so, and get the Maliki government to start functioning effectively--and a lot of things are happening by the way that are not at the highest level--I think you're going to see things happen in the rest of the Middle East.
"The Syrians sent someone to Annapolis [for the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks]. That's good news. The Iranians may be cutting back on the explosive devices. Pakistan: Musharraf is acting as we wanted him to."
In his view, these are all connected, and all related in turn to the reversal of fortunes in Iraq since the surge began. "And I'm convinced that if we can continue this success, you're going to see a change in the Middle East. Plus, some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. If we fail, we're not going to be in the neighborhood and it's every nation and every group for themselves."
Of course, Mr. McCain will have to resign himself to being right but ignored unless he can actually win. And while he may once have been seen as what he calls "the designated successor" to the Republican nomination, he's now a distinct underdog. So he places a lot of emphasis on what he calls the "volatility" of the current race.
"We all know that if I sat here two weeks ago and I said, 'By the way, Huckabee is ahead in Iowa and South Carolina,' you'd just have said, 'Yeah, right.' " He goes on: "I think you're going to see a lot of ups and downs. Sixty percent, 70%, 80% say they're undecided."
He also sees hope, ironically, in the despondency of the GOP faithful. "Our base is dispirited. I'm telling you, our base is dispirited. We're going to have to rev up our base. We're going to have to promise them we're going to stop this spending. We're going to have to promise them that we'll get trust and confidence back with them."
The senator says he doesn't worry too much about the electoral tactics, but he does know what lies ahead. "We've got to win New Hampshire," he says, or at least exceed expectations there. "And then I think we can do well in South Carolina. In South Carolina we've got the base this time. The Attorney General, the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Graham, most of the base."
Whether that's true or not, Mr. McCain still trails by 15 points on average in South Carolina. But assuming he can do well there, "then I think we're obviously very much in the game. What happens to Huckabee, what happens to Rudy, what happens to Romney--all this stuff is in such flux now that it's very difficult to predict and so we're not paying a lot of attention, obviously." Still, he's paying some attention, apparently.
Overall, the impression Mr. McCain gives is that he is enjoying this campaign tremendously. Asked whether he thinks he's running a better campaign since his financing fell off a cliff along with his poll ratings, he shoots back with a laugh, "Do you think I could have run a worse campaign before my finances went south?"
He blames his fall from front-runner status on his leadership on immigration reform, and says, "If I lose this election, it will be on the immigration issue. There's no question in my mind." But as with the other issues he discussed in our meeting, he doesn't give the impression that he regrets his stand for one minute.
Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
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Don't Have a Cow, Man
With her aura of inevitability diminishing, Hillary Clinton is resorting to ever more degrading campaign methods, the Associated Press reports from Dunlap, Iowa:
Standing atop a stage in a livestock auction barn, [Mrs.] Clinton likened the experience to her quest to woo undecided voters in the closing days before Iowa's pivotal caucuses.
"I've been to cattle barns before and sales before, in Arkansas, but I've never felt like I was the one that was being bid on,'' Clinton told a crowd in western Iowa. ''I know you're going to inspect me. You can look inside my mouth if you want. I hope by the end of my time with you I can make the case for my candidacy and to ask you to consider caucusing for me.''
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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iY-dAdE8H0DRIJmiuNG9yqasmIgwD8TJHMHO1
The Associated Press: Ron Paul Tops $6 Million in One Day
I think it will be interesting to see if the other candidates from both sides of the aisle will inspire their supporters to action (at least getting off the couch and going to vote) the same way as Ron Paul inspires his supporters.
This is turning out to be an interesting race......
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Although I disagree with RP on War with Islamic Fascism (and that is a REALLY important disagreement) there is quite a bit I agree with him on-- and those too are REALLY important things. (Trivia-- I voted for him when he ran for President on the Libertarian ticket) Even though I won't be voting for him, I am very glad he is in the race and doing well. He reminds us of our Founding Fathers and our Constitution.
Here's an endorsement he picked up yesterday.
"At one end of the character scale, you have the sickening sight of Mitt Romney, a hollow shell of cynicism and salesmanship, recrafted to appeal to a base he studied the way Bain consultants assess a company. [Ron] Paul and [John] McCain are at the other end. They have both said things to GOP audiences that they knew would offend. They have stuck with their positions despite unpopularity. They're not saints, but they believe what they say. Both have also taken a stand against the cancerous and deeply un-American torture and detention regime constructed by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. In my book, that counts.... [Ron Paul] is the real thing in a world of fakes and frauds. And in a primary campaign where the very future of conservatism is at stake, that cannot be ignored. In fact, it demands support" -- blogger Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, on why he is endorsing Ron Paul for the GOP presidential nomination.
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A busy day on this thread!
Here's today's WSJ on McCain:
McCain's Surge
Why he's making a primary comeback.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Endorsing John McCain for President yesterday, Joseph Lieberman stressed that his Senate colleague would always elevate his country above his party. Coming from a man who was excommunicated by Democrats for his views on Iraq, this was a fitting sentiment--and it may also explain why Mr. McCain seems to be staging something of a primary resurgence.
As recently as January, Mr. McCain was the putative Republican favorite, but his support collapsed amid his campaign mismanagement and the GOP's immigration meltdown. Now primary voters seem prepared to give him a second look in an unstable race. Mike Huckabee has galloped to a lead in Iowa, bruising Mitt Romney, though without much scrutiny of the former Arkansas Governor's record. Fred Thompson has yet to offer a compelling rationale for his candidacy. Rudy Giuliani for a time defied political gravity based on his New York reform leadership, but he has been hurt by questions about his judgment and ethics.
Re-enter Mr. McCain, who is nothing if not a known GOP commodity. One of his problems has been that to some Republicans he is too well known. This is the John McCain who was adored by the media for opposing tax cuts, favoring limits on free speech as part of "campaign finance reform," and embracing a cap and trade regime for global warming. This is the John McCain who was also endorsed this weekend by the Des Moines Register and Boston Globe, two liberal papers that are sure to endorse a Democrat next year.
Our own differences with Mr. McCain have mainly been over economics, and especially taxes. Despite record surpluses in 2000, the Senator refused to propose tax cuts as part of his Presidential bid--one reason he lost to George W. Bush. He also opposed the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, often using the language of the left.
Mr. McCain paid a visit to our offices last Friday, and he now says he supports extending the Bush tax rates, even admitting they helped the economy emerge from recession. "Without a doubt. Without the slightest doubt," he told us. "Absolutely."
In a spirited exchange, Mr. McCain justified his previous opposition by arguing that there was no discipline on spending. "To the everlasting shame and embarrassment of the Republican Party and this Administration," he noted, "we went on a spending spree and we didn't pay for it." That's true enough, and in an ideal world tax cuts would be offset dollar-for-dollar by spending cuts.
But in practice Congress will never do so, which means Republicans are left to be tax collectors for the welfare state. The experience of the Reagan and Bush years is that tax cutting has its own economic benefits, and that revenues will rebound far more quickly than the critics claim. We asked Mr. McCain what he'd do when faced with a Democratic Congress that insists he raise taxes in 2009, and he replied that he'd say "No" and cite JFK's successful tax-cutting in the 1960s. This is intellectual progress, and we trust such McCain advisers as Phil Gramm and Tim Muris will conduct further tutorials.
More than economics, Mr. McCain has two main strengths in this GOP race: His record on national security, and the belief that he can reach enough non-Republicans to assemble a viable center-right coalition and defeat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in what could be a difficult GOP year. Mr. Lieberman's endorsement is notable because it reinforces both of those claims. Mr. Lieberman had to win GOP and independent voters to keep his Connecticut Senate seat after he lost the Democratic primary, and Mr. McCain won in New Hampshire in 2000 with the help of independents who could vote in the GOP primary. He'll need their support again this year.
The two men have also been stalwarts on Iraq, even when it became unpopular, and despite paying a political price for it. Mr. McCain also argued persuasively for the changes in strategy now known as the surge. In his Friday visit with us, the Senator spoke with authority on all manner of foreign policy. He is a hawk in the Reagan mold on Iran, the larger Middle East and overall defense spending.
Our guess is that this national security record is the main reason for his own political surge. With the success of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, even some conservatives have taken to arguing that foreign and military policy will become less important in 2008. We doubt it. This is still a post-9/11 country, and voters know they will be electing a Commander in Chief in a world that is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War. In an election against any Democrat next year, Mr. McCain would have little trouble winning the security debate.
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Although I disagree with RP on War with Islamic Fascism (and that is a REALLY important disagreement) there is quite a bit I agree with him on-- and those too are REALLY important things. (Trivia-- I voted for him when he ran for President on the Libertarian ticket) Even though I won't be voting for him, I am very glad he is in the race and doing well. He reminds us of our Founding Fathers and our Constitution.
Like you, I disagree with Dr. Paul on several key issues, as well. However, to my mind the over-riding issue is not the War on Islamic Fascism, nor is it immigration or health-care (to name a few that have been at the top of many a list). If the dollar crashes, no one will come looking for a job or looking to blow up buildings or will be much worried about doctor bills - Americans will be worried about food & shelter. While the economy is large & diverse enough (more so than in, say, 1929) to probably hold off a major depression, a dollar crash will wreck havoc on the daily lives of most people in the US. As one cynic put it, the only positive outcome of such a crash will be that when we recover from the massive stagflation, it'll be easier for those who still have homes to pay them off.
The dollar is more unstable now that at any time in American history. While I don't completely endorse a 100% return to the gold standard (I prefer a mixed standard for a variety of reasons) like Dr. Paul, his is currently the ONLY viable solution on the table. At $9+ trillion in debt (a large portion of which, as an extremely important aside, is held by China & Saudi Arabia), disastrous fiscal policies from all levels of government (including all those inflationary forces amplified by utilizing fiat currency rather than hard currency), our shift from fiat to debt-based currency rather than backed "commodity" currency, an increasingly loosening banking standards (de facto allowance of predatory lending, usury corruption, weakening reserve ratio lending & cash reserve ratios, etc.), the irrational Fed responses to current events, etc. - coupled with individuals refusing to take personal responsibility for their actions or acknowledging the impact our decisions have on a larger scale - it is likely that we're staring a major recession and possible depression in the face.
I should add that it's hard to fight any war when you're broke, not loan-worthy, and you're manufacturing base has left you out-sourcing your military hardware needs. I add that because even for those who find my initial statement in error (with regard to Islamic Fascism not being the over-riding issue), there is no doubt about there being a very real difference between a willingness to fight and an ability to fight (something no one on this forum needs me to take paragraphs to explain - hahaha!!!). Which is to say that even if said statement is incorrect (let's say a dollar crash makes it MORE likely that a terrorist will want to strike & try to strike), it changes nothing with regard to being trumped by monetary, currency, & fiscal realities and their impact on everything else. We have to fix those issues FAST or we will pay dearly.
So.....all that said, I'm wondering, Crafty, what it is about Paul's stance on terror that you disagree with? I keep hearing this from a variety of people, but don't understand exactly what it is about his stance on terrorism that puts people off. Given that you are more articulate than most of them (and have probably considered the issue with greater care), I'm very interested on your take, if you have a few moments.
Thanx!
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Posting my view and looking forward to Crafty's though I know he has already posted in detail on this in the past.
Ron Paul: "The war in Iraq was sold to us with false information. The area is more dangerous now than when we entered it. We destroyed a regime hated by our direct enemies, the jihadists, and created thousands of new recruits for them. This war has cost more than 3,000 American lives, thousands of seriously wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars."
- The first sentence is technically correct. False information. That's what imperfect intelligence is. We also acted on the best information available in the world that matched the intelligence coming from Britain, France, Russia etc. IMO Saddam had enough dealings with al Qaida, though not a 'collaborative, operational relationship', to justify our involvement in his demise and he wasn't going to leave some other way. He didn't have 'stockpiles of WMDs' sitting out, but he posed enough of a WMD threat to meet my threshold for a threat. He didn't attack the U.S. inside our borders, other than a possible involovement in the 1993 WTC bombing, but did attempt an assination of an ex-President and was shooting daily at our planes as they performed their lawful flights. He attacked four of his neighbors including a full scale invasion of Iran and a complete takeover of Kuwait. He violated his cease fire agreement and cheated on his oil-for-food relief from sanctions. (Not to mention gassing the Kurds, real torture programs and the slaughter of Dujail for which he was hanged.) All without consequence if not for the backbone of our current effort. Standing up to the bloody tyrant affected the policies of Libya and perhaps Iran and others. I don't appreciate anyone saying we brought this on ourselves and I won't vote for a candidate who implies that. Ron Paul's simplistic message hasn't been updated to reflect progress made, just the same slogans used by America's left. If stability breaks out in Iraq and it really is starting to look that way, then his whole premise that the world is more dangerous becomes false. Nothing sets back the global terrorist movement like the humiliating defeat they are now suffering. All they can do now in Iraq is blow up things, like they do in the U.S. and in London, Bali and Madrid. They have no major ally left in Iraq.
I have long asked this question of Ron Paul's foreign policy: What foreign interventions would he have supported going back all 200+ years especially to a much smaller threat faced by Jefferson with the Barbary pirates (early al Qaida) in the Mediterranian? Does he even acknowledge that our constitutional liberties were achieved with the assistance of foreign powers as he disparages our effort to allow consentual government in Iraq?
I agree in principle with Ron Paul on issues of domestic spending. But America doesn't. He would be accused in the general campaign and the debates of wanting to end this program and that, you name it, all these departments closed and programs ended. That isn't realistic and that isn't electable. I wouldn't move that suddenly or that drastically and there aren't 50% of the American people to the right of me, more like 2-3%. Primaries are about advancing your own principles and also they are about winning.
Ron Paul writes on the second sentence (excerpted)of his issues statement: "...Dr. Paul tirelessly works for...free markets..."
- yet Ron Paul:
Voted against Fast Track Authority
Voted against a free trade agreement between the U.S. and Chile
Voted against free trade with Singapore
Voted against free trade with Australia
Voted against CAFTA
Voted against the U.S.-Bahrain trade agreement
Voted against the Oman trade agreement
Voted against normal trade relations with Vietnam
- Freedom to trade is an economic liberty as sacred to me as keeping fruits of our labor and we expand trade by negotiating down the barriers in the other countries IMO.
I disagree with Ron Paul on the failure of our monetary system. We have rising prices on energy because we illegalize supply. We have out of control inflation in government meddled 'markets' for healthcare and college tuition because of the preponderance of third party pay. Price stability otherwise has been excellent.
David, I disagree with you about the impending collapse of the American economy. Job growth in spite of manufacturing loss has been phenomenal. In spite of all the damage we do with excessive taxation, regulation and debt the economy shows remarkable resilience.
Conclusion for me is that our taxes will be lower if we choose an electable proponent of lower marginal rates and fiscal discipline and we will be safer if we SELECTIVELY take battle to our enemies.
(FYI, I support Fred Thompson) - Doug
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Skinny Devil:
The question you ask is a large one, larger than I have had time to answer in the hurry of holiday affairs-- and it belongs on a different thread. IIRC there is a "Why we fight?" thread-- would you repost your question there?
Anyway, here's this on Huckabee.
Marc
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Leap of Faith
December 21, 2007; Page A18
As pigs in pokes go, the Democratic Party bought itself a big one in 1988. Michael Dukakis was relatively unknown, but he was also the last man standing. Only too late did his party, along with the rest of the country, realize Mr. Dukakis was a typecast liberal -- a furlougher of felons, and a guy who looked mighty awkward in a tank.
This is what happens when a party takes a flyer, and it could be Republicans' turn with Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister and governor of Arkansas is surging in Iowa, and is tied with Rudy Giuliani in national polls. He's selling his party on a simple message: He's not those other guys, with their flip-flops and different faiths, and dicey social positions. As to what Mr. Huckabee is -- that's as unknown to most voters as the Almighty himself.
Mr. Huckabee is starting to get a look-see by the press, though whether the nation will have time to absorb the findings before the primaries is just as unknown. The small amount that has been unearthed so far ought to have primary voters nervous. It isn't just that Mr. Huckabee is far from a traditional conservative; he's a potential ethical time bomb.
On policy, Mr. Huckabee's tenure in Arkansas has shown him to be ambivalent about tax increases, variously supporting sales tax hikes, cigarette and gasoline taxes and Internet taxes. Spending increased 65% from 1996 to 2004, three times the rate of inflation.
He's so lackluster on education reform that he recently received an endorsement from the New Hampshire affiliate of the National Education Association -- the first ever of a GOP candidate. The union cited Mr. Huckabee's opposition to school vouchers. Mr. Huckabee is a fan of greater subsidies for farmers and "clean energy." He's proven himself a political neophyte on foreign policy, joining Democrats to skewer President Bush and glorify the "diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy" line.
Most of this is out there, thoroughly documented, and even now slowly filtering its way to voters. Of more concern is what has not yet been discovered about Mr. Huckabee's time as Arkansas lieutenant governor and governor, in particular on ethical issues. There are signs that Mr. Huckabee's background -- borne of the same Arkansas establishment that produced Bill Clinton -- is ripe to provide the sort of pop-up political scandal that could derail a general election campaign.
In Arkansas, Mr. Huckabee was investigated by the state ethics committee at least 14 times. Most of the complaints centered on what appears to be a serial disregard for government rules about gifts and outside financial compensation. He reported $112,000 worth of gifts in one year alone, nearly double his $67,000 salary.
Five of the 14 investigations resulted in admonishments: Two for failing to report gifts (one was later overturned), the other three for some $80,000 that Mr. Huckabee and his wife received but failed to initially report. One of these admonishments involved a $23,500 payment to Mr. Huckabee from an opaque organization called Action America that he helped found in 1994 while lieutenant governor, and that was designed to coordinate his speeches and supplement his income.
Mr. Huckabee caused an uproar when he used a $60,000 account intended to maintain the governor's mansion for personal expenses, including restaurant meals, dry cleaning and boat supplies. He also faced a lawsuit over his assertion that $70,000 worth of furniture donated to the mansion was his to keep. Sprinkled among all this are complaints about the misuse of state planes and campaign funds, mistakes on financial disclosure forms, and fights over documents related to ethics investigations.
Any one of these episodes individually may appear penny ante, but they add up to a disturbing pattern. People I've spoken with who worked with Mr. Huckabee in Arkansas dispute the idea that he is "corrupt." They instead ascribe his ethical mishaps to a "blind spot" rooted in his beginnings as a Baptist minister and a Southern culture of gift-giving; they suggest he never made the mental transition to public office.
Some will also argue Mr. Huckabee is no more ethically challenged than Mr. Giuliani, who is getting pounded with questions about Judith Nathan's security detail and Giuliani Partner clients. The difference is that Hizzoner is a celebrity whose past bones were long ago picked clean by the media crows. Even the Nathan flap is an extension of news that made the rounds five years ago.
The obscure governor from Arkansas is, in contrast, a deep sea for media diving. Most recent have been stories about his pardons and commutations, as well as the news that R.J. Reynolds contributed to Action America. Mr. Huckabee -- who now wants a national smoking ban in public places -- responded that he never knew he accepted tobacco money, which has inspired a former adviser to claim Mr. Huckabee is being "less than truthful." What's next?
The GOP is still reeling from its financial scandals, which helped Democrats tag the party with a "culture of corruption" in last year's congressional races. A Huckabee nomination would also neutralize one of the biggest weapons against nominee Hillary Clinton -- her own ethically tortured past. If the subject came up at all, it would be a race to the Arkansas bottom. A matchup with Barack Obama could be worse, since the "politics of hope" senator has so far avoided scandal and could bludgeon Mr. Huckabee on his past.
Democrats know it. Here's an interesting statistic: Since the beginning of 2007, the Democratic National Committee has released 102 direct attacks on Mitt Romney. Rudy Giuliani has warranted 78; John McCain 68; Fred Thompson 21. Mike Huckabee? Four. The most recent of these landed back in March. GOP voters may not have examined Mr. Huckabee's record, but the left has -- and they love what they see.
So far, GOP voters do, too. Most appear attracted to Mr. Huckabee's image as a "sincere" and "genuine" guy. The former governor may be both of those, but he's also got a past. Voters are going to want to look before they leap.
Write to kim@wsj.com
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NEW MAN IN CHARGE Mike Huckabee entered his new office in July 1996, shortly after succeeding Jim Guy Tucker as governor. Mr. Tucker resigned after his conviction on Whitewater-related charges.
Published: December 22, 2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — In more than a decade of presiding over this state, Mike Huckabee produced a legacy like few other Republican governors in the South, surprising even liberal Democrats with his willingness to upend some of Arkansas’s more parochial traditions.
A NEW TERM Mr. Huckabee and his wife, Janet Huckabee, who lost her bid for secretary of state, at the Inaugural Ball in 2003.
A review of his record as governor shows that, beginning in 1996, he drove through a series of changes that transformed education and health insurance in Arkansas, achievements that were never tried by most of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton.
But he is also remembered in the state for a style of governing that tended to freeze out anyone of any party who disagreed with his plans. He did not, for example, seek Mr. Clinton’s conciliatory middle, or try to court skeptical state lawmakers. Though he was considered as persuasive a speechmaker as he had been a pastor, Mr. Huckabee largely kept his own counsel — in politics, ethics and a singular clemency policy that continues to haunt him.
Against the political advice of his party and his aides, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of convicts, including murderers, sometimes over the heated objections of prosecutors and victims’ families. He was cited five times by the state ethics commission for financial improprieties, and unapologetically accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes and other gifts while he was governor.
Republicans in Arkansas, a beleaguered minority, gleefully greeted his ascendancy but wound up embittered, in many cases, over a governor who “sided with liberal Democrats,” as one put it.
Mr. Huckabee is a son of small-town Arkansas, yet he deeply angered many in his rural constituency, touching the third rail of the state’s politics by shutting down money-draining, redundant school districts in the hinterlands. Protesters rallied at the state Capitol, fearful of losing schools, football teams, and age-old identities, but the governor insisted his way was the best and the schools were closed.
He proclaimed himself a fiscal conservative, but startled legislators with his proposals to raise taxes — for roads, in 1999, and for schools, prisons and other services three years later. He sought the electoral defeat of Republicans who opposed him, according to some in the party.
A constant throughout was his presence at the microphone, the former television preacher delivering his word from the pulpit though hardly mingling in the Capitol’s marble halls.
“He would go out and stump and do his shtick and tell his jokes and charm you,” said State Senator Jimmy Jeffress, a Democrat and critic of the former governor. “He has the gift of gab. He’s the only person I know, other than Bill Clinton, who can pick up a rock and give you a 10-minute talk on it.”
At the same time he was not known to buy pizza for the legislators, as Mr. Clinton had done.
“Huckabee didn’t build bridges,” said State Senator Jim Argue Jr., a Democrat and leader in the schools overhaul effort. “If you didn’t agree with him, he attacked you.”
Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, said it was important to keep in mind that Mr. Huckabee was a Republican governor in one of the most Democratic states in the country.
“Yet here’s a man who managed to fix the roads, improve education and actually govern with the Democrats,” Ms. Yoest said. “People say he was intolerant, but how does that square with him being able to build coalitions and be re-elected numerous times?”
Confounding the Capitol
Mr. Huckabee was derided by Democrats as the “accidental governor” when he took office in July 1996, stepping up from the lieutenant governor’s job when the incumbent governor, Jim Guy Tucker, was forced to resign after a conviction in the Whitewater affair. Mr. Huckabee had not sought the post, having trained his sights instead on the United States Senate, and several legislators recalled a fumbling start.
It was not helped by what Mr. Huckabee later recalled as a hostile reception to himself and his family, as Republicans of humble background, when they moved into the governor’s mansion in a prestigious neighborhood in Little Rock.
“Dozens of hate-filled letters,” he wrote in his memoir, “From Hope to Higher Ground” (Center Street, 2007), “proclaimed that we lacked the ‘class’ to live in such a fine and stately home.” Mr. Huckabee’s touchiness over perceived slights was to become a byword in succeeding years, as the governor spoke out angrily when reporters and others questioned the startling stream of gifts that flowed in from supporters and friends.
Still, the novice governor found the sea legs in 1997 to help enact, with overwhelming support in the heavily Democratic Legislature, a major expansion of health insurance for children of the working poor whose families did not qualify for Medicaid. It was one of the first such expansions in the nation, coming before the federal government authorized them, and it baffled some Republicans in the Legislature.
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“None of us understood what he was trying to do,” said Peggy Jeffries, then a Republican state senator and now executive director of the Arkansas affiliate of the Eagle Forum, a national group of conservatives.
Skip to next paragraph
The Long Run
The Solitary Persuader
This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.
Easily elected to a full term in 1998, Mr. Huckabee was emerging as something of an unquantifiable presence in the state capital, sometimes exerting leadership, other times not, and often floating above the details and minutia of governing.
But he confounded Republicans again when he pushed for a fuel tax increase to finance an ambitious road-building program, and eventually won support for what historians say was the largest highway bond program in Arkansas history.
Meanwhile, a style of leadership was developing that frustrated Republicans and Democrats alike.
Jake Files, a former Republican state representative, recalled that the governor would call lawmakers into his office and state his plans.
“Kind of like getting called to the principal’s office,” Mr. Files said. “If you don’t line up with him, Katie bar the door.”
Still, this style — equal parts persuasion and intimidation — would prove to be of great value when Mr. Huckabee took on the biggest fight of his tenure, school reform.
In November 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court presented the newly re-elected governor with the biggest challenge of his tenure, ruling that Arkansas’s system of financing public schools was inequitable. The court ordered change. More money had to be found, quickly.
Mr. Huckabee immediately adopted the path of greatest resistance, to the shock of many in the Legislature: he called for the closing of dozens of wasteful, tiny school districts. Some had fewer than 150 students. It was a volatile step, one that Mr. Clinton as governor had avoided, even though reformers had agreed for decades that it was an essential one.
“We certainly didn’t want to get too close to it,” recalled one of Mr. Clinton’s legislative aides in the 1980s, Bobby Roberts.
The governor’s plan aroused intense opposition all over the state, particularly as he proposed whittling down the 310 school districts by well over half.
“People don’t want to lose their schools,” said a veteran legislator, State Senator John Paul Capps, a Democrat. “They think it just ruins the community.”
Mr. Huckabee did not back down.
“The governor treated me as if I didn’t exist,” said Jimmy Cunningham, then president of the Arkansas Rural Education Association. “He had no compassion for me.”
The fight went on for over a year, and Mr. Huckabee’s staunchest allies proved to be the most liberal Democrats in the Legislature.
“He set a real high bar,” said Senator Argue, a Little Rock Democrat who describes himself as the preacher-governor’s “philosophical adversary,” but who joined forces with him on the issue. “I just give him credit for having the courage and determination to lead,” Mr. Argue said.
In the end, the Legislature whittled Mr. Huckabee’s school-district closing plan by nearly two-thirds. Disgusted, the governor refused to sign the bill, and it became law without him.
Clemency and Consequences
Nothing was more controversial about Mr. Huckabee’s governorship than his use of clemency to grant pardons and commute prison sentences. His clemency decisions produced the first big crisis of his administration, dogged him through a tough re-election campaign and provoked a series of bitter public protests, some still simmering on Jan. 9, 2007, the day he left office.
In all, Mr. Huckabee cut prison sentences or granted pardons for more than 1,000 criminals, far more than either his immediate predecessors or governors in neighboring states.
This did not happen by chance.
Driven by a religious belief in redemption and questions about the state’s legal system, Mr. Huckabee paid close attention to clemency petitions, former aides said. He insisted on reviewing every single application, though they came in by the hundreds most months.
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(Page 3 of 4)
“He would take these files home with him to the governor’s mansion,” recalled Rex Nelson, Mr. Huckabee’s communications director for nine years. “He would read them, study them. He took it very seriously, the political consequences be damned.”
Most of Mr. Huckabee’s clemency decisions were unremarkable; in the vast majority of cases he simply followed the recommendation of the Arkansas Parole Board. But in a small though significant number of cases, he commuted prison sentences for murderers and other violent criminals over the pleas of victims’ families, prosecutors and judges. And as his reputation for granting clemency spread, applications surged.
“We had tons of them,” said Cory Cox, who worked for several years as Mr. Huckabee’s aide in charge of clemency matters. “People, they’d call and say, ‘Please, let the governor look at this. We don’t know who the next governor is going to be.’ ”
By every account, Mr. Huckabee’s approach to clemency was heavily influenced by his religious beliefs. As John Wesley Hall, a Little Rock defense lawyer who filed numerous clemency petitions with the Huckabee administration, put it, “He’s a Baptist preacher who believes in redemption and second chances.”
But it also reflected Mr. Huckabee’s broader concerns about the criminal justice system in Arkansas, one of the few states where juries rather than judges impose sentences, which defense lawyers say can produce arbitrary results.
Dana Reece, another defense lawyer, told of one client who received a life sentence for selling six grams of crack cocaine. “He’d still be in prison today if it weren’t for Governor Huckabee,” Ms. Reece said. How many politicians, she asked, would stick their necks out for a crack dealer?
“This was a political hot potato, and he knew it,” Mr. Cox said of his former boss. “But he had a conviction that people could better themselves, and he was open-minded to the idea that a poor black man from east Arkansas convicted by an all-white jury just may have been a victim of injustice.”
Many Arkansans faulted him, however, for refusing to give public explanations for pardons and sentence commutations, and for responding harshly to those who criticized his choices.
“He just doesn’t want to talk to victims’ families,” Elaine Colclasure, co-leader of the Central Arkansas chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a victims’ advocacy group, said in an interview last week. “He doesn’t want anyone questioning anything he does. And when you do, he bristles. His compassion is for the murderer and any criminal who says he has found Jesus.”
Dee McManus Engle, another member of the group, recalled accompanying a murder victim’s widow to a scheduled meeting at the governor’s office. “We stayed there half the day trying to talk with Huckabee,” Ms. Engle said, adding, “It was the most important thing in her life, and she was in tears because she could not get to the governor.”
Former aides said that while Mr. Huckabee rarely met with victims or their families, he was never dismissive of their concerns. “I can tell you we listened to victims,” Mr. Cox said. “I mean, it was a no-win situation. The victims, if you granted clemency, it didn’t matter how long you listened to them. It just tore them up.”
As for Mr. Huckabee’s refusal to detail his reasons for granting clemency, Mr. Cox said that was intended to prevent other petitioners from mimicking successful arguments.
Some Arkansas prosecutors argue that Mr. Huckabee’s clemency record reveals a dangerous gullibility about human nature, particularly when it comes to claims of religious conversion. It raises, they say, the basic question of judgment, the precise question one of Mr. Huckabee’s rivals for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, has raised anew in his Iowa campaign.
Exhibit A in this critique is the case of Wayne Dumond, a rapist who had been implicated in other violent crimes, including a murder and another rape, when Mr. Huckabee took office in 1996. Mr. Dumond said he found God in prison, and his case was championed by evangelicals and conservative opponents of Bill Clinton, who was a distant relative of one of the rape victims and who refused to grant clemency to Mr. Dumond.
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Months after being sworn in, Mr. Huckabee announced his intention to cut Mr. Dumond’s prison sentence, prompting furious public protests from Mr. Dumond’s victim and from prosecutors around the state.
“We told the governor that Wayne Dumond had a history of rape and murder,” Henry Morgan, then president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association, recalled. “So the governor knew, or any reasonable person should have known, that releasing him was dangerous.”
Mr. Huckabee was not persuaded. “He thought the man should be released,” Mr. Nelson, his former communications director, recalled.
As it turned out, Mr. Huckabee did not grant clemency to Mr. Dumond; the state Parole Board released him instead, and several former members of the board have since told reporters that they acted under pressure from Mr. Huckabee, a charge he has repeatedly denied.
Even so, Mr. Nelson recalled the moment in 2001 when he and Mr. Huckabee first heard the news that the newly freed Mr. Dumond had been charged with raping and murdering a woman in Missouri. “Everybody realized at that point that that would be something used against him politically in the 2002 campaign,” he said — a prediction that turned out to be correct when the issue contributed to a tight re-election race.
There were several other cases of convicts who won clemency from Mr. Huckabee and then went on to commit more crimes, including Wade Stewart, whose life sentence for murder was commuted in 2004. Mr. Stewart was arrested this year, charged with carrying a concealed revolver. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found that nearly one in 10 who received clemency from Governor Huckabee were later sentenced to prison.
Mr. Huckabee eventually did bend, if slightly, to criticism and scrutiny. He proved less willing to grant clemency in his second term, especially for violent offenses. He also agreed to give slightly more information about his reasoning. Yet some prosecutors say that victims’ families are now skeptical about life sentences.
“They say, ‘You can’t guarantee that he’ll stay in prison for the rest of his life because the governor can let him out,’” said Larry Jegley, Little Rock’s longtime prosecuting attorney. “People are aware the governor has this power and it has been exercised to let murderers, rapists and home invaders loose, and that’s a problem.”
Gifts and Critics
Throughout his tenure, Mr. Huckabee reacted with outrage and scorn when questions arose over the stream of gifts that flowed his way. He pugnaciously fought back against state ethics commission investigations. The governor appeared to find no conflict between occupying the highest office in the state, and receiving tribute; critics, on the other hand, said the two were directly related, in a way that was unseemly at best.
Early in his first term, he was questioned, and eventually sued, for using a state fund meant to operate the governor’s mansion for personal family expenses like pantyhose and meals at Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The suit was eventually dropped, but spending out of the fund was curtailed.
Meanwhile, other methods emerged to supplement the governor’s salary, which was $68,448 in 1999. That year, he reported getting $112,366 in gifts, including thousands in clothing from Jennings Osborne, a wealthy businessman in Little Rock who befriended the family. Mr. Osborne also made regular gifts of pastries and flowers to the governor’s mansion. There were also gift certificates to department stores, ties and other items.
The gift-taking tailed off in subsequent years — there was $5,000 worth in 2003 — but Mr. Huckabee’s tangles with the state ethics commission fill a thick binder with documents spanning much of his time as governor. Mr. Nelson, the governor’s former aide, described these episodes as “penny ante,” and it is true that the commission did not uphold roughly two-thirds of the complaints against the governor. But it did find violations in five, including Mr. Huckabee’s acceptance of a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola and a $200 stadium blanket, though a court later threw out the finding on the canoe.
As the governor left office, new questions arose over wedding registries set up decades after his marriage began at department stores, including Target, so friends could help furnish the Huckabees’s new home in Little Rock. The governor attacked reporters for raising the issue — “I feel you’ve done a real disservice to the people of this state” — but others saw a pattern, in the gift-taking and the defensiveness. Both hark back to his past as a member of the clergy, critics said.
Throughout his tenure, allies and enemies alike were struck by a governor adept at giving the word, if not at receiving it. And in his writings, Mr. Huckabee attributes his moral compass to God, not to himself.
“If integrity and character are divorced from God, they don’t make sense,” he writes in his book, with John Perry, “Character Makes a Difference” (B&H Publishing Group, 2007). “Integrity, left to define itself, becomes evil because everyone ends up choosing his own standards.”
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Fred finally seems to be finding his footing (including a very good serious tax rate cut proposal)-- but if he doesn't have a solid showing in Iowa he's probably done for. Although I like Huckabee for his Fair Tax, strong gun rights, and some other positions, there is quite a bit that is frankly straight disagreeable Democrat. Romney still strikes me as an insincere Ken doll and soft on gun rights, Rudy hostile to gun rights, dubious on immigration, McCain hostile to free speech and border control, blah blah. My sense of things, my hope is that if Fred survives this moment, the lack of passion for any of the others could result in a second chance for him-- if he survives Iowa. Long story short, if you like Fred, right now would be a good moment to express it financially.
https://www.fred08.com:443/Contribute.aspx?CampaignID=redpickup
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Here's this on Huckabee by the , , , unique Ann Coulter. Being Ann, as usual there are absurdities in the following, and, being Ann, there are also some pretty pertinent points made too:
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All I want for Christmas is for Christians to listen to what Mike Huckabee says, rather than what the media say about him. The mainstream media keep flogging Huckabee for being a Christian, apparently unaware that this "God" fellow is testing through the roof in focus groups.
Huckabee is a "compassionate conservative" only in the sense that calling him a conservative is being compassionate.
He responded to my column last week -- pointing out that he is on record supporting the Supreme Court's sodomy-is-a-constitutional-right decision -- by saying that he was relying on the word of a caller to his radio show and didn't know the details of the case. Ironically, that's how most people feel about sodomy: They support it until they hear the details.Continued
First, I'd pay a lot of money to hear how a court opinion finding that sodomy is a constitutional right could be made to sound reasonable. But the caller had the right response when Huckabee asked him, "What's your favorite radio station?" So he seemed like a reliable source.
Second, Huckabee's statement that he agreed with the court's sodomy ruling was made one week after the decision. According to Nexis, in that one week, the sodomy decision had been the cover story on every newspaper in the country, including The New York Times. It was the talk of all the Sunday news programs. It had been denounced by every conservative and Christian group in America -- as well as other random groups of sane individuals having no conservative inclinations whatsoever.
The highest court in the land had found sodomy was a constitutional right! That sort of thing tends to make news. (I was going to say the sodomy ruling got publicity up the wazoo, but this is, after all, Christmas week.)
So this little stretch-marked cornpone is either lying, has a closed head injury, is a complete ignoramus -- or all of the above.
Huckabee opposes school choice, earning him the coveted endorsement of the National Education Association of New Hampshire, which is like the sheriff being endorsed by the local whorehouse.
He is, however, in favor of school choice for kids in Mexico: They have the choice of going to school there or here. Huckabee promoted giving in-state tuition in Arkansas to illegal immigrants from Mexico -- but not to U.S. citizens from Ohio. "I don't believe you punish the children," he said, "for the crime and sins of the parents."
Since when is not offering someone lavish taxpayer-funded benefits a form of punishment? That's almost as crazy as a governor pardoning a known sex offender so he can go out and rape and kill.
Huckabee claims he's against punishing children for the crimes of their fathers in the case of illegal immigrants. But in the case of slavery, he believes the children of the children's children should be routinely punished for the crimes of their fathers. Huckabee has said illegal immigration gives Americans a chance to make up for slavery. (I thought letting O.J. walk for murdering two people was payback for slavery.)
Just two years ago, Huckabee cheerfully announced to a meeting of the Hispanic advocacy group League of United Latin American Citizens that "Pretty soon, Southern white guys like me may be in the minority." Who's writing this guy's speeches -- Al Sharpton? (Actually, take out "Southern" and "white," and I agree with Huckabee's sentiment).
He said the transition from Arkansas' Southern traditions would "require extraordinary efforts on both sides of the border." But, curiously, most of the efforts Huckabee described would come entirely from this side of the border. Arkansas, he pledged, would celebrate diversity "in culture, in language and in population." He said America would have to "accommodate" those who come here.
All that he expected from those south of the border was that they have a desire to provide better opportunities for their families. Basically, we have to keep accommodating everyone but U.S. citizens.
For those of you keeping score at home, this puts Huckabee just a little to the left of Dennis Kucinich on illegal immigration and border control. The only difference is that Kucinich supports amnesty for aliens from south of the border and north of Saturn.
In a widely quoted remark, Huckabee denounced a Republican bill that would merely require proof of citizenship to vote and receive government benefits as "un-Christian, un-American, irresponsible and anti-life," according to the Arkansas News Bureau. Now, where have I heard this sort of thing before? Hmmm ... wait, now I remember: It was during the Democratic debates!
In his current attempt to pretend to be against illegal immigration, Huckabee makes a meaningless joke about how the federal government should track illegals the way Federal Express tracks packages. (Can a Mexican fit in one of those little envelopes?)
In other words, Huckabee is going to address the problem of illegal immigration by making jokes. It's called leadership, folks.
Huckabee confirms for liberal TV hosts their image of conservatives as dorks by bragging about how cool he is because he "likes music." What's he doing -- running for president or filling out his Facebook profile? Arkansas former fatty loves to make jokes and play the bass guitar. Remember what happened to the last former fatboy from Arkansas trying to be "cool" by liking music? I'll take "Stained Dresses" for $400, Alex.
According to Huckabee, most people think conservatives don't like music. Who on earth says conservatives don't like music -- other than liberals and Mike Huckabee? This desperate need to be liked by liberals has never led to anything but calamity.
Huckabee wants to get kids involved in music at an early age because he believes it leads to a more balanced and developed brain. You know, as we saw with the Jackson family. Maybe someone should tell him the Osmonds are voting for Romney.
He supports a nationwide smoking ban anyplace where people work, constitutional protection for sodomy, big government, higher taxes and government benefits for illegal aliens. According to my calculations, that puts him about three earmarks away from being Nancy Pelosi.
Liberals take a perverse pleasure in touting Huckabee because they know he will give them everything they want -- big government and a Christian they can roll.
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On the assasination today:
"I know from my lifetime of experience you have to be prepared for whatever might happen, and that's particularly true today," Clinton said in an Associated Press interview while campaigning in Iowa.
Gimme a break.
I'll take Obama anyday.
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Nancy Reagan for President!
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http://hotair.com/archives/2007/12/23/video-ron-paul-explains-fascism-and-little-else-on-meet-the-press/?print=1
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/12/27/video-ron-paul-reacts-to-bhuttos-death-by-playing-the-same-tired-blame-america-tune/?print=1
Aside from Ron Paul pandering to nazis, Trufers and other assorted tin-foil hats, he's utterly clueless about the global jihad and foreign policy.
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Fred has a strong pitch clip on his site at http://www.fred08.com:80/Virtual/FDTIowaSpeech.aspx
Here's the WSJ's Political Diary on it:
===================
Thompson's Pitch: Let's Save the Democratic Party from the Democrats!
It wasn't an attack ad, and it didn't feature a "floating cross" in the background. In fact, Fred Thompson's closing appeal to Iowa voters is playing mostly on his Web site and YouTube because his campaign can't afford to buy TV time for the 17-minute message. Call it Thompson's Hail Mary pass.
That doesn't make the pitch any less worth watching. Harking back to Ronald Reagan's 1976 televised speech before the North Carolina primary -- which helped produce the Gipper's upset victory over President Gerald Ford -- Mr. Thompson's message is grounded in the substance and clarity he told supporters he would bring to the race, but which only became clearly visible in recent weeks.
Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Reagan who is now at the Hoover Institution, notes that Mr. Thompson is trying something no other GOP candidate this year has done: appeal to Democrats. His key passage begins: "You know, when I'm asked which of the current group of Democratic candidates I prefer to run against, I always say it really doesn't matter. These days all those candidates, all the Democratic leaders, are one and the same. They're all NEA-MoveOn.org-ACLU-Michael Moore Democrats. They've allowed these radicals to take control of their party and dictate their course.... This election is important to salvage a once-great political party from the grip of extremism and shake it back to its senses. It's time to give not just Republicans but independents, and, yes, good Democrats a chance to call a halt to the leftward lurch of the once-proud party of working people."
Certainly the other GOP candidates might argue with Mr. Thompson's claim that his track record and approach make him the best candidate to win Democratic votes in the general election. Rudy Giuliani would be expected to put blue states such as New Jersey and Connecticut in play, and John McCain has proven support among some independent voters. But Mr. Robinson gives Mr. Thompson credit for trying to change the tone of the last days of the Iowa caucuses to something more substantive: "We have here a serious man, making a serious case -- and doing so in the context of a campaign that has otherwise descended into mere caterwauling."
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Be Reasonable
As Iowa sizes up the candidates, so do I.
Friday, December 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.
But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.
Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They're the reason we get up in the morning. "What happened?" "Who won?"
This is my 2008 slogan: Reasonable Person for President. That is my hope, what I ask Iowa to produce, and I claim here to speak for thousands, millions. We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.
Here are two reasonables: Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years. They've read a raw threat file or two. They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works. No one will have to explain it to them.
Mitt Romney? Yes. Characterological cheerfulness, personal stability and a good brain would be handy to have around. He hasn't made himself wealthy by seeing the world through a romantic mist. He has a sophisticated understanding of the challenges we face in the global economy. I personally am not made anxious by his flip-flopping on big issues because everyone in politics gets to change his mind once. That is, you can be pro-life and then pro-choice but you can't go back to pro-life again, because if you do you'll look like a flake. The positions Mr. Romney espouses now are the positions he will stick with. He has no choice.
John McCain? Yes. Remember when he was the wild man in 2000? For Republicans on the ground he was a little outré, if Republicans on the ground said "outré," as opposed to the more direct "nut job." George W. Bush, then, was the moderate, more even-toned candidate. Times change. Mr. McCain is an experienced, personally heroic, seasoned, blunt-eyed, irascible American character. He makes me proud. He makes everyone proud.
Barack Obama? Yes, I think so. He has earned the attention of the country with a classy campaign, with a disciplined and dignified staff, and with passionate supporters such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen, who has told me he sees in Obama's mind and temperament the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed during the Cuban missile crisis. Mr. Obama is thoughtful, and it would be a pleasure to have a president who is highly literate and a writer of books.
Is he experienced enough? No. He's not old enough either. Men in their 40s love drama too much. Young politicians on fire over this issue or that tend to see politics as a stage on which they can act out their greatness. And we don't need more theatrics, more comedies or tragedies. But Mr. Obama doesn't seem on fire. He seems like a calm liberal with a certain moderating ambivalence. The great plus of his candidacy: More than anyone else he turns the page. If he rises he is something new in history, good or bad, and a new era begins.
Hillary Clinton? No, not reasonable. I concede her sturdy mind, deep sophistication, and seriousness of intent. I see her as a triangulator like her husband, not a radical but a maneuverer in the direction of a vague, half-forgotten but always remembered, leftism. It is also true that she has a command-and-control mentality, an urgent, insistent and grating sense of destiny, and she appears to believe that any act that benefits Clintons is a virtuous act, because Clintons are good and deserve to be benefited.
But this is not, actually, my central problem with her candidacy. My central problem is that the next American president will very likely face another big bad thing, a terrible day, or days, and in that time it will be crucial--crucial--that our nation be led by a man or woman who can be, at least for the moment and at least in general, trusted. Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon. Would she be able to speak the nation through the trauma? I do not think so. And if I am right, that simple fact would do as much damage to America as the terrible thing itself.
Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Bill Richardson are all reasonable--mature, accomplished, nonradical. Mike Huckabee gets enough demerits to fall into my not-reasonable column. John Edwards is not reasonable. All the Democrats would raise taxes as president, but Mr. Edwards's populism is the worst of both worlds, both intemperate and insincere. Also we can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.
I forgot Rudy Giuliani. That must say something. He is reasonable but not desirable. If he wins somewhere, I'll explain.
Because much of the drama is on the Democratic side, a thought on what might be said when they win or lose. If Mrs. Clinton wins, modesty is in order, with a graceful nod to Mr. Obama. If she loses--well, the Clintons haven't lost an election since 1980. For a quarter century she's known only victory at the polls. Does she know how to lose? However she acts, whatever face she shows, it will be revealing. Humility would be a good strategy. In politics you have to prove you can take a punch. I just took one. (On second thought that's a bad idea. She might morph at the podium into Robert DeNiro in "Raging Bull" and ad-lib the taunt: You didn't knock me down Ray! I'm still standing!)
For Mr. Obama: a lot of America will be looking at him for the first time, and under the most favorable circumstances: as the winner of something. This is an opportunity to assert freshly what his victory means, and will mean, for America. This is a break with the past, a break with the tired old argument, a break with the idea of dynasty, the idea of the machine, the idea that there are forces in motion that cannot be resisted . . . But what is it besides a break from? What is it a step toward, an embrace of?
Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
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Third post of the last 24 hours:
Ron Beats Rudy?
New Hampshire could surprise a lot of people.
BY ANDREW CLINE
WSJ
Sunday, December 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
MANCHESTER, N.H.--For several hours last Sunday, more than a dozen Ron Paul volunteers stood in snowdrifts in the rain outside the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester waving at last-minute Christmas shoppers and handing out hundreds of yards signs.
The campaign doesn't know how many people participated because, as with so many Paul rallies, this one was organized entirely by fans not officially associated with the campaign.
"We told them to take Christmas Eve and Christmas off, and next thing we know they're doing a sign wave at the mall," said Jim Forsythe, a self-employed engineer and former Air Force pilot from Strafford, N.H., who independently organizes volunteer efforts for Ron Paul.
That spontaneous grassroots support is why Mr. Paul, an obstetrician from Lake Jackson, Texas, could pull off a stunner on Jan. 8 and place third in New Hampshire's Republican primary. If he does, he would embarrass Rudy Giuliani and steal media limelight from John McCain and Mitt Romney, who are battling for first place.
Many Republican operatives in New Hampshire, even those affiliated with other campaigns, think Mr. Paul is headed for an impressive, double-digit performance. That he has been polling in the high single digits for months is discounted, because the polls may be missing the depth of his support.
Why? For starters, he appears to be drawing new voters. Polls that screen for "likely" voters might screen out many Paul supporters who haven't voted often, or at all, before. Many of Mr. Paul's supporters appear to be first-time voters. They will be able to cast their ballots because New Hampshire allows them to register and vote on the day of an election.
Even Mr. Paul's New Hampshire spokesman, Kate Rick, is an unlikely political activist. She grew up in a political family in Washington, D.C. and says "I swore I would never work in politics." She changed her mind only after finding Mr. Paul, a candidate she says she can finally believe in. "Most people I know in the grass roots are like that," she said. "My closest friends have never voted before, and they're die-hard Paul people now."
There is another reason to discount the polls on Mr. Paul. The one thing that unites his supporters is a desire to be left alone, not only by government, but by irritating marketers and meddling pollsters, too. Mr. Paul's supporters might well be screening their calls and not-so-inadvertently screening out pollsters. Still, some observers of the primary race here downplay this support, noting that a lot of the activists who show up in news stories are not state residents and won't be voting.
It is true that Paul supporters from New York, New Jersey and even California are prominent at campaign rallies. But volunteers and campaign staffers say that, although out-of-state volunteers often are the most flamboyant and can attend daytime rallies while local supporters are at work, they do not outnumber the locals.
"Ninety percent [of his supporters] are from New Hampshire," says Jared Chicoine, Mr. Paul's New Hampshire coordinator. Keith Murphy, a former Democratic campaign worker from Maryland who owns Murphy's Taproom in Manchester, has held several Paul rallies at his restaurant, which has become a regular hangout for the Paul crowd. When the candidate shows up, about 75% of the activists at an event are from out of state, he said, but on other nights it's about 50-50.
Regardless of where they are from, organizing Mr. Paul's supporters is a challenge. "This is entirely grassroots oriented to the point that the official campaign structure seems almost lost, to the point that they don't know what to do with all these people," Mr. Murphy said.
On their own initiative, and at their own expense, Paul volunteers hold rallies, print and distribute brochures and even purchase ads. "I pick up the paper and say, wow, there's an ad and it's not my ad," Mr. Chicoine told me.
The buzz surrounding the Paul campaign is reminiscent of the grassroots campaign Democrat Carol Shea-Porter waged against Republican Rep. Jeb Bradley last year. Polls showed Mrs. Shea-Porter trailing by 19 points in October. With almost no money and no support from the Democratic establishment, she came from behind and beat the congressman 51% to 49%.
Many are wondering if the polls are similarly missing Mr. Paul's momentum. Mrs. Shea-Porter and Mr. Paul have very different ideas about how to use the power of government, but both strongly oppose the war in Iraq. And Mrs. Shea-Porter ran last year as a fiscal conservative, so it's possible Mr. Paul could win over many Republicans who voted for her last year.
Mr. Chicoine and other Paul supporters say that, contrary to conventional wisdom, most of Mr. Paul's backers are Republicans, not independents. But everyone agrees that Mr. Paul draws an unusual mix of libertarians, fiscally conservative Democrats, conservative Republicans, home-schoolers, vegans, gambling aficionados, anti-abortion activists and others who want the government to butt out of some aspect of their lives.
But will they get out to vote on primary day?
"I've never seen a group of people that are this energetic about a candidate," Mr. Murphy said. "It's something else."
That sentiment is shared by Republicans who have observed numerous New Hampshire primaries. The level of enthusiasm for Mr. Paul is remarkable, they say. It transcends the state's Libertarian base (about 4% of the electorate). And by many accounts, Mr. Paul's backers here are more energized and committed than are supporters of Mr. Giuliani, who may enjoy inflated poll numbers because of his celebrity status.
National attention is focused on the horse races between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and between Messrs. McCain and Romney. But the shy obstetrician from Texas could be the surprise story of the New Hampshire primary.
Mr. Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/01/video-smartest-woman-in-the-world-doesnt-know-the-first-thing-about-pakistan/
:roll:
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Nice one GM :lol:
Here's a bit on how she treats the help and some other things:
WHAT A SWEET LADY
"Where is the G-dam f***ing flag? I want the G-dam f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***ing sunrise."
--From the book "Inside The White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 244 - (Hillary to the staff at the Arkansas Governor's mansion on Labor Day, 1991)
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"You sold out, you m***er-f***er! You sold out!"
-From the book "Inside" by Joseph Califano, p. 213 - (Hillary yelling at a Democrat lawyer.)
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"F*** off! It's enough that I have to see you sh**-kickers every day, I'm not going to talk to you too!!
Just do your G*dam job and keep your mouth shut."
-From the book "American Evita" by Christopher Anderson, p. 90 - (Hillary to her State Trooper body-guards after one of them greeted her with "Good Morning.")
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"You f** *ing idiot"
-From the book "Crossfire" p. 84 - (Hillary to a State Trooper who was driving her to an event.)
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"If you want to remain on this detail, get your f***ing ass over here and grab those bags!"
--From the book "The First Partner" p. 259 - (Hillary to a Secret Service Agent who was reluctant to carry her luggage because he wanted to keep his hands free in case of an incident.)
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"Get f***ed! Get the f*** out of my way!!! Get out of my face!!!"
--From the book "Hillary's Scheme" p. 89 - (Hillary's various comments to her Secret Service detail agents.)
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"Stay the f*** back, stay the f*** away from me! Don't come within ten yards of me, or else!
Just f***ing do as I say, Okay!!!?"
-From the book "Unlimited Access", by Clinton FBI Agent in Charge, Gary Aldrige, p. 139 –
(Hillary screaming at her Secret Service detail)
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"Where's the miserable c**k sucker?"
-From the book "The Truth About Hillary" by Edward Klein, p. 5 -
(Hillary shouting at a Secret Service officer)
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"Put this on the ground! I left my sunglasses in the limo. I need those sunglasses.
We need to go back!"
-From the book "Dereliction of Duty" p. 71-72 - (Hillary to Marine One helicopter pilot to turn back while enroute to Air Force One.)
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"Son of a bitch."
-From the book "American Evita" by Christopher Anderson, p. 259 -
(Hillary's opinion of President George W. Bush when she found out he secretly visited Iraq just days before her highly publicized trip to Iraq )
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"What are you doing inviting these people into my home? These people are our enemies! They are trying to destroy us!"
-From the book "The Survivor" by John Harris, p. 99 - (Hillary screaming to an aide, when she found out that some Republicans had been invited to the Clinton White House)
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"Come on Bill, put your d**k up! You can't f*** her here!!"
-From the book "Inside the White House" by Ronald Kessler, p. 243 -
(Hillary to Gov. Clinton when she spots him talking with an attractive female at an Arkansas political rally.)
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"You know, I'm going to start thanking the woman who cleans the restroom in the building I work in. I'm going to start thinking of her as a human being"
--- Hillary Clinton -From the book "The Case against Hillary Clinton" by Peggy Noonan, p. 55
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"We just can't trust the American people to make those types of c hoices.... Government has to make those choices for people "
-From the book "I've Always Been A Yankee Fan" by Thomas D. Kuiper, p. 20 - (Hillary to Rep. Dennis Hasert in 1993 discussing her expensive, disastrous taxpayer-funded health care plan.)
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"I am a fan of the social policies that you find in Europe " ---Hillary in 1996"
-From the book "I've Always Been A Yankee Fan" by Thomas D. Kuiper, p.6
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What We Want in a President
Ruthlessness is important when it comes to foreign enemies. Charity is essential for domestic opponents.
BY LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 12:01 a.m. EST
In the next six weeks Americans are going to pick the two finalists in the long job search for the most important CEO position on the planet. As someone who has served in three White Houses and been a Federal Reserve governor during a fourth, I have become a firm believer that the character traits someone brings to the job are more important than the issue papers or debate sound bites that get so much attention in the primaries.
Consider two examples. In December, Joe Trippi, a strategist for John Edwards, noted that polls showed a quarter of Barack Obama's own supporters did not think he would be qualified to be president. This says little about Mr. Obama, but it does say a lot about the process. These voters are not choosing someone to lead the country; they are trying to send a message about their own personal frustrations, or perhaps about another candidate.
Or consider the comments of a friend of mine and active fund-raiser about Fred Thompson, who is my choice. My friend agreed that Mr. Thompson was smart and well informed and had good judgment. But he felt that Republicans should definitely not nominate him because he was temperamentally unsuited to the campaign trail. Mr. Thompson probably would rather discuss the nuances of issues than shake hands or write thank-you notes to donors, two skills very important to the running. Polls now suggest my friend may be right. If so, all it means is that the process of selecting a president has little to do with the skills needed for the job.
By its very nature, the presidency involves a lot of on-the-job training. Some of our presidents have had to come up to speed quite quickly.
For example, John F. Kennedy faced the Bay of Pigs fiasco after just a few weeks on the job. No one would argue that he handled it well. Some serious historians have noted the links between that performance and our involvement in Vietnam (having "lost" in Cuba, he was determined not to let it happen again), not to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis just 18 months later. Kennedy is remembered fondly for bringing style, grace and humor to the White House--wedged between the boring Eisenhower and his graceless successors, Johnson and Nixon. But he was still learning on the job at a time when nuclear annihilation was a real possibility. Still more amazingly, with 14 years in Congress, Kennedy had far more national political experience than many now seeking the job.
As president, there is a lot to learn both factually and about the process of governing. Beginning on day one, he or she will have to confront a bureaucracy and a media establishment that has its own agenda, to hire expert advisers and administrators on a whole host of foreign and domestic policy issues, and to structure the whole operation in a way that carries out the will of the people. Our job as voters should be to select someone who will (1) know what he or she doesn't know, (2) get up to speed quickly, and (3) avoid making serious mistakes in the meantime.
A process driven by 30-second commercials prepared by the candidates themselves, and so-called debates that ask candidates to explain in 60 seconds how they would bring about world peace or national prosperity, does not help. Nor does media coverage that focuses on whose commercials are moving polling points and who performed well in the last inane debate.
But we voters can still do a respectable job in the CEO selection process. Obviously ideology and our visceral reactions to the candidates matter, since they are also part of job performance. There are, however, three other questions about a candidate's character that are likely to shed some light on whether that candidate will do well in the on-the-job training school of the Oval Office. These questions have nothing to do with party or ideology.
First, has the candidate faced a crisis or overcome a major setback in his or her life? A president's first crisis will teach two important lessons. The first is that bad things happen, in fact they happen on a regular basis. The second is that the real power of the office to affect, let alone control, events is far less than imagined. If the occupant of the Oval Office has faced this double whammy--encountering a tragedy involving events over which he or she has had little control, yet finding a way to persevere--the new president is far more likely to succeed.
Harry Truman, who made some of the toughest decisions of any president, overcame business failure. Teddy Roosevelt lost his first wife after childbirth. On the other hand, someone who got straight A's, never got turned down for a date, was never fired from a job or defeated in an election, is going to have a very rude awakening. The average voter can research this personal history quite easily.
Second, has the candidate had a variety of life experiences? The presidency is a job for a generalist. You never know what direction a crisis will come from: foreign threats, economic calamity, civil unrest. It might even be a biological pandemic that involves all three at the same time.
A variety of life experiences or careers helps a person to understand that actions which make sense in one framework may have unintended consequences elsewhere. It also increases the chances that a president will think creatively and not get boxed in, and gain control of events rather than be controlled by them.
By contrast, someone who has only been an elected official is likely to interpret problems only in a political context. Again, whether a candidate has had a variety of experiences is something the average voter can easily discern.
Third, can the candidate tell the difference between a foreign enemy and a political opponent? A certain degree of ruthlessness is a necessary attribute for any successful CEO or president. But our liberty, which is ultimately our nation's greatest resource, requires that a president restrain this trait when acting domestically.
We should seek an individual who is ruthless about protecting us against others, but acts with charity toward all and malice toward none at home: a tall order. But this trait comes out on the campaign trail, and in the past job performances of the candidates. We should opt for candidates who are ruthless in debating real public policy issues but steer away from attacking the personal traits of their opponents.
No candidate is going to be perfect, and reasonable people can differ about whether a certain candidate possesses each of these traits. But these are a good filter.
Johnson and Nixon would never have passed the last two tests, and in Nixon's case, the line about not having "Nixon to kick around any more" was a sign he couldn't handle setbacks well. By contrast, Reagan had a variety of life experiences, and mastered the difference between domestic opponents and foreign enemies marvelously. He was also gracious in his defeat in 1976. Franklin Roosevelt's polio undoubtedly helped make him a success as president; and although ruthless, he also knew how to have a bipartisan cabinet and war effort.
Ultimately, when we make up our minds we should think about the qualities the candidate would bring to the Oval Office--and not just whether or not they would make a good candidate.
Mr. Lindsey is author of "What a President Should Know . . .. but Most Learn Too Late," which will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this month.
WSJ
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/02/team-hillary-doubles-down-on-her-pakistan-mistakes/
I'm sure the MSM will be all over this story.....Any minute now.....
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/02/biden-hits-hillary-on-pakistan/
Enter Biden.
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http://ohioagainstterror.blogspot.com/2007/12/anisa-abd-el-fattah-back-ron-paul-and.html
You can't say Ron Paul's base isn't.....diverse. :roll:
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The Seinfeld Campaign
By FRED BARNES
January 3, 2008; Page A13
Des Moines, Iowa
If there's one thing a presidential campaign should provide, it's a sense of what a candidate's presidency would look like. We got that in 1992 with Bill Clinton, who campaigned as a moderate Democrat and mostly governed that way as president. The same was true in 2000 with George W. Bush. The 9/11 attacks changed his national security policy, but his domestic policies (tax cuts, the faith-based initiative) were the staples of his campaign.
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee and his wife after a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Tuesday, Jan. 1.
The 2008 presidential race is different: Voters are scarcely getting any glimpse of how the next president would perform in the White House. Instead, the campaign has been dominated by uninformative debates with too many marginal candidates and by a series of unimportant squabbles.
On top of that, both Democratic and Republican candidates are spending an enormous amount of time making frivolous distinctions among themselves and their rivals. As the first actual voting begins today in the Iowa caucuses, it's only a slight exaggeration to say that voters have been cheated.
We know, of course, that the Democratic candidates are liberals and the Republicans tend to be conservative to one degree or another. But we knew this from the early beginnings of the campaign more than a year ago.
Since then, many of the candidates have issued position papers or taken detailed stands on various issues. But these are mostly of interest to policy wonks, single issue groups and some elements of the press. They aren't intended to attract much attention, and they haven't.
What matters is what the voters see and hear -- the public campaign. And it's here where the voters are learning disturbingly little from the candidates on how they'd act as president.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Hillary Clinton emphasizes her experience. But it's unclear whether that experience consists of anything more than having been the wife of a governor, first lady when husband Bill Clinton was president, and more recently a senator.
There's no evidence her experience ever involved crafting policy (except her failed health-care plan) or a critical role in decision making. As first lady, she never had a security clearance or attended meetings of the National Security Council. So who can tell if her experience would actually give her an advantage, as her husband insists, if a crisis occurs while she's president? I doubt if voters can.
Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy is centered on an equally vague point. He would end political polarization in Washington, seek bipartisan solutions, and heal divisions in the country. But how would he achieve this epic task? How would he "bring us together"?
That's still a mystery. And there's nothing in his record in Washington to indicate he's a champion of bipartisanship rather than a conventional Democratic liberal.
In his autobiography, "The Audacity of Hope," he praises the "gang of 14" senators, half Democrats, half Republicans, who blocked a change in Senate rules on judicial nominations and cleared the way for a handful of confirmations. But Mr. Obama declined to join the bipartisan effort, because it facilitated the confirmation of a few conservative judges.
John Edwards, the third major Democratic candidate, has made "corporate greed and influence" in Washington his chief talking point. It's an old-fashioned populist pitch that emphasizes class sentiment rather than a realistic presidential agenda. Can voters tell if this is anything more than hot air? I don't think so.
The Republicans aren't much better in conveying an idea of their presidencies. Rather, they've all insisted that they are the next Ronald Reagan. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney told USA Today that Reagan "knew how to build consensus and achieve victory" in the Cold War. "Those are the kinds of skills I have worked to develop." Republican consultant Ed Rollins, who has joined Mike Huckabee's campaign, claims that Mr. Huckabee sounded just like you-know-who -- Reagan. In truth, all the claims to be Reagan-like are unpersuasive and, I suspect, unhelpful to voters.
The arguments among the candidates haven't helped either. For weeks, Mr. Romney and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani attacked each other on immigration, each asserting his rival was soft on illegal immigrants. This debate was hardly illuminating, and I'd be surprised if voters could make heads or tails of it. Mr. Huckabee, too, is bound to have left voters scratching their heads. He first advocated compassion toward illegals, then was warmly endorsed by one of the harshest critics of illegal immigration, Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist.
Even less revealing has been the effort by Mrs. Clinton and Messrs. Obama and Edwards to claim the distinction as the best agent of change. Mrs. Clinton says her experience in Washington means she knows best how to achieve change. Mr. Obama says the opposite, that his aloofness from the ways of Washington means he's not tied down by Beltway connections. Mr. Edwards suggests his readiness to combat corporate interests gives the best prospects for change. To put it mildly, this is an inane dispute.
Here's the crux of the problem with the 2008 campaign. The next president will have to deal with three enduring issues: Iraq, immigration and entitlements. Yes, taxes and spending are important, but these three are overriding. On Iraq, Democrats have stuck with their positions fashioned when the war was being lost. But what would they do when faced in 2009 with, in all likelihood, a more stable Iraq in which the insurgency has been defeated? We don't know. What a Republican president would do is more knowable. He'd be likely to follow Mr. Bush's lead.
On immigration, Republicans, even John McCain, have moved away from comprehensive reform that comes to grips with 12 million illegals who are already in America and not about to leave. What would they do beyond stiffer border enforcement? Who knows? The Democratic candidates are more favorably disposed toward comprehensive reform, but they aren't talking this up. So what they'd do is also far from certain.
Finally, there's Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Bush's failed effort to reform Social Security in 2005 appears to have cooled not only interest in coping with rising entitlement costs, but also any interest in seriously discussing the issue in the campaign.
Republican Fred Thompson has talked about entitlements, but the other candidates haven't bothered to respond to him. Mrs. Clinton says she'd do something but she hasn't said what. So the campaign has provided no clarity on entitlements, and voters are left not knowing what to expect.
Maybe we shouldn't expect to learn much from a presidential campaign. Franklin Roosevelt, after all, ran as a budget balancer in 1932 but, once elected, unleashed the New Deal. However, 1932 should be the exception and not the rule. We'll never get a perfect picture of the next presidency during a campaign. But a glimpse or a serious hint or a fleeting idea would help. That's what voters deserve and have a right to expect.
Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and a Fox News commentator.
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A very interesting night last night!
Some quick initial thoughts:
The Dems: VERY bad for Lady Evita. Her aura of invincibility is broken. Many supported her thinking she was the best bet to win in November even though they didn't like her that much. Edwards may feel cocky at the moment that he too beat her, but ultimately it will not be him. With Obama looking like someone who can win (yes Iowa is not representative, but the size of the enthusiastic turnout BO generated seems significant) most of his support will go to BO. I caught BO's victory speech on Fox last night. Speaking purely from a handicapping point of view, it was VERY impressive. The man calls to emotions people want to feel. Very American optimism. This man has the potential to win the nomination.
The Reps: Turnout was , , , typical. Great win for Huck, embarrassing body blow to Romney, who outspent Huck 15-1. I was glad to see Fred take third (using money I sent him BTW) and continue to wish him well. Both he and McCain now goes into NH credibly. With Romney seriously wounded, and Huck moving on from the evangelical base in Iowa, and MCCain unloved on several important issues (immigration, campaign finance "reform" :roll:, taxes) Fred may yet get another chance. Even though Rudy was a no-show, Ron Paul virtually tripled him-- dang! :-o
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You know the Clinton machine is sharpening knives right now, planning bad things for Barry-O. I hope 3rd. place fires up Fred, as Huckleberry is unelectable in the general election. Ron Paul has the crazy vote locked up, but even if his loons raise a billion, he can only be a democratic asset in the general.
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I still think Hillary will walk away with the dem nomination. The real fight has all along been on the republican side, but I still don't think Huckabee is in the fight despite Chuck Norris).
I told my buddies who support Thompson (but feel he will lose badly because he refuses to run an actual campaign) that he would break the top 3 in Iowa &/or NH, and that he will do better, on average, than most others. Why? Because candidates run primarily to achieve 1) name recognition, and 2) to put their ideas forth. Thompson already has name recognition, and whether it is true or not, he certainly has the reputation for being the most conservative. To hit the road too much allows everyone to take a real close look to see if it's true (which is why Huckabee will fall flat on his face by this time next month). Thompson has nothing to gain by running hard at this time. His supporters will vote his way unless they are given a policy-related reason not to, and I suspect only Romney would stand to gain from that.
It's going to be a helluva fight. Ron Paul has FAR more than just the "crazy vote", plus $20 million in his pocket. Giuliani will doubtless do well outside of Iowa, Thompson will maintain a solid position, & Romney will come back hard. I suspect McCain is already gone (along with Hunter), and Huckabee will be dead in the water soon, so we're still looking at 4 strong candidates.
It would have been even more interesting if Gary Johnson had decided to run.
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I trust Dick Morris is known to all. Here is his take on it all:
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Dick Morris' Political Insider
Hillary on the Ropes
Friday, January 4, 2008 8:31 AM
By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
The amazing victories by Obama and Huckabee in Iowa are truly historic.
They demonstrate the impact and viability of a message of change in both parties. In the Democratic Party, Obama, winning in a totally white state, shows that racism is gone as a factor in American politics. On the Republican side, Huckabee?s win shows how a truly compassionate conservative can win by harvesting voters who want the message of concern for the poor and for values to prevail.
But what of Hillary? She's down but she's not out. Hillary Clinton, in the first really contested election of her own political career, lost dismally - outclassed, outdrawn, and outpolled by Barack Obama.
Her campaign professionals (including Bill) decided to stress experience, precisely the wrong message in a Democratic primary. Prematurely appealing to the center and abandoning the left, she fell between two chairs, not sufficiently centrist to win independents or liberal enough to attract Democrats.
On the Republican side, Huckabee brought a new phenomenon into politics.
A New Testament Christian politician, he takes the biblical message to the center-left, clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. His refusal to indulge in negative advertising sent a message to Iowa voters showing his strength under fire.
The Obama victory in Iowa probably presages a victory in New Hampshire and follow up victories in Nevada and South Carolina. (Hillary will win Michigan because she is alone on the ballot.) Suddenly, Hillary?s argument that she should be the candidate because she has a record of defeating the "Republican attack machine" will backfire. Sold as a winner, she will be exposed as a loser. The overhang of Iowa will dog her for all of the early primaries.
Particularly important for Obama is the poor finish of John Edwards, who has campaigned in Iowa for six years. Now Obama can count on being the nearly unanimous choice of the anti-Hillary voters. No longer will the vote be divided.
Hillary faces a serious problem: Voters rejected her and rejected Bill on a very personal basis. Iowa was a referendum on Hillary and she lost 30-70. Her argument of experience only reinforced her phoniness and her issues positioning showed how contrived her ideology is. This is a stinging personal defeat for Hillary.
But what will happen next? With the limelight comes the spotlight. Obama will suddenly become the putative candidate of the Democratic Party and will be subject to the scrutiny that comes with the title. Can he weather the examination?
Perhaps not. Democrats may turn on Obama, worried that he may not win in November. The doubts about Obama, up to now hidden behind concerns about Hillary?s candidacy, will be on center stage. I wonder if he can stand the scrutiny.
Much the same process will evolve on the Republican side. Ignored in the Iowa result, Giuliani appears to be in even worse shape than Hillary with his fifth place finish. But the same process that will unfold for the Republican Party may take place on the Democratic side. Voters may wonder if all that stands between the White House and the Democratic Party is a Mormon, a Christian evangelical, and a 70-year-old.
Rudy, like Hillary, may look better once the rest of the field unfolds.
But don't write off Obama or Huckabee. Their appeals are truly unique and obviously resonate with voters. Their approaches are now and the outcome shows how relevant their message is.
© 2008 Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
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It's going to be a helluva fight. Ron Paul has FAR more than just the "crazy vote", plus $20 million in his pocket. Giuliani will doubtless do well outside of Iowa, Thompson will maintain a solid position, & Romney will come back hard. I suspect McCain is already gone (along with Hunter), and Huckabee will be dead in the water soon, so we're still looking at 4 strong candidates.
It would have been even more interesting if Gary Johnson had decided to run.
When the general public takes a hard look at Dr. Crazy's foreign policy, he'll have nothing but his base of nazis, troofers, jihadists and tin-foil hatters. The blimp will become the Hindenburg.
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RP also stands for a lot of fine things too.
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Crafty,
Yeah, aside from losing the war against the global jihad and causing the death of western civilization, i'm sure he'd be a great president....
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Clear and strong on the second amendment, ending the foolihsness of the War on Drugs, abolishing the IRS and many other departments of the govt sounds pretty good to me.
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You'll never see the end of the IRS, unless you dissolve the USG. Conquered peoples don't get to keep and bear arms anyway.
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GM my friend, I reject your moment of defeatism :-) We have our guns yet and as for the rest, as long as we do have them, we shall see.
Here's Peggy Noonan on Iowa:
Out With the Old, In With the New
Obama and Huckabee rise; Mrs. Clinton falls.
Friday, January 4, 2008 12:01 a.m. EST
And so it begins.
We wanted exciting, we got exciting.
As this is written, late on the night of the caucuses, the outlines of the decisions seem clear: Barack Obama won.
Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, the avatar of the machine, lost.
It's huge. Even though people have been talking about this possibility for six weeks now, it's still huge. She had the money, she had the organization, the party's stars, she had Elvis behind her, and the Clinton name in a base that loved Bill. And she lost. There are always a lot of reasons for a loss, but the ur-reason in this case, the thing it all comes down to? There's something about her that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No.
She started out way ahead, met everyone, and lost.
As for Sen. Obama, his victory is similarly huge. He won the five biggest counties in Iowa, from the center of the state to the South Dakota border. He carried the young in a tidal wave. He outpolled Mrs. Clinton among women.
He did it with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together.
He had a harder row to hoe than Mrs. Clinton did. He was lesser known, too young, lacked an establishment. He had to knock her down while building himself up. (She only had to build herself up until the end, when she went after his grade-school essays.) His takedown of Mrs. Clinton was the softest demolition in the history of falling buildings. I think we were there when it happened, in the debate in which he was questioned on why so many of Bill Clinton's aides were advising him. She laughed, and he said he was looking forward to her advising him, too. He took mama to school.
And so something new begins on the Democratic side.
Something new begins on the Republican side, too.
Everyone said Mike Huckabee was a big dope to leave Iowa Wednesday to fly to L.A. to be on Jay Leno, but did you see him on that thing? He got off a perfect line on why he's doing well against Romney: "People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off." The studio audience loved him. And you know, in Iowa they watch "The Tonight Show" too.
Mr. Huckabee likes to head-fake people into thinking he's Gomer Pyle, but he's more like the barefoot boy of the green room. He's more James Carville than Jim Nabors.
What we have learned about Mr. Huckabee the past few months is that he's an ace entertainer with a warm, witty and compelling persona. He won with no money and little formal organization, with an evangelical network, with a folksy manner, and with the best guileless pose in modern politics. From the mail I have received the past month after criticizing him in this space, I would say his great power, the thing really pushing his supporters, is that they believe that what ails America and threatens its continued existence is not economic collapse or jihad, it is our culture.
They have been bruised and offended by the rigid, almost militant secularism and multiculturalism of the public schools; they reject those schools' squalor, in all senses of the word. They believe in God and family and America. They are populist: They don't admire billionaire CEOs, they admire husbands with two jobs who hold the family together for the sake of the kids; they don't need to see the triumph of supply-side thinking, they want to see that suffering woman down the street get the help she needs.
They believe that Mr. Huckabee, the minister who speaks their language, shares, down to the bone, their anxieties, concerns and beliefs. They fear that the other Republican candidates are caught up in a million smaller issues--taxing, spending, the global economy, Sunnis and Shia--and missing the central issue: again, our culture. They are populists who vote Republican, and as I have read their letters, I have felt nothing but respect.
But there are two problems. One is that while the presidency, as an office, can actually make real changes in the areas of economic and foreign policy, the federal government has a limited ability to change the culture of America. That is something conservatives used to know. Second, I'm sorry to say it is my sense that Mr. Huckabee is not so much leading a movement as riding a wave. One senses he brilliantly discerned and pursued an underserved part of the voting demographic, and went for it. Clever fellow. To me, the tipoff was "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"
My sense is that Mr. Huckabee's good supporters deserve a better leader.
His next problem may be not so much New Hampshire as Ed Rollins, the Reagan White House political aide who came in a week ago to manage his campaign. Mr. Rollins began his tenure announcing to respectful young reporters that he--"the grizzled veteran," the "old battler"--would like to sink to his knees and "shoot Romney in the groin" and "punch his teeth out." Such class is of course always welcome on the trail, but one senses the verbal ante will constantly be upped, and I'm not sure that will work well for Mr. Huckabee. Self inflated dirigibles, especially unmoored ones, can cast shadows on parades.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
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Third post of the day:
Mike Huckabee recently named Richard Haas (the President of the CFR) as his advisor on foreign policy. CNN's WOLF BLITZER asked "Who are your principal foreign policy advisers, Governor?" Mike Huckabee responded: "Well, I have a number of people from whom I get policy. I'm talking to Frank Gaffney, I talk to Richard Haas.."
So what does Richard Haas believe in? Here's an article below which was written by Haas for the Tapei Times. It basically states the Bill of Rights and Constitution should be given up in favor of a cooperative world body run by elite consensus. Who needs individual rights in the techno-futuristic world police state? And you thought liberty was in jeopardy now? Just wait till you see what your children will have to deal with. Get activated folks, These police state freaks want to shape your future into a control grid enforced through the fear based reaction to state sponsored false flag terror.
State Sovereignty Must be Altered in Globalized Era
In the age of globalization, states should give up some sovereignty to world bodies in order to protect their own interests
By Richard Haass
Taipei Times - For 350 years, sovereignty -- the notion that states are the central actors on the world stage and that governments are essentially free to do what they want within their own territory but not within the territory of other states -- has provided the organizing principle of international relations. The time has come to rethink this notion.
The world's 190-plus states now co-exist with a larger number of powerful non-sovereign and at least partly (and often largely) independent actors, ranging from corporations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), from terrorist groups to drug cartels, from regional and global institutions to banks and private equity funds. The sovereign state is influenced by them (for better and for worse) as much as it is able to influence them. The near monopoly of power once enjoyed by sovereign entities is being eroded.
As a result, new mechanisms are needed for regional and global governance that include actors other than states. This is not to argue that Microsoft, Amnesty International, or Goldman Sachs be given seats in the UN General Assembly, but it does mean including representatives of such organizations in regional and global deliberations when they have the capacity to affect whether and how regional and global challenges are met.
Less is more Moreover, states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function. This is already taking place in the trade realm. Governments agree to accept the rulings of the WTO because on balance they benefit from an international trading order even if a particular decision requires that they alter a practice that is their sovereign right to carry out.
Some governments are prepared to give up elements of sovereignty to address the threat of global climate change. Under one such arrangement, the Kyoto Protocol, which runs through 2012, signatories agree to cap specific emissions. What is needed now is a successor arrangement in which a larger number of governments, including the US, China, and India, accept emissions limits or adopt common standards because they recognize that they would be worse off if no country did.
All of this suggests that sovereignty must be redefined if states are to cope with globalization. At its core, globalization entails the increasing volume, velocity, and importance of flows -- within and across borders -- of people, ideas, greenhouse gases, goods, dollars, drugs, viruses, e-mails, weapons and a good deal else, challenging one of sovereignty's fundamental principles: the ability to control what crosses borders in either direction. Sovereign states increasingly measure their vulnerability not to one another, but to forces beyond their control.
Globalization thus implies that sovereignty is not only becoming weaker in reality, but that it needs to become weaker. States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves, because they cannot insulate themselves from what goes on elsewhere. Sovereignty is no longer a sanctuary.
This was demonstrated by the American and world reaction to terrorism. Afghanistan's Taliban government, which provided access and support to al-Qaeda, was removed from power. Similarly, the US' preventive war against an Iraq that ignored the UN and was thought to possess weapons of mass destruction showed that sovereignty no longer provides absolute protection.
Imagine how the world would react if some government were known to be planning to use or transfer a nuclear device or had already done so. Many would argue -- correctly -- that sovereignty provides no protection for that state.
Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens. This reflects not simply scruples, but a view that state failure and genocide can lead to destabilizing refugee flows and create openings for terrorists to take root.
The NATO intervention in Kosovo was an example where a number of governments chose to violate the sovereignty of another government (Serbia) to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide. By contrast, the mass killing in Rwanda a decade ago and now in Darfur, Sudan, demonstrate the high price of judging sovereignty to be supreme and thus doing little to prevent the slaughter of innocents.
Conditions needed Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state fails to live up to its side of the bargain by sponsoring terrorism, either transferring or using weapons of mass destruction, or conducting genocide, then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal or occupation.
The diplomatic challenge for this era is to gain widespread support for principles of state conduct and a procedure for determining remedies when these principles are violated.
The goal should be to redefine sovereignty for the era of globalization, to find a balance between a world of fully sovereign states and an international system of either world government or anarchy.
The basic idea of sovereignty, which still provides a useful constraint on violence between states, needs to be preserved. But the concept needs to be adapted to a world in which the main challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens rather than from what states do to one another.
Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course.
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Frank Gaffney would be a great advisor for Huckleberry.....
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/12/28/huck-claims-john-bolton-as-a-foreign-policy-adviser-thats-news-to-john-bolton/
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The 9/10 Caucuses
By FrontPage Magazine
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, January 04, 2008
Last night, Iowa caucus-goers had the opportunity to vote for a wide variety of candidates who possessed foreign policy sagacity, an aggressive plan to fight sponsors of terrorism, and the competence and breadth of experience to lead the nation during the War on Terror – and the plurality of neither party chose to do so. Instead, they selected affable and charismatic figures who appeal to portions of the party’s base but who lack credibility on national security – an unsettling reality in a post-9/11 world.
The Democrats
The Democratic Party made its selection as the result of a self-conscious process. The party, now a wholly owned subsidiary of MoveOn.org, does not wish to fight the war; it wishes to end it, as its fruitless Congressional leadership has demonstrated in its every budget measure. The party rewards those who downplay homeland security to the benefit of "social justice," especially if doing so allows them to indulge in identity politics.
Barack Obama allowed them to do both more powerfully than Hillary Clinton.
Although not as beloved by the netroots as John Edwards, he has demonstrated a thorough naivete about foreign policy. In recent months, he’s expressed a willingness to unilaterally bomb the allied nation of Pakistan and to hold direct negotiations with rogue states like Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela.
He has boasted he was consistently against the war in Iraq, and he was; he thought the war was a conspiracy. On October 2, 2002, while still an Illinois state senator (Is anyone who was a state senator six years ago qualified to be a wartime president?), Obama told an antiwar rally he did not oppose all war:
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I’m opposed to. A dumb war.
Today, he’s running to become commander-in-chief of the forces fighting that "dumb war," a description certain to erode morale. While always careful to note the troops’ courage and valor, he also talks down their grand accomplishments at defeating al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. On his website currently, Obama writes during the present surge, "our troops have helped reduce violence in some areas of Iraq, but even those reductions do not get us below the unsustainable levels of violence of mid-2006." This is both disspiriting and false. The New York Times reported late last month that "violent attacks in the country had fallen by 60 percent since June." Rather than the surge, which has driven al-Qaeda out of Anbar Province, Obama would have removed all U.S. troops by this March. The Obama Plan offers "at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries." But thanks to the Bush surge, in October alone, 110,000 refugees returned to the newly pacified Iraq.
Nor has our present military success taught him anything. He now pledges to "have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months." Who will take America’s place in newly destabilized Baghdad? Phantom troops and bearded mullahs. Four years after John Kerry made a similarly dishonest pledge, Obama parrots that he "will rally NATO members to contribute troops to collective security operations." But there is less European will to contribute to Iraq (or Afghanistan) now than in 2004 (and there was none then). Barack also announces "the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent American history " – reaching out to all, "including Iran and Syria."
John Edwards’ second-place finish is more indicative of the party’s bent. Edwards, too, is a candidate dangerously underqualified, a one-term senator with "no international experience, no military experience" and who would need "on-the-job training in the White House on national security issues." At least, that’s how John Kerry described him. He is also a charter member of the Hate America Left. Outpacing Barack and Hillary, John Edwards believes we need to "reestablish ourselves after Iraq as a force for good in the world again. "His well-oiled machine nudged out the anointed candidate of the party elite.
Hillary Clinton also vied for the left-wing vote, pandering to the far-Left "Take Back America" conference and breaking her campaign promises, in the process hammering out a hopelessly contradictory and convoluted position on Iraq. Touting her "experience" in foreign affairs – a phrase that inspires titters when referring to the Clintons – she omits how she urged her husband to withdraw from Somalia in 1993, emboldening Osama bin Laden and leading America down the "Path to 9/11." However, in all her kowtowing to her party’s extremists, she has been careful to preserve wiggle-room to run back the center. She has refused to completely back down, instead crafting a policy that leaves all sides wondering which, if any, of her stated positions is the authentic one.
Under the present circumstances, though, this is a sign of strength. Hillary has been around power enough to know that, as president, she may need the authority and freedom of action her opponents vow to jettison. Ironically, this makes her moderately more responsible, and more conservative, than Obama or Edwards – and explains why she finished behind both.
The GOP
Among Republicans, too, a segment of the party faithful selected a candidate on the basis of personality and identity politics. Mike Huckabee is an amiable evangelical. Evangelicals made up 60 percent of caucus voters, and Huckabee won 46 percent of their vote while engaging in a tremendous get-out-the-vote effort. Huckabee won this position with his glib sense of humor and on account of his opponents’ social liberalism, uncertainty, or apparent apathy. But being a nice man – and demonstrating a general understanding of the threat of Islamic fascism – does not make him qualified on foreign policy. Next to Ron Paul, he is the least qualified candidate to poll any support.
This fact was not lost on his staff. A "senior aide"confessed last Friday that Huckabee had "no foreign policy credentials." Michael Dale Huckabee proved this in his witless Foreign Affairs article, in which he denounced President Bush’s "arrogant bunker mentality" and pined for other countries to like us again. Although it won’t be toppled by terrorists, the United States is:
more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.
The war in Afghanistan-Pakistan, too, fits the high school student analogy. "Ultimately it is this popularity contest," he writes. Perhaps that explains why he offered America’s "apologies" for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination – a small misstatement perhaps, or perhaps an attempt for the big man on campus to be "modest about its abilities."
The nation is not ready for four years of locker room foreign policy when jihad is on the march.
Huckabee believes Bush has been far too demanding. "Instead of asking if someone is for us, instead of demanding that every ally be at the level of Great Britain, I will ask if we should be for them, if they can be useful in any way, however limited, however temporary."But that was exactly the plea President Bush made when he uttered that phrase. Huckabee demonstrates exactly how he is willing to go slumming for support, noting in his Iraq policy, "I support a regional summit so that Iraq's neighbors become militarily and financially committed to stabilizing Iraq." Iraq’s "neighbors" include Iran and Syria.
His feckless goodwill extends to Western Hemisphere dictators, as well. In 2002, the then-Arkansas governor signed a letter asking President Bush to lift the embargo against Castro’s Cuba. After receiving Cuban-American support in Florida, presidential candidate Huckabee reversed himself. What changed? Huckabee’s reply betrayed an impolitic sense of opportunism: "Well, what changed was I’m running for president." (See the video.) Elsewhere he added, "Rather than being seen as some huge change, I would call it rather the simple reality that I’m running for president of the United States, not for re-election as governor of Arkansas." He excused himself on the grounds, "I really wasn’t that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States." If true, that betrays a grave ignorance of both foreign policy and the American history of his childhood. (Had he never heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis? For that matter, had he never heard of Elian Gonzalez?) "Being in Arkansas," he claimed, did not place him in close "proximity to Cuba." (More video.)
Mike Huckabee is glib. He is likeable. And he would be out of his depth as leader of the free world.
His domestic record is not an exceptional improvement. Huckabee pardoned more criminals during his time in Little Rock than his previous three predecessors – including Bill Clinton – and more than all six of his neighboring states combined, although they have a population nearly 20 times larger than Arkansas. Democrats would relish a matchup that allows them to appear tougher-on-crime than Republicans for once.
He would also take the Republicans’ hottest wedge issue – immigration – off the table. (So, too, would McCain, and perhaps Giuliani.) Although he now proposes a version of Mark Krikorian’s excellent immigration plan, as Arkansas governor Huckabee fought to give illegal aliens state-funded scholarships and fibbed about allowing state troopers to enforce immigration policy. William Gheen, the president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, has described Huckabee’s strategy on immigration: "He knows he's wrong on immigration; he can't win if he’s wrong on immigration — therefore, lie." Feminists would love to run against a man who stated, "a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband." And leftists in general would be happy to be represented by someone who favors voting rights for Washington, D.C.; caps on greenhouse gas emissions; and has a history of increasing taxation and social spending.
Then, too, there are the darker aspects of Huckabee’s down-home, "sit-a-spell" personality, aspects that prove he and the last president born in Arkansas have more in common than a hometown. Clinton surrogate Bob Kerrey drops Barack Obama’s middle name as an alleged compliment; Huckabee "innocently" asks a New York Times reporter, "Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"– a move as thuggish as it was bigoted. Hillary’s campaign strategist Mark Penn can say, "the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising"; Huckabee can hold a press conference to announce he will not air a negative ad – assuring it is broadcast on every major network and earning it more visibility than his meager campaign could ever afford.
Huckabee also has notoriously thin skin – no pun intended – recently on display in his "shelved" attack ad. Opening the ad, he spat, "I’m Mike Huckabee, and I approve this message, because Iowans have a right to know the truth about Mitt Romney's dishonest attacks on me and even an American hero, John McCain." (Huckabee campaign chairman, and political powerhouse, Ed Rollins’ testiness with Chris Wallace last night also failed to win friends and influence voters.)
As likely as not, the Huck-a-boom is leading to a Huck-a-bust. The Manchester Union-Leader notes a "AP/Pew poll showed that only 18 percent of the GOP-leaning voters in New Hampshire consider themselves ‘evangelical’" – less than one-third the number of evangelicals voting last night. Among non-evangelicals, Romney won more than twice as many votes. Perhaps this explains why, for the moment, Huckabee is barely running ahead of Ron Paul in the Granite State. That may change, or Huckabee may suffer the fate of Pat Robertson in 1988 and Alan Keyes in 2000: winning a bloc vote in Iowa and losing a real vote in New Hampshire.
But if Republicans vote based on the most pressing issues facing their country, Huckabee’s support will almost certainly diminsh.
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**The only person that knows less about geopolitics and history than the average Ron Paul supporter, is.....Ron Paul.**
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/11/mccain-paul-dif.html
McCain, Paul Differ on Iraq
November 28, 2007 8:52 PM
ABC News' Z. Byron Wolf and Ed O'Keefe Report: Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., played with populist fire during the Republican debate Wednesday night.
Segueing from an unrelated topic, John McCain, who has staked his political career on his support for the surge in Iraq and fight against global Islamic terrorism, turned to Paul, who was standing to his left and addressed him directly.
Watch the video HERE.
"Congressman Paul, I've heard him now in many debates talk about brining our troops home and about the war in Iraq and how its failed and I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. We allowed . . ."
McCain was obscured here by jeers and boos and cheers all at once from the crowed auditorium. Poor CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper had no chance against the audience.
But the Arizona Senator continued, "We allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and (Ron Paul is looking right at McCain and shaking his head 'No')
McCain: "And I want to tell you something sir, I just finished having Thanksgiving with the troops and their message to you is, the message of these brave men and women serving over there is, 'Let us win. Let us win.'
Cheers mixed with jeers and boos and applause rose up all over again.
In a 30 second response, Paul, who recently raised $4 million exclusively from online contributors, calmly asked McCain, "The real question you have to ask is why do I get the most money from active duty officers, military personnel?"
"So what John is saying is just totally distorted. He doesn't understand the difference between nonintervention and isolationism. I'm not an isolationist. I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel. But I don't want to send our troops overseas using force telling them how to live. We would object to it here and they're going to object to us over there."
It was not the first time the two men tangled.
Earlier, talking about fiscal responsibility, McCain, who has been outspoken against pork barrel spending, lamented Republicans who got into politics to change Washington, but "we went to Washington and Washington changed us."
Several questions later, Paul, absolutist in his views and almost in alone in Washington in his opposition to just about every spending bill said to McCain, "Washington didn't change me."
At a later point in the debate, McCain and Paul sparred again.
Recalling Iraq once again, McCain asserted, "We never lost a battle in Vietnam, it was American public opinion that caused us to lose that conflict."
McCain then said that the difference between Iraq and Vietnam is al-Qaeda's determination to attack the United States.
"They want to follow us home, they want Iraq to be a base for al-Qaeda," McCain insisted.
Dr. Paul engaged McCain once again, saying that whether or not the U.S. "never lost a battle" in Vietnam is "irrelevant."
"(Al-Qaeda) want to come here ... because of our military base in Saudi Arabia," Paul retorted.
"They come here because we're occupying their country just as we would object if they occupied our country," he added.
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., took McCain's side in the Paul-McCain clash.
"I wish we lived in a world that Ron is describing . . . unfortunately, Ron, I don't believe that is the case," Tancredo said.
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Would someone please give me a URL for yesterday's debate?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_presidential_debates,_2008
Linked in the article.
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That you GM.
Here's Hillary's latest ad :wink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6Wab4QRt8&feature=related
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Outrageous that Fox did not include RP in the debates last night :x
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http://www.newsmax.com/headlines/paul_fox_debate/2008/01/06/62102.html?s=al&promo_code=426B-1
Fox Under Fire for Excluding Ron Paul
Sunday, January 6, 2008 11:26 AM
By: Newsmax Staff
When Fox News hosts its Republican candidates forum Sunday night, one of the leading candidates won't be invited.
The Fox debate is excluding Texas Congressman Ron Paul, even though he polls higher in New Hampshire, has raised significantly more money, and is campaigning more in New Hampshire than Fred Thompson -- who is invited. The censorship of Paul has infuriated his loyal supporters, who note that he pulled 10 percent of the vote in Iowa, well ahead of Rudy Giuliani, who pulled just over 3 percent. Giuliani has also been invited to the Fox forum. Paul is also setting records in GOP fundraising, raking in $20 million in the last quarter alone.
New Hampshire Republicans are apparently not happy with Fox's arbitrary decision to exclude Paul. This weekened the New Hampshire Republican Party issued a press release announcing it had dropped its affiliation with the Fox Republican debate.
"The first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary serves a national purpose by giving all candidates an equal opportunity on a level playing field," said Republican Chairman Fergus Cullen. "Only in New Hampshire do lesser known, lesser funded underdogs have a fighting chance to establish themselves as national figures."
Paul's campaign is also angered by the Fox effort to cut out his voice.
"The New Hampshire Republican Party did the right thing by pulling its sponsorship for Fox's candidate forum," said Ron Paul 2008 spokesman Jesse Benton. "'Fox News' decision to exclude Congressman Paul is unfair, but it won't stop Dr. Paul's message of freedom, peace and prosperity from resonating with the people of New Hampshire."
The Fox decision is not going over well with New Hampshire voters or media who don't like New York-based media coming to their state to dictate news coverage. This past Thursday, the Manchester Union Leader, New Hampshire's major newspaper, published a front-page editorial blasting news organizations that do not invite all candidates to their forums. Fox said it decided to invite candidates who had received high standing in national polls, despite the fact small primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire will often back underdogs. Paul supporters believe the move is an effort to marginalize their candidate, who has been a strong critic of the Iraq war.
"Fight Fox," a new Web site organized by Paul backers, tells readers: "We need to send a message to Fox's Rupert Murdoch & his fellow Neocon buddies that he is not Musharraf and the US is not Pakistan, yet! Fox News cannot just stifle public opinion. debate and impact a primary election by excluding Ron Paul just because they don't like his message of freedom and liberty."
Paul seems to share that view. According to a report in the Boston Globe, he called Fox News a "propagandist" for the Iraq war.
Despite the hoopla, Fox is sticking to its guns: no Ron Paul.
"We look forward to presenting a substantive forum which will serve as the first program of its kind this election season," David Rhodes, vice president of Fox News, said in a statement.
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I'm not surprised. The media (on both sides) make their picks for candidates way before they even hit the road. The amount of coverage that anyone without a recognizable face receives is often negligible or filed under "oh those wacky candidates". And forget about being included in a debate.
I was disturbed by the treatment Ron Paul received from his co-debaters on Saturday. Agree with him or not, laughing in his face is just downright rude. Embarrassing behavior by supposedly mature adults.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/251539.php
I think Ron Paul is regretting the media attention he is now getting....
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Hillary the Movie:
http://www.hillarythemovie.com/trailer.html
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RP leads military donations?!? Superficial data says yes , , ,
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/10/ron_paul_leads_military_donations_race/
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I thought it was a very good debate last night, with all the candidates having good presentations and strong moments.
FOX pollster says my man Fred won though :-D http://www.fred08.com/Virtual/luntz.aspx
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RP leads military donations?!? Superficial data says yes , , ,
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/10/ron_paul_leads_military_donations_race/
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http://www.americanconservativedaily.com/2007/07/unspinning-the-latest-ron-paul-spin/
Unspinning the Latest Ron Paul Spin
Posted By: J.J. Jackson* on July 18, 2007
Filed Under Eyes on 2008
Apparently the Ron Paul supporters who are camping out this site just think that I am going to take their word for everything and parrot their talking points when they put a few emails in my mail box. The latest? A bold claim that Ron Paul got more donations than any other candidate from current and former members of the military.
You know, and this is just a word of advice ok, I don’t know where you get these talking points from but maybe you should keep them to your selves. You would probably do your selves a better service by just keeping me off your mailing lists. Because all you do by sending me these poorly contrived messages is compel me to double check what you say and unspin it if not true and post it for everyone to see.So I went to the Federal Trade Commission’s website and looked at 2nd quarter donations (http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2007/Q2/) and am here to bring everyone the truth. Which I am sure will bring even more condemnations from Paul supporters as my posts on him always seem to do.
The truth is that Ron Paul only outpaced all Republican candidates in donations by donors that declared themselves as either current or former members of the military. Notice I say “declared”. This is important since one is not required to “declare” their profession when giving to candidates.So, did Ron Paul out pace all other candidates in donations from members of our military? That’s impossible to say because so many of the donations for candidates did not declare a profession.
Ron Paul did certainly get a couple thousand dollars from members and former members of the military the data shows that. But let’s look at the facts. For other candidates, contributions from “undeclared” professions are in the millions. Romney and Giuliani, for example, had $2.7 million from such sources. McCain had $2.2 million from “undeclared” professions. Am I being asked to assume that none of these people ever served in the military?
So can Paul supporters say that Ron Paul got more support from military members than any other candidate? They are trying. For example, like this quote from a Paul supporter who simply calls himself “rEVOLution”:
You and your neo-con buddies are in for it in 2008. The military is squarely behind Ron Paul and he walloped all the other fake conservatives that you support in fund raising from members of the military! Report that!
or maybe this one from “Constitutionalist”:
Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul! That’s all you are going to hear in 2008! Because now that it is a FACT that more members of the military support him than any other candidate it is going to grow into a national movement that will knock you neo-cons out of power! HA! Hopefully you’ll get over your hatred of Ron Paul and report this great news!
I think you see what I mean. The spin cycle is in overdrive. However, the only “fact” that can be concluded from this data is that Ron Paul received more donations (total dollars that is) from members of the military that actually declared their profession as such when they donated. Nothing else is able to be concluded nor even implied. And let’s be clear, these were not the only two emails. There were enough of them that obviously someone is spreading disinformation and I want to head it off before it becomes gospel.
Make no mistake, when the Paul spin machine turns I will work it over just like I have for all the other candidates regardless of party. I don’t know where you guys are getting these talking points from, but either you misread them or the person feeding them to you is incorrect. And you do a diservice to your candidate by doing these things. Because instead of focusing on the good things about Paul, when stuff like this circulates the internet people only focus on the goofiness of his supporters.
Related Posts
Some Ron Paul Supporters Still Desperate To Claim Military Support
http://www.militaryforpaul.com/ claims that the VFW has endorsed Ron Paul (see post here http://www....
Ron Paul in 4th Place
Ron Paul Would be More Popular If He Was Pro-Iraq War
*Content posted by a user may not be completely written by that user. Content from another source is cited in either block quotes or quotes with a link to the original material when necessary. Content from other sites is posted for commentary and news purposes under fair use.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/11/reason-ron-paul-defended-his-newsletters-for-years/
More on Dr. Crazy's newsletters of yore......
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Wow! A great article about economic realities..... trade deficits with China, and Canada... the role of savings, and the impact of taxes.....
(and the U.S. Presidential Candidates misunderstanding of them).
In this issue:
What Are They Thinking?
The Reality of Trade Deficits
Fair Tax Nonsense
How to Create an Immigration Depression
Stimulate the Economy by Cutting Spending?
Tax Hikes to Help Us Grow?
Europe, Phoenix, and My Conference in La Jollal
In the past week, I have been in the car coming home late from work, with the presidential debates are on the radio. It is very discouraging to listen to what passes for economic literacy among the candidates. In reality, many candidates are espousing policies that are quite dangerous at worst, or simply misleading at best. Far too many in both parties tell a frustrated America what it wants to hear, rather than the economic reality. The Republicans have some of the worst offenders.
So, today we will look at some economic reality. We tackle trade deficits, the dollar, taxes (the "Fair Tax"), how should we stimulate the economy as we slip into recession, and global trade. I think we will cover enough that I can just about guarantee to offend most of my readers at some point. But the main point I want you to take away from all this is that the simple one-line answers given at these debates might work to fool most of the voters and tell them what they want to hear, but they are not based in economic reality. While this is of more interest to US citizens, the principles apply across borders. So, let's jump right in.
The Reality of Trade Deficits
The trade deficit jumped this month by almost 10%, to $63 billion. To hear the candidates talk, we can lower the deficit by forcing China to allow its currency to rise, increase our exports because of a lower dollar, stop our dependence on high-priced foreign oil, etc. Whatever the problems are, they are not of our making.
Let's look at the reality. I asked my friends at Plexus to create a few charts for me. First, let's see if a lower dollar will have a major impact on the deficit. The deficit is in red, and the numbers for the dollar index are on the right. Notice that from 1992 until 2002 the dollar got stronger and the trade deficit rose. Of course, there was the period from the end of '93 until '95 where the dollar dropped almost 20% and had seemingly very little effect on the trade deficit.
Now notice that from 2002 until the present the dollar has gone down and the trade deficit has exploded. If a weaker dollar were the answer, then one would expect the trade deficit to improve. Yet, the deficit has roughly doubled since 2002 while the dollar has dropped by more than a third. Using a trade-weighted dollar index would produce the same visual results, although the trade-weighted dollar has dropped by "only" 25%.
As I have maintained for years, I expect the Chinese to allow their currency to rise slowly. By the time the next president can have a foreign policy team in place to focus on the issue, the Chinese will have allowed the yuan to rise another 15% or so. This will bring it very close to the 30% increase in valuation that the China hawks in Congress have been wanting. The reality will be that the Chinese will have done almost all the heavy lifting within 18 months.
What will be the result? It means that the $325 billion in goods and services that we buy from China will cost us 10-15% more than it does now. Will we buy 15% less? Not if that is how we want to spend our money. And that brings us to the next chart. While there is not an exact correlation, the trade deficit rises as consumer spending rises, which makes sense if you think about it.
Want to see the real problem at the root cause of the trade deficit? The one that candidates absolutely cannot mention from the debate podiums? Look at the next chart:
No, the simple answer is that the trade deficit is not going to come down until the US starts to save more and spend less. In 1992, consumer spending was a little over 65% of GDP. It is now closer to 72%. Savings are down from 8% in that time, to barely above zero. If US consumers simply saved 5%, as we did 10 years ago, the trade deficit would come down by a lot.
But it would not go away, because we, like all developed countries, are addicted to energy consumption, and for now that means oil. We imported $34 billion in petroleum products in November, a jump of 10% over the next highest month on record. (By the way, you can get 47 pages of small-print numbers on all aspects of trade at the main web site at the US Census Bureau at http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/press.html. The data I cite is from there.)
In large part, that is because of soaring oil prices. But it may get worse. We actually imported less oil in November in terms of barrels of oil than the average for the last year, but the price was up from an average of $72 in October to almost $80 in November. Oil at $95 has not yet made it into the actual price. Another $15 a barrel could add as much as $50 billion to the annual trade deficit.
That means oil alone will soon be more than 60% of our trade deficit, if oil stays above $90 a barrel. Hard to cut the deficit with a lower dollar if we keep buying expensive oil.
Some random items from pages 21-22 of the report. We imported $193 billion in autos for the first 11 months of the year. $618 million in sugar. $118 billion in TV's, VCR's and other electronic gadgets. We imported $219 billion just in crude oil.
Quick: who's our biggest trading partner? Canada, by a wide margin. We import almost the same from Canada as we do from China ($289 billion to $295 billion), but we also send them $229 billion. Yes, we ran a trade deficit with Canada of $59 billion for the first 11 months of the year. ($67 billion with Mexico.) The rapidly rising Canadian dollar has barely made a dent in the deficit. Yet Senators Schumer and Graham (bipartisan economic illiterates) think a rising Chinese currency will lower the trade deficit with China when it has done no such thing with Canada, and dropped the $112 billion deficit with Europe by just 10%, almost entirely composed of lower imports and only a little by increased exports.
And yes, our deficit with China is going to be in the $260 billion (annualized) range. Dropping that by 10% would not change the deficit that much. You reduce the trade deficit by spending less and exporting more.
However, we would have to grow exports by 90% to balance the trade deficit. Exports are up by 12% over a year ago, and most categories are up, but it is simply not realistic to think we can grow our way out of the trade deficit.
The heavy lifting on reducing the deficit is going to be by a reduction in spending. And that is only going to happen when people realize they have not saved enough for retirement and their homes are not a piggy bank that can be cashed out for retirement. And reduced consumer spending will not happen on just imports. It will be across the board and a drag on the economy. Wishing for a lower trade deficit may bring along problems that are not mentioned in the debates.
Yes, if we can develop coal-to-natural-gas technologies (there is considerable hope on that front), bio-fuels (not ethanol, which is a really bad idea, unless you grow corn) and a conversion to electric-based cars, the developed world can rid itself of oil addiction. But that is going to be at least 10 years down the road, if not a lot longer.
So, the next time some candidate says we have to lower the trade deficit, ask him how he plans to do that. Exactly what policy is going to make a difference, unless we erect trade barriers? See if the candidate says we need to spend less.
Fair Tax Nonsense
The only candidate I will specifically mention is Mike Huckabee. His espousal of the Fair Tax demonstrates his lack of understanding of reality and economics. Basically, Fair Tax proponents want a 23% sales tax to replace every type of government tax. No more income, corporate, social security, or Medicare taxes. And everyone gets a $5,000 or so "prebate" which covers the taxes up to the poverty level. What could be simpler or more fair?
No one would like to get rid of the IRS more than I. I spend way too much on accounting for taxes and such. But this is not the way to do it.
First of all, the 23% they talk about is really 30%. Under the proposal, if an item sells for $100, then $23 of that would go to the government (said to be tax-inclusive). That means the item really costs $77 and the tax is an additional $23 or about 30% (said to be the tax-exclusive rate). Add an average 7% for state sales tax and we are now up to 37%. But wait, it gets worse.
That 23% number simply won't produce the revenues they suggest. That assumes the government will pay the tax, so the budget has to go up. It also assumes that there is 100% compliance and everyone pays that 37% (yeah, right - just like they do the income tax). Bruce Bartlett writes this week in the Wall Street Journal:
"A 2000 estimate by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation found the tax-inclusive rate would have to be 36% and the tax-exclusive rate would be 57%. In 2005, the U.S. Treasury Department calculated that a tax-exclusive rate of 34% would be needed just to replace the income tax, leaving the payroll tax in place. But if evasion were high then the rate might have to rise to 49%. If the Fair Tax were only able to cover the limited sales tax base of a typical state, then a rate of 64% would be required (89% with high evasion)."
44 states have income taxes. They would have to repeal their income taxes and raise their sales taxes in order for individuals not to have to file annual income tax returns.
Do you really want to add 30% to the cost of a new home? And pay an extra 30% in interest on the borrowing price? 30-40% more for your legal services? Do you want your rents to go up 30%? Do you really think that massive evasion would not follow? We would move back to a black market cash economy so fast it would take all of Ben Bernanke's printing presses working overtime to create enough cash for the black market economy.
Yes, in theory it would mean that exports would be priced more competitively, as corporate taxes are removed. The idea as theory is not entirely without merit, but every independent study I have read suggests the number for the tax when combined with state taxes would be north of 40% and maybe more like 50%.
Further, this is a tax hike on the middle class. If you make less than $15,000 you win. If you make more than $200,000 you win, because you actually save more and spend less of your income. This is a nice populist proposal which sounds good but is economically challenged. It only works on someone who has not read about the problems.
Let me give you two links if you want to read more. One is to Bartlett's article and the other is to the people at Fact Check (a very good site for lots of facts on a lot of things) http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010523 and http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/unspinning_the_fairtax.html.
What would I do about tax reform? Dick Armey had it right: flat and low and simple. It seems like every ex-communist country has it figured out. It is just we capitalists that can't get it right.
How to Create an Immigration Depression
The call by Huckabee and others to deport 12,000,000 illegal immigrants is simply economic suicide. It would create a depression (not just a minor recession) in short order. Let's reduce productivity by 10-15%. Let's reduce consumer spending by 7-8%. Shut down hundreds of thousands of businesses who could not get workers they need. Who will pick the crops? Or do any of a hundred jobs that Americans don't want to do? It would drive up labor costs and create inflation. It would be a disaster of Biblical proportions.
Now, I am all for controlling the border. I want to know who is coming in. But we have to deal with reality, and the reality is that we need those workers who are here. The economy simply will not function without them. You can't send them home and then tell them to apply and hope they can get back in, and then expect business to function as usual. It will take years for a bureaucracy to handle the paperwork.
Go ahead. Close the borders. Find out who is here illegally and make sure they do not have a criminal record. If so, they go. The rest need to get documented, and we need to radically increase the number of immigrants we allow (after we control the borders!), especially educated workers who can help us build our knowledge economy.
And yes, this is amnesty. That is the cost of not controlling the border all these years. Nothing we can do about it, unless we want to shoot ourselves in both feet just to prove a point. Sounds rather dumb to me.
The great irony is that within ten years we are going to need even more immigrants to replace retiring boomers, as well as to pay into social security and Medicare programs. We are going to be competing with Europe for those immigrants. We need to get a head start.
And yes, it is a lot more complex than this quick analysis. But pandering to voters who for whatever reason want to stop illegal immigration by throwing out everyone who is here illegally is not the answer. Establish fines, require documents, whatever. But recognize reality and stop telling voters what they want to hear when your policies simply cannot work and will be destructive.
Stimulate the Economy by Cutting Spending?
In the Republican debate in South Carolina last night, the candidates were asked what they would do to stimulate the economy if it is rolling into recession. Nearly every candidate said "I would cut spending" as an answer.
I guess they skipped that class in Economics 101. Deficit spending is a stimulus in the short term. Cutting spending in the short term would be the opposite. I am a huge proponent of cutting spending, smaller government, balanced budgets, etc. But you don't stimulate an economy that is rolling into recession by cutting spending. Dumb answer, and those who are doing the questioning should call them on their economic garbage.
Tax Hikes to Help Us Grow?
The Democratic candidates agree that the Bush tax cuts needs to be repealed. So, in 2010 we face the largest tax increase in history if that is to be the case. Want to double the dividend and capital gain taxes? Vote for Hillary or Obama. Watch your stocks tank.
They want to "tax the rich" and make more for middle class tax cuts. Sounds nice, but let's look at the facts. The bottom half of taxpayers only pay 3% of the total income taxes collected, which is 1% less than before the Bush tax cuts. 44% of the US population, or 122 million people, pays no income tax at all.
The richest 1% of the country pay 39% of all taxes ($365,000 income and up), which is 3% more than before the Bush tax cuts, under the Clinton tax policy. The top 5% ($145,000) pay 60% of all taxes (up 5% from 1999); and the top 25%, with income over $62,000, pays paid 86% of all taxes. It seems to me that the rich are paying their fair share. Every category is paying more now than under Clinton, except the bottom 75%.
Under any Democratic plan, they would want more than 50% of US citizens to pay no income taxes. If you pay no taxes, why do you care if we run deficits? Polls clearly show that those who pay no taxes are overwhelmingly against tax cuts, as they think it will cut their entitlements and benefits. The plan is clearly to build a constituency of voters who will vote Democrat to increase taxes on someone else and spend the money on programs for them.
Any increase in taxes at the levels proposed by Democrats is by definition anti-growth. Government spending is not as efficient or productive as private spending. It will also be a large drag on the stock market. 2010 is now less than two years away. Congress is going to have to deal with tax policy in 2009 or risk a major economic setback. See how safe your job or business will be in a second recession within a few years, like we saw in 1980-82.
A repeal of the Bush tax cuts would raise taxes on the bottom 75% of the country, and cut taxes for the rich, as a percentage of total taxes paid.
I can go on, but I have probably offended enough readers for one weekend.
Europe, Phoenix, and My Conference in La Jolla
I am going to be in Phoenix February 9-10, speaking several times at the Cambridge House Resource Investment Conference. This is a large, free conference with an outstanding line-up of speakers, mostly focused on natural resources and gold. If you are in the area, or simply looking for more information on gold and natural resources, you should consider attending. As noted, the conference is free if you pre-register. You can find out more by going to: http://www.cambridgehouse.com/mauldin/access.html and clicking on "Phoenix."
I am off to Europe next Saturday for a week, and am now scheduled to go back April 16-18. I trust the weather will be better in April. Details to follow in a few weeks on the second trip.
We are finalizing plans for the Annual Strategic Investment Conference, co-hosted by Altegris Investments in La Jolla. It will be April 10-12, so save the dates. This is a very high-level conference with nationally known speakers and some of the best hedge fund managers I know. Attendees consistently rate it the best conference they attend all year.
The kids are now off and gone after being here for most of the holidays. The house is quiet and the tree is (finally) out, with all the decorations packed for another year. It is a great pleasure to watch them grow and mature, talking about decisions, anticipating graduation and new jobs. Abbi has been an intern for the Tulsa 66ers, a minor league basketball team, but she was recently hired on as paid staff, running floor operations. Clearly management there knows a good thing. Now if Mark Cuban can get the same vision, maybe Abbi can move closer to Dad.
There have been times when I thought seven kids was a little much, but now I realize I am a blessed man. Seven is just about the perfect number.
It is time once again to hit the send button. Have a great week.
Your working harder than he would like to analyst,
John Mauldin
John@FrontLineThoughts.com
Copyright 2008 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved
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Russ:
Agreed in part, though I think the analysis of the Fair Tax to be cliched and flawed. The Balance of Trade analysis is more or less corrrect, but substantially irrelevant-- the real issue is capital flows (which simply dwarf trade flows) and the value of the dollar. With Gold approaching $900 and oil having kissed $100, it seems obvious that there are too many dollars out there. (In Euro terms, in gold terms, gold's rise has been far, far less.) Yet Bernake seems to be a clueless Keynesian looking to prime a pump when what he is really doing is pushing on a string. I fear stagflation is coming and that, as you note, none of the Dems and few of the Reps seem to get it.
The true issue as I see it is a matter of relative tax rates. (Here Fred is strong, Huck interesting but suspect, Rudy pretty good, Romney OK, McCain suspect) Europe, (due to the dynamics of east Europe, Ireland?) has cut and simplified taxes and with a good chance of a Dem victory in November, the Bush rate cuts seem likely to "expire" -- not to mention additonal Dem tax increases and economic meddling planned. The US corp tax rate is now second highest in advanced world IIRC. THIS IS THE CORE PROBLEM IN MY OPINION. Naturally a stampede for the exits begins in the stock market.
Staying with the subject of this thread (feel free to carry political economic subjects to the thread for them), this bodes ill for the Reps unless they can front someone who can fly into the face of the conventional wisdom and carry the day.
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Here's this from the WSJ about Hillary's next incarnation:
Mrs. Clinton's Sex Appeal
By JAMES TARANTO
January 11, 2008
Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia has the most interesting poll result we've seen in all the years of the 2008 presidential campaign:
Let's not forget the enduring affection New Hampshirites have for their "Comeback Kid" Bill Clinton. He was everywhere, and he issued hard-edged--some say petty--blasts at Obama that received saturation attention in the media. Interestingly, Democratic voters in the exit poll were asked if Bill Clinton were a White House candidate in '08, would they have voted for him or their current candidate. By a margin of 58 percent to 27 percent, Hillary Clinton's voters preferred Bill, while all other Democrats kept most of their own voters. This is not a compliment to Hillary, but it's obvious that without Bill, she would not be in a position to win the party nomination.
Did any pollster think to ask Republican voters in 2000 to choose between their candidate and George Bush père? We're pretty sure not, and that's revealing in itself. Although George W. Bush undoubtedly benefited from his famous political name, it's highly doubtful that Republican voters would have preferred the elder Bush (who, having served only one term, was constitutionally eligible to run). Indeed, although the elder Bush now receives lots of backhanded compliments from those who despise his son (even George McGovern!), many Republicans remember him for tax increases, David Souter and Saddam Hussein's survival.
In Mrs. Clinton's case, the comparison to that feminist icon Lurleen Wallace seems more apposite all the time. But as we look toward November, it's worth pondering the nature of this longing for Bill Clinton.
It seems unlikely that it is, at its root, about policy. Mr. Clinton was not a defining ideological figure, no FDR or Reagan. To the extent that he moved his party, it was toward the center, and the party--including Mrs. Clinton--has in many ways moved back.
There is perhaps an element of nostalgia for the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, notwithstanding that the peace was illusory and the prosperity hasn't gone away.
But above all, Clinton nostalgia is about partisanship. Mr. Clinton endeared himself to his party, and especially its left wing, not via his policies but by provoking the enmity of Republicans--most notably, by being impeached. His final two years in office thus produced a partisan closing of the ranks behind him, to some extent despite his centrist policies. (Ironically, George W. Bush might now enjoy more support than he does among Republicans if the Democratic opposition were better organized.)
It's telling that in Iowa and New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton did much better among Democrats than among independents. This may augur well for her in subsequent primaries and caucuses, many of which are limited to registered Dems. But it may bode ill for November, when the majority of voters will be non-Democrats. Bill Clinton, after all, never quite managed to get a majority of the popular vote, against fairly weak Republican opposition (albeit with Ross Perot available as an alternative).
To be elected, Mrs. Clinton will have to find an appeal broader than her husband's, a tall order given that many of her supporters prefer him. Off the top of our head, the only idea that occurs to us is one she seems to be trying: urging women to vote for her because she'd be the first female president.
There is a risk of taking this too far. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports on a bizarre comment Mrs. Clinton made yesterday while campaigning for the Jan. 19 Nevada caucuses:
Clinton and her busload of traveling press moved from there to the popular local Mexican restaurant Lindo Michoacan, where a "roundtable" that was actually square passed a microphone around to tell her people's concerns about the mortgage crisis and foreclosures. She took notes and munched on tortilla chips. . . .
A man shouted through an opening in the wall that his wife was illegal.
"No woman is illegal," Clinton said, to cheers.
No woman is illegal? She really seems bent on alienating male voters, doesn't she?
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Fred Thompson interviewed about 'war on terror':
http://pajamasmedia.com/pages/2007/11/fred_thompson_war_on_terror_co.php
From November, only dated in the sense that Bhutto was still alive.
I predict Thompson will be the VP pick no matter who wins (other than him) and Republicans will have another upside down ticket like Dole-Kemp '96. How did that work out?
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“Mitt Romney finally won the ‘gold’ yesterday, as he so effusively puts it, and the result is a Republican Presidential battle that is more muddled than ever. The most important story out of Michigan is that Republicans are still looking for a standard bearer. Mr. Romney has the immediate bragging rights with his victory, salvaging his campaign in the process. He was able to win in his native state, and to do so convincingly among Republican voters of all stripes. He helped himself by stressing the economy in a state that has lagged behind U.S. growth for years, even if he did go over the top with his pandering to the auto industry. Mr. Romney can’t stop jobs from leaving the state, no matter how often he claims he can... The result is a blow to John McCain, who was coming off a victory in New Hampshire and had won in Michigan in 2000... Mike Huckabee’s distant third means that he hasn’t yet been able to capitalize on his surprising Iowa victory. His political religiosity didn’t play well outside of evangelical precincts in either New England or the Midwest, and his attacks on President Bush’s foreign policy and corporations have pushed away parts of the GOP coalition... Another winner yesterday was Fred Thompson, who is competitive in South Carolina and is running as the conservative who can unite the GOP’s fractious wings. The former Tennessee Senator has laid out an impressive policy map, but he’s suffered in early contests because his heart and energy didn’t seem to be in the race. That has changed in recent weeks, especially with his pungent, quick-witted debate performances. If he can do better than Messrs. Romney and Huckabee among conservatives, he could surprise in the Palmetto State and give himself a genuine chance at the nomination. The abiding lesson from the last two weeks is that GOP voters are still sifting the field, searching for their next leader.” —The Wall Street Journal
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From the Muslim Observer
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=1692
Unique Opportunity For Michigan Muslims
The American Muslim community can make a big impact on the political scene by voting in large numbers in the Michigan Primary on Tuesday, January 15. Every media headline makes us believe that the fight for the top position is between McCain and Romney on the Republican side. The democrats have no such match going on due the de-franchising of the Michigan democrats by the National Democratic Party, after the state decided to move its primary ahead. Edwards and Obama surrendered to the party bosses and dropped their names from the ballot and agreed not to campaign, except Clinton - she exhibited the courage to challenge the party leadership and has her name on the ballot.
The Muslim community in Michigan has a unique opportunity to beat the pundits by voting as a block for Ron Paul as the Republican candidate. The primary process in Michigan allows to pick either of the two ballots, Democrat or Republican, for the vote. This meets one of the goals of AMPEC, “Promote ideas and the people that are consistent with Muslim community thought. At the same time the Muslim community shall identify those elements that are highly undesirable for peace, stability and humanity, both inside and outside US, and ensure their failure right at the onset.” The Muslim community must very honestly understand that the system of governance in this country follows in the same general direction, irrespective of who is in leadership. With Democrats, the paths may be less treacherous than if the Republicans are in power, but are leading in the same direction! Unless the system gets an overhaul, there will be very little change in the way whole system operates in this country.
The Muslim community’s failure to recognize the importance of primary elections and their vital role in the overall elections process will mean that this year, as usual, a small minority of voters will make decisions for everyone else and the outcome most likely will not be pleasant for the American Muslims. Let’s beat the odds, let’s vote.
Ron Paul meets the Muslim community’s major concern about “War in Iraq” - an issue that every media outlet has ignored in the primary political campaign in Michigan. To the Muslim community, it is the source of major problems in America - security, jobs, education, healthcare, etc.; and the world peace. The Republican candidate who voted “NO” against War in Iraq, is against the Patriot Act and is in favor of bringing the troops back home - deserves our full support in the Michigan Primary; THAT CANDIDATE IS RON PAUL.
Vote Smart on January 15, 2008
Beat the political machine in Michigan - Vote REPUBLICAN and for RON PAUL
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For months, the Republican establishment in New York and New Jersey marched nearly in lock step behind Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former hometown mayor they were confident would become their party’s nominee for president.
But as Mr. Giuliani has plummeted from first to fourth — or worse — in some national polls, as he finished near the bottom of the pack in the nation’s earliest primaries, and as his lead evaporated even in Florida, the state on which he has gambled the most time and money, those Republican leaders are verging toward a grim new consensus:
If Mr. Giuliani loses in the Florida primary on Jan. 29, they say, he may even have trouble defeating the rivals who are encroaching on his own backyard.
“It’s pretty certain that he has to win Florida,” said Guy V. Molinari, the former Staten Island borough president, who is co-chairman of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign in New York.
Those supporters say they are confident that if Mr. Giuliani carries Florida or runs a very close second, he will remain the odds-on favorite to claim virtually all of the delegates from the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut primaries on Feb. 5, when Republicans in 22 states vote.
But if Mr. Giuliani is relegated to a distant second or worse in Florida, even some of his supporters acknowledge that New York’s primary one week later would most likely be up for grabs, with Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts being Mr. Giuliani’s strongest rivals. Like Mr. Giuliani, both are fielding full delegate slates in all 29 of the state’s Congressional districts.
“If he carries Florida, he carries New York,” said Fred Siegel, a Cooper Union historian who has served as an adviser to the former mayor and written a largely admiring biography of him. But winning Florida would require “a miraculous comeback,” he said, adding: “I wouldn’t bet on it.”
With 101 delegates from New York, 52 from New Jersey and 30 from Connecticut, the region accounts for about 15 percent of the magic number needed for the Republican nomination. All three are winner-take-all contests.
Mr. Giuliani’s precipitous decline in national and state polls in recent weeks has prompted many of his leading supporters in the metropolitan area to raise questions about his strategy of largely ignoring early races in Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan to focus on Florida. He received little news coverage during those primaries, then finished poorly in each.
“I think that a lot of what’s happening in general is the early campaigning in Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan playing an active role, and the fact that Rudy chose not to compete,” said Guy F. Talarico, a Giuliani supporter who is the former chairman of the Republican Party in Bergen County, N.J. “People are focusing on that and saying, ‘When are we going to get in the game?’ ”
Still, once the campaign circles back to the metropolitan area, “I think he’s going to win New Jersey,” Mr. Talarico said.
A senior Republican strategist, who is allied with Mr. Giuliani and is working with Republican legislative candidates in New York, said Mr. Giuliani’s decision to circumvent the early primaries was a “big gamble” that for the moment looked in danger of failing.
“Who knows if it will work,” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized by the campaign to speak publicly. “But the danger is what you are seeing now. We’re obviously concerned.”
In Florida, a Quinnipiac University poll of likely Republican voters found last month that Mr. Giuliani was leading the pack with 28 percent, followed by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas with 21 percent and Mr. Romney with 20 percent. But a follow-up survey last week found the race statistically tied among four candidates: Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Romney.
Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers have declined in Florida even though he has invested heavily there. The former mayor spent almost $600,000 on television advertising in Florida between Dec. 8 and Jan. 6, second only to Mr. Romney, who spent $676,851, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a political advertising research firm.
Almost all of Mr. Giuliani’s spending came in the final 10 days of that period, when Mr. Romney stopped buying ads.
The race has also narrowed in New Jersey, according to a poll released this week by Monmouth University/Gannett. The poll showed Mr. McCain leading by 29 percent to Mr. Giuliani’s 25 percent, a difference that is within the poll’s margin of sampling error. In September, the same poll found Mr. Giuliani 32 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival, Mr. McCain.
On Wednesday, Mr. McCain vowed to compete hard in New York. “I’m going there a lot for money,” he said. “I ought to go there for votes.”
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Nationally, a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Sunday found that Mr. Giuliani, who led the Republican field with 29 percent nationally in October and was tied with Mr. Huckabee at about 22 percent last month, had plummeted to 10 percent, behind Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee.
In New York, with its three million enrolled Republicans, polls indicate Mr. Giuliani’s edge was eroding even before the victories by Mr. Huckabee, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney in Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan, respectively. In October, Mr. Giuliani led his nearest opponent by a commanding 33-point margin. By last month, he was still ahead, but his lead had shrunk to 22 percentage points.
New public polls are expected to show the race has tightened even more, polling experts said.
“I have a feeling that the sag in Florida and the sag in New Jersey will probably be matched by a sag in New York,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac Poll, which plans to release a new New York poll next week.
It is unclear what impact Mr. Giuliani’s weak poll numbers and poor primary finishes have had on his fund-raising, as new quarterly campaign spending reports will not be filed until the end of the month. But his campaign reported last week that some workers had given up their paychecks for the month to help save dwindling funds. The campaign reported having $7 million in cash on hand at the time.
There are also concerns among Giuliani supporters that if he does not gain momentum before Feb. 5, he will have to spend precious funds just to win New York, where advertising is particularly expensive.
Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s senior political adviser, said on Wednesday: “Rudy has a long history of fighting for New York, and with his track record and the campaign team we’ve put together here, we’re going to win on Feb. 5.”
Mr. Giuliani has some clear advantages in the region. In addition to having more organizational support from Republican elected officials, he is counting on the fact that in New York and Connecticut, Italian-Americans constitute about one-fifth of the voters in Republican primaries.
But while his popularity soared after the World Trade Center attack, Mr. Giuliani is still reviled by some New Yorkers, including well-organized firefighters who blame him for communications failures on 9/11 and Republicans who have never forgiven him for endorsing a Democrat, Mario M. Cuomo, for governor against George E. Pataki in 1994. Mr. Pataki won.
Mr. Pataki said through a spokesman, David M. Catalfamo, on Wednesday that he was “continuing to evaluate all the candidates and will make an endorsement sometime in the future.”
But several people who worked in his administration, including his former counsel, Michael C. Finnegan, have made their allegiances clear: They are running as McCain delegates.
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Well, actually I believe he does this to everyone but it is great to hear some African Americans (now that they have a Democratic alternative) speak this truth - finally - about the Clintons:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/politics/bal-te.preacher16jan16,0,1629577.story?track=rss
I don't care that Obama is reportedly more liberal than Clinton. I don't care that he is Black. I will take him any day over another Clinton. Go Obama!
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I have zero tolerance with folks who praise Louis Farrakan.
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WSJ Political Diary
Borderline
When it came to illegal immigrants, Mike Huckabee spent his decade as governor of Arkansas as a compassionate conservative. He pushed for a bill allowing immigrant students in-state tuition rates if they went to state colleges, failed to complete an agreement to let state police enforce federal immigration law and criticized federal anti-immigration enforcement efforts. He dismissed as "racist" the motivations of sponsors of a bill that would have required state residents to show proof of citizenship to vote. He often said it was wrong to punish the children of parents who had entered the country illegally.
Well, that was then and now Mr. Huckabee is running for president. Competing in the hotly-contested South Carolina primary this week, he signed a pledge to support a plan that would send all illegal aliens home.
The pledge, sponsored by the advocacy group Numbers USA, commits Mr. Huckabee to oppose any path to citizenship for illegal aliens now in the country and to use law enforcement measures to deport them back to their countries of origin.
Numbers USA leader Roy Beck had previously been a critic of Mr. Huckabee's immigration record, calling it "poor" and "a disaster." But yesterday, he was all smiles at a news conference with Mr. Huckabee in South Carolina: "Probably, this is the strongest no-amnesty, attrition plan of any of the candidates," he told reporters.
But anti-immigration backers of the former Arkansas governor should be wary. He can and often does turn on a policy dime. Jim Gilchrist, founder of the border control group Minutemen, endorsed Mr. Huckabee in December when the candidate "looked me in the eye" and pledged to fight for a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship, which currently makes any child born inside the borders automatically a U.S. citizen. Now Mr. Huckabee says he doesn't support such an amendment and Mr. Gilchrist has been unavailable for comment to reporters asking how he now feels about his candidate.
-- John Fund
Has Romney Broken the Code?
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- One Republican who isn't changing his message after Michigan is Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts Governor finally hit pay dirt in an early primary by pounding away on jobs and the economy. His first campaign events here suggest he's sticking with the theme that won up north.
At the University of South Carolina yesterday, Mr. Romney launched into his now-honed stump speech about how "Washington is broken" and has failed to "secure the border," "fix Social Security" or "fight for every good job." Back in Michigan, Mr. Romney discovered that jittery voters responded strongly to promises to address the economy, especially those in the ailing auto sector who were quick to buy the argument that their problems begin in Washington. He continues to hammer away on that theme here, promising to cut taxes and reduce pork-barrel spending and insisting that "lobbyists" and "long-term politicians" are quaking "in their boots" after his Michigan win.
Can a weakening economy save Mitt Romney? It's too early to tell, since the South Carolina polls probably haven't caught up with the changing dynamics of the race yet -- they currently have him trailing John McCain and Mike Huckabee by ten points or more. But his crowd at the university was heaving -- so big that many couldn't fit in the main ballroom. And even if Grandpa Romney doesn't prevail in the end, attendees got an early view of another Romney politician in the making -- the governor's 20-month-old grandson, Parker, who delighted the masses by crawling into Mr. Romney's arms and burbling into the microphone.
-- Kim Strassel
Dr. Coburn Makes a House Call
GREENVILLE, S.C. -- This state was John McCain's Waterloo in 2000, in no small part because he struggled to gain traction with core Republican voters. The Arizona senator is now trying to avoid a repeat by shoring up his conservative credentials. One bulwark rolled out yesterday was an endorsement from conservative Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn.
Senator Lindsey Graham set the tone for a packed auditorium here in the religious Upcountry, introducing Senator Coburn as a "rock-solid fiscal, social and economic conservative," who represents "everything that was right about the Republican Party." Senator Coburn (just in case anybody was still missing the point) began his own talk by noting that his "credentials as a conservative are unquestioned" and explained that Mr. McCain was the only candidate who could be trusted on the crucial question of appointing conservative judges and protecting "innocent life." Senator McCain hopped in next, praising his own pro-life record and promising to "nominate the closest thing to a clone of [Supreme Court Justice] John Roberts." Only at the end did anyone mention what has been Mr. McCain's traditional selling point elsewhere, his qualifications to serve as commander-in-chief.
The Arizona senator needs all the help he can get from conservatives like Dr. Coburn. Parked outside the rally were a variety of protest groups, some waving signs about Mr. McCain's immigration positions, others waving confederate flags (the candidate's criticism of which earned him the ire of many residents in 2000). But unlike in his 2000 race against George W. Bush, several GOP candidates this year are seriously chasing the conservative vote -- including Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson. That may be Mr. McCain's salvation, and why he's currently the front-runner with support in the mid-20s.
-- Kim Strassel
The Biggest Loser
Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin fought tooth and nail to shake up the primary calendar this year and break what he called the "stranglehold" of Iowa and New Hampshire on the nominating process. But while the accelerated Michigan primary produced a contest of some significance on the Republican side, it was a complete flop on the Democratic side. The vote was virtually meaningless for the Democrats' presidential race, generating little local enthusiasm while producing a feud with the national party that has yet to be resolved.
Because most Democratic hopefuls acceded to the national party's request to keep their names off the Michigan ballot, Tuesday's turnout represented only 20% of the state's registered voting population and in real terms was only 4.8% larger than 2000, the last seriously contested primary. Compare that to the record-shattering Democratic turnout in both Iowa and New Hampshire this year.
Adding insult to injury, the Democratic National Committee voted earlier this year to strip Michigan of all 156 of its delegates to the national convention. While Mr. Levin remains confident the DNC won't make good on its threat and that Michigan's delegates will be seated in the end, the DNC took the unusual step of canceling the block of hotel rooms set aside for the Wolverine State delegation in Denver in August.
Florida Democrats, who casts their vote twelve days from now, are in a similar situation, having also been stripped of their delegates. But at least the Florida beauty contest will include all the candidates on the ballot, and the entire media universe will be watching the outcome, guaranteeing the Sunshine State a big impact on the presidential race as it hurtles toward a critical moment the following week on Tsunami Tuesday.
Not so Michigan. Even as Mr. Levin publicly urged Democrats to turn out Tuesday and register their choice between Hillary Clinton and "uncommitted," the eyes of his party were focused thousands of miles of away on the televised debate between the top contenders in Las Vegas. All in all, the outcome has not brought credit on Mr. Levin, who faces embarrassing question about whether the costs associated with his gamble were worth the unimpressive result.
-- Tom Bevan, executive editor RealClearPolitics.com
The Semi Natural
Sometimes it takes a well-connected journalist to articulate what a lot of people are feeling, but can't quite express in public.
Time columnist Joe Klein did just that when he used a Council on Foreign Relations meeting this week to suggest that "an element of unwitting sabotage" may be behind Bill Clinton's frequently unhelpful comments that have thrown his wife's campaign off-stride. According to the New York Observer, Mr. Klein suggested that Mr. Clinton may be "worrying" that "maybe she's going to be a better president" than he was. But Mr. Klein hastily added that Mr. Clinton is probably ambivalent about his wife's candidacy, because he also has been supportive in fundraising and other areas: "Consciously, I think that he sees her election as president as the final validation of his presidency."
Such amateur psychology would be meaningless if it were not for the fact that Mr. Klein knows the Clintons so well. He spent many long conversations with them during the 1992 campaign and afterwards. In 1997, he anonymously published the best-selling novel "Primary Colors," a thinly fictionalized retelling of Mr. Clinton's rise to the White House that later became a movie. In 2002, he wrote a largely positive non-fiction review of the Clinton presidency called "The Natural."
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Fred on the Bus
by Erick Erickson
Traveling through snowy South Carolina with Fred Thompson, I’m struck by the sense that finally, the man has arrived. The candidate so many conservatives were excited by early in 2007 is finally walking the land.
The Fred Thompson in South Carolina this week is the one America saw knock into Mike Huckabee as a pro-life liberal with “blame America first” beliefs whose economic policies would destroy the economy. And the crowds love it.
Though barely mentioned in the national media, Senator Fred Thompson has been on a barn storming tour crisscrossing South Carolina for more than a week. In a unique approach, he is not just going to major media markets, but to rural areas of South Carolina. On my first day on the trail with Senator Thompson, he drew a crowd of 180 people to a small Mennonite restaurant in Abbeville, South Carolina — population 26,000 with a median income of $15,370. He capped off the day at the Orangeburg-Calhoun County Technical College in Orangeburg, South Carolina with over 200 people braving a rare snow shower to hear him. The day before I joined him on the campaign trail, Senator Thompson’s campaign saw large capacity auditoriums overflowing with people standing outside the buildings waiting to get in.
The crowds are enthusiastic and relieved. Finally, the Fred Thompson they hoped for is on the campaign trail. “Saying the Reagan Coalition is dead is like saying the Constitution is dead,” Thompson began one speech, taking on Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. “The Reagan Coalition was never about the man. It was and is about the principles and values we apply to issues.” He continued, “The issues may change, but the principles do not.” The crowd roared its enthusiasm.
Later in the day, an elderly gentleman asked Senator Thompson about immigration. Senator Thompson responded, “Securing the border is popular for a lot of candidates to talk about these days. They’ve changed their positions. I embrace change, but some of these guys are wearing out the road to Damascus.” The crowd ate it up. Thompson pointed out that he, unlike the other candidates, has been consistently supportive of increased border security and consistently opposed to lax enforcement.
It’s refreshing to hear Senator Thompson. He is not the candidate the media likes. He gives good sound bites, but he is plodding, methodical, and issue oriented. Senator Thompson’s is not a personality driven campaign. It is about issues, issues, issues. And it is conservative to the core. On the campaign trail, it seems Thompson has never met an issue he was ready to solve based on what he perceives as real conservative principles. Chief among them is that if government gets involved, it will probably make the situation worse. There is no pandering. John McCain may give straight talk, but Thompson gives no bull.
Since Mitt Romney’s call for a government plan to save the automotive industry, Senator Thompson has been on a tear blasting him as the candidate who tailors his message to whichever group he is talking to. Taking on Mike Huckabee, Senator Thompson points out that he likes Mike Huckabee, but his policies and agenda are full of empty rhetoric and policies anathema to the entrepreneurial spirit in the United States. He points out that he and John McCain are friends, but he has “strong disagreements” with John McCain on issues such as immigration and taxes.
Polling in South Carolina shows Fred Thompson gaining momentum in the state. The campaign staff has noticed the crowds growing since Fred Thompson took on Mike Huckabee in the Fox News Debate. The message is clear -- Thompson is the real conservative in the race.
There is an opening for Thompson. Mitt Romney has written off South Carolina, ceding the field to John McCain. Mike Huckabee is losing ground as voters learn more about his liberal record. Conservative rallying has begun to impact John McCain. There is a palpable sense in the crowds and among South Carolina reporters that the momentum is with Fred Thompson. And so the campaign soldiers on.
In Orangeburg, South Carolina, Fred Thompson fired up the crowds with humor and substance. After a long day of talking, he coughed and took a sip of water. “Yeah, I’m choked up,” Thompson said, “but I’m not getting emotional.” The crowd roared. Then Thompson went into his hallmark campaign routine -- questions from the crowd. Every event ends that way.
An attendee asked Thompson what he would do about Israel and the Palestinians. While complementary of the President, Thompson said, “Every President has thought he could solve the problem on the force of his personality, but he can’t.” He continued, “There are a lot of things that are possible in that situation, but one non-negotiable — the right of Israel to exist.” More applause. Another attendee asked about immigration. “A nation that cannot control its borders ceases to be a sovereign nation,” Thompson responded. The crowd drowned him out with applause. Then Thompson does what so many of the other candidates fail to do. He talks specifics and policies, mixed with humor and the recognition that what he is doing is rather unique.
It is a unique campaign. Like John McCain, who was written off for dead last June, Fred Thompson has begun a comeback. He has come back as the candidate everyone wanted to get in the race. In the process, he is owning the crowd.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24517
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On the eve of SC/Nev we get Hillary "baring her soul" discussing the Lewinsky scandal. Of course she always loved Bill and of course he always loved her......
Obviously her campaign feels her crying the day before New Hampshire got her the victory there so are now using emotion to manipulative the babe vote. It will probably work. There appears to be no end to the gullibility of some of the electorate for the Clintons:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iD2pnjLSISPm_PmWZjz5fJmP4wqA
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Looks like the Ronulans have the cause of the world's problems figured out, although many have been saying this for years..... :evil:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28664_Todays_Moment_of_Paulmania#comments
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http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:wIq9wSEwbeEJ:www.ronpaulforum.com/showthread.php%3Ft%3D302154+ron+paul+forum+jewish+defector&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari
The Ronulans don't like the scrutiny. Busted by google!
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Not that I agree, but Fred Barnes makes the case for McCain. I am intrigued though that he has gotten Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm on board. Both of these men have my respect.
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Now McCain Must Convince The Right
By FRED BARNES
WSJ
January 22, 2008; Page A19
John McCain has a problem. After winning South Carolina's primary last Saturday, he should be the overwhelming favorite to capture the Republican presidential nomination. He's not, at least not yet, and the reason is that he's alienated so many conservatives over the past eight years.
Mr. McCain may become the Republican nominee anyway -- in spite of thunderous opposition by conservatives including radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, former Sen. Rick Santorum, and American Conservative Union (ACU) head David Keene. Even then, to win the general election, he must find a way to reconcile with conservatives and unify the Republican Party.
Mr. McCain will have to take the initiative to repair the relationship, and he appears ready to do just that.
His victory speech in South Carolina marked a new step. Rather than dwell on the hardy perennials of his campaign message, national security and patriotism, Mr. McCain spoke more broadly about his conservative goals. "We want government to do its job, not your job," he said, "and to do it with less of your money." He praised "free markets, low taxes and small government."
Moreover, Mr. McCain intends to go beyond conservative boilerplate and actually campaign as a conservative. His congressional voting record is predominantly conservative (ACU rating 82.3%), qualifying him to do so. He's already stepped outside his comfort zone on taxes, endorsing a cut in the corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%.
If he echoes the talking points dispatched to his surrogates over the weekend, he'll be fine. Besides touting Mr. McCain's ability to step in as "commander in chief on Day One," they were urged to emphasize what an ally calls a "Kemp-Gramm mishmash" of tax and spending cuts. Another point to stress: "Winning in November" is crucial to putting conservative judges on the Supreme Court.
It's worth noting the presence of supply-sider Jack Kemp and spending foe Phil Gramm on the McCain team. In fact, the Arizona senator has attracted an impressive array of conservative supporters, including Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Trent Lott of Mississippi, former Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, and ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Still, Mr. McCain's ties to liberal Democratic senators, and his difficulty suppressing his maverick streak, are a problem. In a televised debate two weeks ago, he said pharmaceutical companies are "bad guys" and called for importing drugs from Canada. Mr. McCain also endorsed a bipartisan commission to reform Social Security, which many conservatives see as a scheme for raising taxes.
When Mr. McCain strays from conservative orthodoxy, it's often the result of impulse. Before running for president in 2000, he rarely jumped ship. But in his campaign against George W. Bush, he enthralled the media with his "straight talk," which consisted mostly of tweaking conservatives and Republicans.
Since then, he's joined with Democrats to enact campaign-finance reform, push for bills allowing illegal immigrants to stay in this country, and impose a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions. All this has estranged many conservatives. Mr. Limbaugh declared last week that the nomination of John McCain or Mike Huckabee would "destroy the Republican Party . . . change it forever, be the end of it." Former Sen. Santorum and ex-House majority leader Tom DeLay insist they won't vote for Mr. McCain, even if his Democratic opponent is Hillary Clinton.
The McCain campaign claims that it's only a handful of conservative luminaries who oppose him. Not true. Complaints about him are rife among grassroots Republicans, and exit polls from the two primaries he won provide unmistakable evidence. He split self-identified Republicans with Mr. Huckabee in South Carolina and Mitt Romney in New Hampshire. But he barely won "somewhat conservative" voters in those states, and lost lopsidedly with "very conservative" voters.
Mr. McCain won both primaries because of his appeal to moderates and independents, indicating that he'd be a strong general election candidate. But he's got to take the Republican nomination first. That means winning without independents in more states with Republican-only primaries.
Spotlighting his conservative positions is a start. A few gestures bound to gain national attention would help. Appearing at today's March for Life demonstration in Washington would underscore his anti-abortion voting record. As Mr. McCain campaigns in Florida before next Tuesday's primary, a visit to Rush Limbaugh's home in Palm Beach to discuss conservative issues makes sense.
Ultimately, Mr. McCain doesn't have to make conservatives adore him. But he'll never be president unless he persuades them he's the most conservative candidate available with a credible chance of winning the White House. That shouldn't be too hard a sell.
Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and co-host of "The Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel.
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John McCain's Gun Control Problem
by John Velleco
Director of Federal Affairs
In 2000, Andrew McKelvey, the billionaire founder of monster.com, threw a sizable chunk of his fortune into the gun control debate.
It was shortly after the Columbine school shooting. Bill Clinton was in the White House and gun control was daily front-page news. McKelvey wanted in.
He started out contributing to Handgun Control Inc., which had since been renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. But while he agreed with their gun banning goals, McKelvey thought the way they packaged their message was too polarizing.
"I told them that Handgun Control was the wrong name. I thought what they were doing was great but I thought it could be done differently," McKelvey said.
So McKelvey struck out on his own and formed Americans for Gun Safety. Although AGS shared almost identical public policy goals as other anti-gun groups, McKelvey portrayed the group as in the 'middle' on the issue and attempted to lure pro-gun advocates into his fold.
To pull it off, he needed a bipartisan coalition with credibility on both sides of the gun debate. On the anti-gun side, the task was easy. Most of the Democrats and a small but vocal minority of Republicans supported President Clinton's gun control agenda.
Finding someone who could stake a claim as a pro-gunner and yet be willing to join McKelvey was not so easy. Enter Senator John McCain.
McCain's star was already falling with conservatives. He had carved out a niche as a 'maverick' as the author of so-called Campaign Finance Reform (more aptly named the incumbent protection act), which was anathema to conservatives but made him a darling of the mainstream media.
Gun owners were outraged over CFR, but McCain still maintained some credibility on the gun issue.
Earlier in his career, McCain had voted against the Clinton crime bill (which contained a ban on so-called assault weapons), and he did not join the 16 Senate Republicans who voted for the Brady bill, which required a five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun.
But as he ramped up for his presidential run in 2000, McCain, expanding on the 'maverick' theme, staked out a position on guns far to the left of his primary opponent, George W. Bush.
McCain began speaking out against small, inexpensive handguns and he entertained the idea of supporting the 'assault weapons' ban. His flirtation with anti-Second Amendment legislation quickly led to a political marriage of convenience with McKelvey.
Within months of the formation of AGS, McCain was featured in radio and television ads in Colorado and Oregon supporting initiatives to severely regulate gun shows and register gun buyers. Anti-gunners were ecstatic to get McCain on board.
Political consultant Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, hoped McCain would "bring a conservative perspective to the gun debate."
The ads not only pushed the anti-gun show measure in those two states, they also served to undermine the efforts of gun rights activists who were furiously lobbying against the same type of bill in Congress.
"I think that if the Congress won't act, the least I can do is support the initiative in states where it's on the ballot," McCain said in an interview.
At the time still a newcomer to the gun control debate, McCain said, "I do believe my view has evolved."
McCain continued to pursue his anti-gun agenda even after his presidential run ended, and the next year he and McKelvey made it to the big screen.
As moviegoers flocked to see Pearl Harbor, they were treated to an anti-gun trailer ad featuring McCain. This time the Senator was pushing legislation to force people to keep firearms locked up in the home.
"We owe it to our children to be responsible by keeping our guns locked up," McCain told viewers.
Economist and author John Lott, Jr., noted, "No mention was ever made by McCain about using guns for self-defense or that gunlocks might make it difficult to stop intruders who break into your home. And research indicates that McCain's push for gunlocks is far more likely to lead to more deaths than it saves."
Also in 2001, McCain went from being a supporter of anti-gun bills to being a lead sponsor.
Pro-gun allies in Congress who were holding off gun show legislation -- which would at best register gun owners and at worst close down the shows entirely -- were angered when McCain teamed up with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and introduced a "compromise" bill to give the issue momentum.
"There is a lot of frustration. He has got his own agenda," one Republican Senator told Roll Call.
After September 11, 2001, McKelvey and McCain, now joined by Lieberman, had a new angle to push gun control.
"Terrorists are exploiting the gun show loophole," AGS ads hyped. McCain and Lieberman hit the airwaves again in a series of radio and TV spots, thanks to McKelvey's multi-million dollar investment.
A Cox News Service article noted that, "The ads first focused on gun safety but switched to terrorism after Sept. 11. Americans for Gun Safety said the switch is legitimate."
However, Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel pointed out that, "the McCain-Lieberman bill is loaded with poison pills which would allow a single appointed official to prevent any gun show, anywhere in the United States from operating."
Ultimately, the anti-gun legislation was killed in the Congress and AGS fizzled out and disappeared altogether. The issues for which McKelvey spent over $10 million are still in play, however, and John McCain remains a supporter of those causes. In fact, as recently as 2004, McCain was able to force a vote on a gun show amendment.
In the post-Columbine and post-9/11 environments, the Second Amendment was under attack as never before. Pro-gun patriotic Americans who stood as a bulwark to keep the Congress from eviscerating the Constitution were dismayed to look across the battle lines only to see Senator McCain working with the enemy.
John McCain tried running for president in 2000 as an anti-gunner. This year it appears he is seeking to "come home" to the pro-gun community, but the wounds are deep and memories long.
:x
http://gunowners.org/pres08/mccain.htm
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This columnist for the NY Slimes may be onto something :lol:
Editing Hillary’s Story
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: January 24, 2008
Last summer, I asked Hillary Clinton if she had any reservations about using her husband in her campaign. She said no, that having Bill on the team was “a great gift. I have always believed you should get the very best people to advise you.”
I never really made use of the interview. At the time, it was hard to complain about the former president’s role. Publicly, he was limited to the occasional stump speech, telling crowds what a good senator his wife was, and how she had helped a small businessman market his fishing poles to Scandinavia. He had a peculiar line about how he had told her back at Yale Law School that he’d met all the great minds of their generation and hers was the finest. Even if that seemed a tad over the top, supportive spouse is a role that provides latitude for excessive enthusiasm. After all, Laura Bush always used to assure people that her George was up to the job.
But now Bill is all over the place — campaign guru, surrogate candidate, one-man first response team. By next week, he’ll be designing the bumper stickers.
The Democratic elders are wringing their hands about the ex-president’s rants at Barack Obama, worrying that he’ll alienate black voters. That doesn’t seem all that likely. African-Americans have stuck with the Democrats through a lot worse than a fight over who said what about Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
And you can’t deny the Clintons’ double-teaming is throwing Barack off his game. “I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he complained during Monday’s debate.
But in the process, they’re ruining the central selling point of her campaign, the story that explains why she’s the one a dispirited country should trust to make things better.
Every candidacy has one. Barack’s is about the child of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya whose very lineage makes him the vehicle for a transcendent national unity. Hillary’s isn’t how the smart girl from Illinois who overcame every obstacle fate could throw at her to become the first woman president. Instead, it’s a version of the story we love best of all, about second chances and the American capacity to turn failure into redemption.
She admits she messed up during her early first lady years. The health care plan was a disaster. Travelgate is still too embarrassing to go near. “Oh, we made so many mistakes,” she said last summer, waving away the woes of 1993 and 1994 in one fell swoop, all the while referring to the first Clinton presidency in the first person plural.
Her biggest error was taking a major policy role in her husband’s administration. During the 1992 campaign many people, including me, were offended when the public seemed to want to limit Hillary to the adoring gaze and cookie-baking role. But the public was onto something. It wasn’t Hillary’s gender that was the problem, it was her status as spouse.
It’s almost never a good idea for the boss to bring a husband/wife into management. It muddies up the lines of authority, and it lets personal relationships contaminate the professional ones. As every sentient being on the planet knows, the Clintons have an extremely complicated marriage, and sticking it smack in the middle of the chain of command caused chaos.
The implicit promise of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy was that she had learned from Clinton I. In her, Americans would have a candidate who had been in the very center of White House decision-making. And the very fact that so much had gone wrong was added value. She is nothing if not a good learner, and — the story went — she had discovered at great price where all the landmines lay, both in the presidency and her own character. And she had forged a separate political identity in seven years in the Senate. During an era when the challenges to a new president could be sudden and overwhelming — and here Hillary isn’t ashamed to play the terror card — she was uniquely prepared to hit the ground running and achieve the greatest do-over in American history.
Now, Bill’s role as Chief Attack Dog undermines all that. If he’s all over her campaign, he’s going to be all over her administration. Instead of the original promise of the thoroughly educated Hillary, we’re being offered the worst-case scenario — that the pair of them are going to return to Pennsylvania Avenue and recreate the old Clinton chaos.
A lot of people are O.K. with that. (After all, we’ve lived for seven years with a disciplined Oval Office that runs like clockwork while it spreads chaos everywhere else.) Only it’s not change, it’s not a breakthrough moment in American history. It’s just a nervous decision that we’d rather go back than risk going forward.
It’s a story, all right, with Bill at the center. If Hillary expects anybody to get misty-eyed about the first woman president at the inauguration, she’s got to send him home and go back to the original plotline.
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More feminine musings from the NY Slimes:
Two Against One
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 23, 2008
GREENVILLE, S.C.
Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the WebIf Bill Clinton has to trash his legacy to protect his legacy, so be it. If he has to put a dagger through the heart of hope to give Hillary hope, so be it.
If he has to preside in this state as the former first black president stopping the would-be first black president, so be it.
The Clintons — or “the 2-headed monster,” as the The New York Post dubbed the tag team that clawed out wins in New Hampshire and Nevada — always go where they need to go, no matter the collateral damage. Even if the damage is to themselves and their party.
Bill’s transition from elder statesman, leader of his party and bipartisan ambassador to ward heeler and hatchet man has been seamless — and seamy.
After Bill’s success trolling the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, Hillary handed off South Carolina and flew to California and other Super Tuesday states. The Big Dog relished playing the candidate again, wearing a Technicolor orange tie and sweeping across the state with the mute Chelsea.
He tried to convey the impression that they were running against The Man, and with classic Clintonian self-pity, grumbled that Barack Obama had all the advantages.
When he was asked yesterday if he would feel bad standing in the way of the first black president, he said no. “I’m not standing in his way,” he said. “I think Hillary would be a better president” who’s “ready to do the job on the first day.” He added: “No one has a right to be president, including Hillary. Keep in mind, in the last two primaries, we ran as an underdog.” He rewrote the facts, saying that “no one thought she could win” in New Hampshire, even though she originally had had a substantial lead.
He said of Obama: “I hope I get a chance to vote for him some day.” And that day, of course, would be after Hillary’s eight years; it’s her turn now because Bill owes her. “I think it would be just as much a change, and some people think more, to have the first woman president as to have the first African-American president,” he said.
Bad Bill had been roughing up Obama so much that Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina suggested that he might want to “chill.” On a conference call with reporters yesterday, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, tut-tutted that the “incredible distortions” of the political beast were “not keeping with the image of a former president.”
Jonathan Alter reported in Newsweek that Senator Edward Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and former Clinton aide, have heatedly told Bill “that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Senator Barack Obama.”
In the Myrtle Beach debate Monday night, Obama was fed up with being double-teamed by the Clintons. He finally used attack lines that his strategists had urged him to use against Hillary for months. “It was as though all the e-mails were backed up,” said one.
When Hillary tried once more to take Obama’s remarks about Ronald Reagan out of context, making it seem as though Obama had praised Reagan’s policies, he turned sarcastic about getting two distortionists for the price of one.
“I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” he snapped at Hillary, obviously entrapped and psyched-out by the Clinton duo.
On a conference call with reporters yesterday morning, Obama did not back off from his more aggressive, if defensive, stance. The Clintons, he said “spent the last month attacking me in ways that are not accurate. At some point, it’s important for me to answer.” Recalling that Hillary had called mixing it up the “fun” part of politics, he said: “I don’t think it’s the fun part to fudge the truth.”
Bill has merged with his wife totally now, talking about “we” and “us.” “I never did anything major without discussing it with her,” he told a crowd here. “We’ve been having this conversation since we first met in 1971, and I don’t think we’ll stop now.” He suggested as First Lad that “I can help to sell the domestic program.”
It’s odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line. She handed over South Carolina to him, knowing that her support here is largely derivative.
At the Greenville event, Bill brought up Obama’s joking reference to him in the debate, about how Obama would have to see whether Bill was a good dancer before deciding whether he was the first black president.
Bill, naturally, turned it into a competition. “I would be willing to engage in a dancing competition with him, even though he’s much younger and thinner than I am,” he said. “If I’m going to get in one of these brother contests,” he added, “at least I should be entitled to an age allowance.”
He said, “I kind of like seeing Barack and Hillary fighting.”
“How great is this?” he said. “Neither of them has to be a little wind-up doll who’s supposed to behave in a certain way. They’re real people, flesh and blood people. They have differences.”
And if he has anything to say about it, and he will, they’ll be fighting till the last dog dies.
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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=24650
Newt: A GOP Dark Horse?
by Michael Reagan (more by this author)
Posted 01/25/2008 ET
Fred Thompson's gone. Duncan Hunter's gone. All these people are gone. Huckabee could become Huckabeen -- gone by next Tuesday. So could Rudy after next's Tuesday's Florida primary.
All of a sudden you've got this Republican primary coming down to McCain, Romney and Ron Paul. With all this uncertainty, just where can a conservative go? All of a sudden radio talk show hosts, who reflect the opinions of grass-roots conservative voters, are all over the lot hammering on Rudy, hammering on Romney, hammering on McCain and hammering on Paul.
Listening to them you get an idea who they want or don't want. They don't like McCain. Most probably they support either Huckabee or Romney. Although they think Rudy is gone, he could come back if he wins in Florida next Tuesday.
If Huckabee is finished, I think they go to Romney, who is somewhat more conservative than the rest. At any rate, conservatives could be faced with backing either McCain, or Romney, or Huckabee or even Rudy.
Or they could end up backing none of them.
Who, then, could conservatives end up backing? Well, who recently has come out with a new book? Who's doing all the shows talking about his new book? Who is advocating common-sense solutions to the most pressing problems America faces?
Newt Gingrich, that's who. He was out of the race for a long time, he toyed with the idea of running until Fred Thompson entered the race, and then he more or less pulled back.
Why Newt? Ask yourself why Ronald Reagan won. He won because he was able to excite a group of people in America that the liberal wing of the Republican party has never excited -- the grass roots.
Newt Gingrich is the last Republican to have done that -- to reach out to the grass roots, to all those conservative Republicans and Reagan Democrats. Remember, it was Newt who engineered the miraculous Republican take-over of Congress in 1994 -- something that was deemed impossible two years after Bill Clinton won the White House.
I wouldn't be surprised if he was out there quietly working the phones and hoping for a wide-open convention where the delegates -- not the primaries that selected many of them -- decide for themselves who they want to carry the GOP banner in the presidential election in November.
If Newt throws his hat in the ring he knows that in the blink of an eye he will have the grass roots behind him.
Look at what happened Saturday in South Carolina. McCain won with 33 percent of the vote, which means 67 percent of the voters said we don't want McCain; only 30 percent said yes to Huckabee, which means that 70 percent said no to him. About 15 percent went for Thompson, a mere 14 percent went for Romney and 2 percent went for Giuliani.
So basically the voters said a resounding “No” to all of the above.
So who can electrify the base and get them to come out from their bunkers and ignite a groundswell? On the record, the only person capable of doing that is Newt Gingrich.
Covering all the issues that concern the grass roots: Romney represents the Reagan economic approach; McCain, the national security issues; Giuliani represents the hard-line-on-crime position; and Huckabee covers the religious position. Everybody has a piece.
Newt Gingrich covers all of those issues, and in the eyes of the grass roots, he covers them brilliantly. Just as his Contract with America dealt with many of the issues that concerned the grass roots and won Congress for the GOP, his agenda goes right to the heart of our current problems. He's offering concrete solutions to all the concrete problems and that's what the grass roots crave.
As a result, if the nomination gets thrown open in a brokered convention, the person who comes out of the struggle the winner will most likely be Newt Gingrich.
If I'm right I'll back him to the hilt. If I'm wrong I'll follow my dad's lead and support the nominee no matter who he is.
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I have a dream!
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I am no longer a fan of Ann Coulter after witnessing her insult all Jews on Donny Deutch. That said I think she may be on to something when she points out that the Crats are praising McCain because they think he would lose against the Clintons. Here is B. S. Clinton talking highly of McCain as though he is promoting him:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/25/bill-clinton-john-mccain-and-hillary-are-very-close/
Here is Coulter pointing that the Clintons and the liberal media are doing this because they think *Romney* would be the Repubs strongest candidate. One thing is for sure. There is no doubt that the greatest rallying factor to get the Republicans to come out and vote en mass will be to keep the Clintons out. I will be first on line. These two pathological characters need to be put to pasture. I am thinking of registering as a Crat just to vote for Obama:
http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=230
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I am thinking of registering as a Crat just to vote for Obama
Hahahaha!!!!
Nice!
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I'm thinking Obama will be our next president.
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I know the conventional wisdom is that the Reps will lose, but the Dems have a lot of weak chinks in their armor that the Reps will hit only after the candidates are nominated. Until then, the Dems are flower in a hot house of Democrat activists, Moveon.org, George Soros $ and others of such ilk.
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I wish we could transplant Newt's brain into Mitt's body.....
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I bet Newt does too. :lol:
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The Clinton Race Gambit
January 28, 2008; Page A14
WSJ
About Bill Clinton, what can you say? Even before the polls closed in South Carolina on Saturday, the former President was diminishing Barack Obama's victory and trying to boost his wife in the next primaries by playing the race card.
Asked by a reporter why it took "two" Clintons to beat Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton replied that "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina" in 1984 and 1988. And he added that both Rev. Jackson and Mr. Obama had run "a good campaign here." Hmmm. The reporter hadn't mentioned Jesse Jackson, but Mr. Clinton somehow felt it apposite to refer to him anyway. He thus associated Mr. Obama's landslide victory with that of a black candidate who never did win the Democratic nomination, much less the Presidency, and who had run overtly as an African-American candidate in contrast to Mr. Obama's explicit campaign theme of transcending race.
Anyone who thinks this was accidental has spent too much time with Sid Blumenthal. While Mr. Obama won a respectable 24% of white voters, according to Saturday's exit polls, Mrs. Clinton still won 36% and John Edwards 39% of the white vote. Mr. Obama won 78% of the black vote.
The Clintons are now eager to make Mr. Obama into a Rev. Jackson-style "black candidate" as they contest primaries with a larger share of white and Hispanic voters than there were in South Carolina. The Clintons want to portray Mr. Obama as a candidate with a narrowly racial appeal, both to undermine his larger and inspirational message of "unity," and also to play to whatever doubts still exist about an African-American candidate among Democratic voters.
It's going to be fascinating to see if Democrats and the press let the Clintons get away with this. Imagine if Mitt Romney had made the Jesse Jackson comparison. Democrats would have immediately denounced the remarks as "racist," or as a part of some Republican "Southern strategy."
This primary contest has been a rolling revelation for many Democrats and the media, as they've been shocked to see the Clinton brand of divisive politics played against one of their own. Liberal columnists who long idolized the Clintons are even writing more-in-sorrow-than-anger pieces asking how Bill and Hillary could descend to such deceptive tactics. Allow us to answer that lament this way: Our readers aren't surprised.
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Bye! Bye! Rudy!
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This from the NY Slimes, which often butted heads with Rudy when he was mayor. Definitely caveat lector!
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Perhaps he was living an illusion all along.
Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination for president took impressive wing last year, as the former mayor wove the pain experienced by his city on Sept. 11, 2001, and his leadership that followed into national celebrity. Like a best-selling author, he basked in praise for his narrative and issued ominous and often-repeated warnings about the terrorist strike next time.
Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power, and his poll numbers edged higher to where he held a broad lead over his opponents last summer. Just three months ago, Anthony V. Carbonetti, Mr. Giuliani’s affable senior policy adviser, surveyed that field and told The New York Observer: “I don’t believe this can be taken from us. Now that I have that locked up, I can go do battle elsewhere.”
In fact, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was about to begin a free fall so precipitous as to be breathtaking. Mr. Giuliani finished third in the Florida primary on Tuesday night; only a few months earlier, he had talked about the state as his leaping-off point to winning the nomination.
As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers point to the hubris and strategic miscalculations that plagued his campaign. He allowed a tight coterie of New York aides, none with national political experience, to run much of his campaign.
He accumulated a fat war chest — he had $16.6 million on hand at the end of September, more than Mitt Romney ($9.5 million) or Senator John McCain ($3.2 million) — but spent vast sums on direct mail instead of building strong organizations on the ground in South Carolina and New Hampshire.
Indeed, his fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, a state where he was once considered competitive, provided an early indication of his vulnerability.
And, curiously, this man with the pugnacious past declined to toss more than light punches at his Republican opponents.
In interviews Tuesday, even before he gave a concession speech in which he spoke of his campaign in the past tense, Mr. Giuliani described his strategic mistakes, suggesting that his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries. But this is a rhetorical sleight of hand; he in fact competed hard in New Hampshire, to remarkably poor effect.
Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him.
Mr. Giuliani was a temple-throbbing Italian-American New Yorker who ruled a cacophonous city seen as the very definition of liberalism. He was somewhat liberal on social issues — notably immigration and abortion — where Republican candidates are invariably conservative. And he possessed a complicated family life: he has been thrice-married and has two adult children who rarely speak to him. At the beginning of his campaign last spring, he sat for a celebrity photo shoot smooching with his third wife, who snuggled in his lap.
“It bordered on science fiction to think that someone as liberal on as many issues as Rudy Giuliani could become the Republican nominee,” said Nelson Warfield, a Republican consultant who has been a longtime critic of the former mayor. “Rudy didn’t even care enough about conservatives to lie to us. The problem wasn’t the calendar; it was the candidate.”
Several of Mr. Giuliani’s campaign aides acknowledged as much Tuesday. They say he tried to tack right without ever really convincing voters that he had experienced a change of heart. And an adviser who has known Mr. Giuliani since the early 1990s and spoke on condition of anonymity said the mayor’s early poll numbers struck him as ephemeral.
“His numbers were built on name recognition and celebrity,” this adviser said. “He had so many of his old friends around him, sometimes it was like he was running for president of Staten Island.”
In his concession speech Mr. Giuliani acknowledged, jokingly, how out of place he often seemed among conservative Republicans. “We’re a big party and we’re getting bigger,” he said. “I’m even in this party.”
After his third-place finish, Republican officials said Mr. Giuliani was expected to drop out of the race and endorse Mr. McCain, possibly as early as Wednesday.
In the beginning, few cracks were evident in the Giuliani campaign machine. He led the Republican field in polls conducted by The New York Times and CBS News throughout the summer, as his support peaked in August at 38 percent nationally in a four-way fight with Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Fred D. Thompson. That put him 20 points ahead of his next closest competitor, Mr. Thompson, who has since dropped out of the race.
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Mr. Giuliani often played to large crowds in New Hampshire and through the Deep South; everyone seemed to love his tough talk on terrorism. When Mr. McCain’s campaign nearly flat-lined last summer, as he ran low on money, Mr. Giuliani seemed poised to take advantage.
No candidate last summer sent out as many direct-mail appeals in New Hampshire as Mr. Giuliani. Last fall, the campaign also broadcast its first television commercials there, ultimately spending more than $3 million on advertisements, and dispatched Mr. Giuliani there for lots of retail campaigning in a state where voters tend to worry more about taxes and the military than conservative social issues. And he seemed at peace with this choice.
“It is not inconceivable that you could, if you won Florida, turn the whole thing around,” Mr. Giuliani told The Washington Post in late November on a bus trip through New Hampshire. “I’d rather not do it that way. That would create ulcers for my entire staff and for me.”
But Mr. Giuliani’s campaign was stumbling, even if it was not immediately evident. He leaned on friendly executives who would let him speak to employees in company cafeterias. Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain, by contrast, compiled lists of undecided Republican voters and invited them — sometimes weeks in advance — to town-hall-style meetings.
“Rudy Giuliani had a tremendous opportunity in New Hampshire that his campaign never embraced,” said Fergus Cullen, the state Republican chairman. “They vacillated between being half committed and three-quarters committed, and that doesn’t work up here.”
Mr. Giuliani also relied on a New York-style approach to photo-friendly crowds. “Rudy went very heavy on Potemkin Village stops, working what I call ‘hostage audiences,’ “ Mr. Cullen said. “It looked like he was campaigning, but he didn’t know who he was talking to.”
A curious new vulnerability also arose. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took much joy in crawling through the weeds of policy debate, flashing his issue mastery. But as a presidential candidate, he as often seemed ill at ease.
Mr. Giuliani once embraced gun control, gay rights and abortion rights; he knew that all of these issues would be a tough sell to Republicans. While he never shifted positions as sharply as Mr. Romney — who renounced his former support of abortion and gay rights — he as often occupied a muddled middle ground that pleased no one.
This became most evident in the first Republican debate. Asked about repealing Roe v. Wade, he was equivocal. “It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”
Later, he said that the decision on abortion should be left to women — but that he would appoint strict constructionist judges of the type who had favored overturning Roe v. Wade.
“Give him credit — he sort of stuck to his positions,” Mr. Warfield said. “It made him a man of principle, but it won’t make him the Republican nominee.”
Storm clouds swept over the Giuliani campaign in October and November. A federal prosecutor indicted his friend and former police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik. And a report indicated that Mr. Giuliani had spent city money to visit his girlfriend, now his wife, in the Hamptons; the police also provided some security for his new love.
Cause and effect is difficult to chart in a presidential campaign. Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers did not fall off the table, but the news gave newly wary voters another reason to reconsider him.
By late fall, Mr. Giuliani’s poll numbers were fading in New Hampshire, and he trailed Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain. He began a curious two-step, saying he would compete in but probably not win in New Hampshire.
Weeks earlier, he had executed a similar tactical retreat in South Carolina — he and his campaign strategist, Mike DuHaime, said that they hoped voters would cast ballots for him, but that they did not necessarily expect to win the state.
That was a tough pitch in states where voters pride themselves on being taken seriously by candidates.
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“DuHaime comes out and says it’s all about delegates, rather than winning the state,” Mr. Cullen said. “It was amazing. It was the talk of every Dunkin’ Donuts and rotary club.”
By late December, Mr. Giuliani made a fateful decision. He formally abandoned plans to run hard in and perhaps win New Hampshire or Michigan. Instead, he made sporadic appearances in those states and retreated to Florida, where he would make something of a final stand.
This was a deeply controversial move; no one had won an election by essentially skipping the first four or five caucuses and primaries. With this decision, he consigned himself to the media shadows during weeks of intensive coverage. But Mr. DuHaime, who had run President Bush’s effort in the Northeast in a past election, signed off on it, as did Mr. Giuliani’s other top campaign aides.
In the end, Mr. Giuliani and his advisers treated supporters as if they were so many serried lines of troops. If they tell a pollster in November that they are going to vote for you, this indicates they are forever in your camp, their thinking went.
But politics does not march to a military beat; it is a business of shifting loyalties. By Tuesday night, even those voters who rated terrorism as the most important issue were as likely to vote for Mr. Romney or Mr. McCain as for Mr. Giuliani. And those who had voted early for Mr. Giuliani now felt a sense of irrelevance.
“I’ve already voted; I voted for Mr. Giuliani,” David Brown, 70, said in Sun City Center, Fla. “I wish I’d voted for Mr. Romney.”
So Mr. Giuliani confronts the hardest of choices, as he finished far behind two other candidates in a state he had vowed to win. Some of his former aides, particularly those who hail from his days at City Hall, have urged him to slog on to New York, New Jersey and California on Feb. 5.
But there, too, the ground is shifting. Only weeks ago, Mr. DuHaime spoke in a call about the former mayor’s strong lead in those states. “Some of these leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said.
Mr. Giuliani now trails or is at best tied in polls in all of those states. And soon after that phone call, reporters received a memorable e-mail rebuttal from Mr. Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.
“Mayor Giuliani’s momentum-proof national polling lead, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all walk into a bar,” it began. “You’re right. None of them exist.”
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McCain is an American hero. Having said that, I weep for the republican party and this nation if he's our nominee.
The only thing that makes me smile right now is Dr. Crazy's 3% in Florida.
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It looks like Silky Pony is going back to hair care and ambulance chasing full time. :evil:
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There is much to strongly dislike about McCain, but at least he is clear that we are in a war and that we need to win it.
Also, I am somewhat heartened by the fact that he has Phil Gramm and Jack Kemp giving him economic advice.
I certainly prefer him to Lady Evita or BO-- and unlike Romney, currently he leads them in the polls.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/28/mccains-campaign-boasts-another-open-borders-zealot/
This is my biggest issue with McAmnesty.
=================
McCain’s campaign boasts another open borders zealotposted at 10:22 am on January 28, 2008 by Bryan
Send to a Friend | printer-friendly His name is Jerry Perenchio, and he’s a national finance co-chair of the McCain campaign. You can find him listed on McCain’s website. Perenchio has a long history of thwarting the people’s will when it comes to border security.
Jerry Perenchio is the man who poured millions of dollars into fighting the California movement to teach schoolchildren English. Does John McCain share Perenchio’s zealous opposition to pro-English immersion initiatives? If he doesn’t, why does he have the nation’s leading opponent of pro-English immersion initiatives serving in the prestigious position of national campaign finance co-chair?
Perenchio aggressively bankrolled opposition to Prop. 227, which dismantled “bilingual education”–the oxymoronic program that holds foreign-language-speaking students hostage and forces them to maintain their native tongues instead of transitioning to English as quickly as possible–in 1998. He donated millions directly to the opponents and also donated millions of dollars in anti-227 “public service announcements” on Univision railing that “The dreams of millions of Hispanic families are being destroyed.” Despite Perenchio’s massive campaign to prop up language segregationism, the pro-English Prop. 227 won in a landslide.
It’s bad enough that McCain has Juan Hernandez as his Hispanic Outreach Director. McCain claims that Hernandez is on the campaign because he agrees with McCain’s policies. But it’s something else entirely to find that McCain is backed by Perenchio. Perenchio isn’t just an open borders advocate; he’s also a global warming crusader and major contributor to Planned Parenthood. Michelle has all the details. McCain is looking more and more like a creature of the radical side of a couple of issues that put him at odds with the vast majority of the GOP base and, in the case of border security, with the general public as well. Personnel is policy, and the personnel on McCain’s campaign offer a strong hint about which policies he would take with him if he’s elected president.
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"He was too New York, too Italian, and he had too many wives."
DOROTHY KALIADES, of Queens, on the problems with Rudolph W. Giuliani’s presidential quest.
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GM:
Looks like McCain is going to be endorsed by our Dem in Rep clothing governor too , , ,
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WSJ
Hillary's Smear Campaign
By MICHAEL ZELDIN
January 31, 2008; Page A17
Beginning with the South Carolina debate, and continuing as an applause line in many stump speeches thereafter, Hillary Clinton has accused Barack Obama of representing an inner-city slum lord while practicing law in Chicago. Of all people, Sen. Clinton should know better.
During the Whitewater investigation, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated the legal work performed by Mrs. Clinton, then a partner in the Rose law firm, on behalf of Jim McDougal and his bank, Madison Guaranty. Mr. Starr believed that Mrs. Clinton helped orchestrate the fraudulent land deal known as Castle Grande. He subpoenaed her billing records, hauled her before a grand jury, and relentlessly pursued her.
In her defense, Mrs. Clinton and her attorneys asserted that her involvement in the matter was de minimus. As one of independent counsels who preceded Mr. Starr, I was interviewed repeatedly on the subject. I wholeheartedly defended Mrs. Clinton.
I believed that the evidence revealed that Mrs. Clinton, who spent a total of only 60 hours of work on the case over a 15-month period, was not substantially involved in the matter and did nothing improper in her work on behalf of Madison Guaranty. In the end, no charges were brought against Mrs. Clinton because there was insufficient evidence to prove that she knowingly assisted anyone in the perpetration of a fraud.
Yet, when an opportunity presented itself in the debate, Mrs. Clinton, without so much as a blink of an eye or the slightest blush, denounced Sen. Obama for representing "Tony Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." Her accusation invites scrutiny. Not so much for the truth of the accusation (the facts are quite straightforward and completely benign) but as a window into Mrs. Clinton's character and as a lens with which to see whether a Clinton presidency will be a vehicle for change.
The facts are well documented: Upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1991, Mr. Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law review, could have named his job at any law firm or corporate legal department in America. Instead, he selected a boutique civil rights law firm, Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.
During his tenure at Miner Barnhill, the firm accepted the representation of the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a nonprofit group that redeveloped a run-down property on Chicago's South Side. Mr. Rezko, not the client of the firm, was assisting Woodland with City housing redevelopment projects. As a junior associate, Mr. Obama was asked by his supervising attorney, William Miceli, to do about five hours of basic due diligence and document review. That began and ended his involvement in the case.
No one who has ever practiced law, let alone Mrs. Clinton, could argue, with a clear conscience, that these five hours on behalf of a church group that partnered with a man who at a later point in time would be alleged to be a scoundrel equated to knowingly representing a Chicago slumlord. Yet she could not resist leveling the accusation.
I suggest that this provides a window into Mrs. Clinton's character because notwithstanding the enormous suffering she had to endure when accused of wrongful conduct in her representation of Madison Guaranty -- a representation that appears to have been no more than a routine business transaction -- she is willing to behave no differently than did her Whitewater accusers if she can gain politically. She appears to have learned no lessons from the Starr investigation.
Mrs. Clinton's willingness to ignore the truth for short-term political advantage is exactly what breeds the partisanship that's paralyzed Washington for too many years, and the cynicism felt by so many Americans, especially the young. Getting ahead by any means possible is the strategy. Once elected, the candidate falsely believes that he or she will be able to set things right and govern differently. All that was said in the campaign is rationalized -- it will be forgiven and forgotten as part of the hyperbole of the election process.
Sadly, it just isn't so. No one forgets and no one forgives in Washington. (Ask John Kerry if he has gotten over the Swift boat smear campaign.) How you get elected defines who you will be once in power. Mrs. Clinton has shown us with this one simple, baseless accusation why it will be hard for her candidacy to represent a change. She appears too comfortable with the politics of personal destruction if she can gain a political advantage.
Mr. Zeldin is a former independent counsel and federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. He has volunteered for Barack Obama in the Democratic primary campaign.
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What McCain's Got
January 31, 2008; Page A16
Orlando, Fla.
In a time of Republican confusion, Sen. John McCain, reviled as an unreliable maverick, has won three GOP primaries. Florida showed why he's winning.
In the age of modern media, it is possible for anyone with access to Google to learn almost everything there is to know about a presidential campaign -- polls, strategies, stump speeches, background papers, bottomless punditry. What more does one need to know? If the day comes that campaigns are run only with Web videos, that is indeed all you'll need to know. But they're not. They are still worked town by town, from diners to bagel shops and in places like Sun City, Fla., where several hundred retirees gathered Saturday to hear John McCain.
John McCain beat Mitt Romney by 5.5 points in New Hampshire and by five again in Florida. Three months ago, Mr. McCain was a 10% cipher in Florida, with no organization and no donors. This week one saw why John McCain is basically five points better than Mitt Romney, or Rudy Giuliani, at the most fundamental job in politics -- connecting.
When Mr. McCain took the stage in Sun City, the applause was polite. When he finished, he got a standing ovation. He has been at this game a long time, and his ability to sense and ride the emotional flow of an audience is astonishing.
It discomfits some, including me, that Mr. McCain seems like a live, capped volcano. But in front of an audience like this, and before a younger group two days later at the Tampa Convention Center, he stood with that tight, little upper body of coiled electricity and plugged his message of honor, commitment and threat straight into the guts of his listeners.
Rudy Giuliani's antiterror message has been strong and credible, but it was almost an abstraction compared to the meat and potatoes of the McCain presentation.
He asks veterans to stand. About 70 men rise, to great applause. He's talking about the "transcendent threat of radical Islamic extremism" and from there to homicidal doctors in Scotland and arrests in Germany. "Al Qaeda is on the run, but they're not defeated!" He wraps himself, justifiably, in the "Petraeus" surge. And then, "My friends, doesn't the president deserve credit that there hasn't been another attack on the U.S.?" They are going nuts. It wasn't demagogic. He does it with tone and timing. You can almost see his eyes calibrating.
Retail politics still matter, and in an era of terror, war and loss of national self-esteem, John McCain is a retail politics powerhouse.
Some strengths and weaknesses emerged in the Sun City Q&A. The first question was about "our borders," and Mr. McCain brought down the house with, "Thank you, sir, and this meeting is over." The volcano then gets into a gratuitously testy exchange with an anti-immigrant speaker who was already being hooted by the audience. On Social Security, he reverted to the Greenspan Commission. That was back in 1982, and it produced a tax increase.
Mr. McCain is hapless on economics. The answer to why he nonetheless beat Mr. Romney by eight points with economic voters is in large part his effective denunciations of the Bush-GOP spending surge in the first veto-less term. There's nothing "maverick" about that. That spending is the main thing that drove the GOP base into its famous funk.
If Mitt Romney were capable of sadness, he should be depressed. He's very good. That famous, equivocal stiff on the debate stage isn't the same person who pitched himself to about 150 people Monday on the tarmac at the Fort Myers airport. This was an almost nothing stop, but he acted as if it were the first week of the campaign. He came across as energetic, alive, young, smart, informed and ready to work his tail off to "fix Washington." (His remark that Mr. McCain "will say anything to get elected" did have a few reporters exchanging glances.) He spent a long time after the speech immersed in the audience, chatting. He didn't have to do that. He may be unnaturally smooth, but Mitt's a heavy-hitter.
So why is he losing? McCain endorsements by Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez mattered in Florida. But an aide explained after the speech that in New Hampshire and Michigan they watched Mr. McCain rise almost in sync with Rudy's sudden decline. Indeed, the Romney candidacy may ultimately fall victim to the catastrophic Giuliani all-Florida decision.
Tuesday night, at the Giuliani wake in the Portofino Hotel in Orlando, a high official with the campaign said their internal polls had Rudy as the "preferred" candidate for many voters. But naturally, he said, most voters don't want to cast a likely losing vote. It is enraging some conservatives that marginally more of these Giuliani votes are migrating to John McCain. Mitt needed Rudy in the race.
Rudy just doesn't have McCain's national campaign skills, or desire. He arrived at the Fort Myers tarmac in the afternoon after Mitt Romney (Mitt was early, Rudy late). Gave a terrific stump speech -- terror, tax cuts, even threw in the Everglades. Rudy Giuliani didn't have supporters; he had fans. This clutch of fans was separated from him by a red felt rope, as you would see outside clubs in New York.
After the speech, he stepped off the small stage, took off his suit jacket, folded it for an aide and then, staying on his side of the rope with Judith, attached to him like Cling Wrap, he autographed "Rudy Country" signs. And never said a single word. Not a word, save one guy who forced a conversation. All they got from Rudy was an autograph and a grin, which never fell from his face. It was weird.
This will ever be a mysterious candidacy. You can say there was Rudy baggage yet to fall, that the success of the Iraq surge flowed to John McCain, that the half-baked Driving Miss Judy stories hurt, that he was low on money.
Still. He could have competed for a second or third in New Hampshire. Instead he decamped and settled for humiliation, finishing behind a Mike Huckabee whose public life is a dot compared to the Giuliani legacy in New York City. Rudy ran on that legacy, and one suspects came to realize New York was the peak. Running for president requires fire in the belly. But you have to show it on both sides of the velvet rope.
WSJ
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Crafty,
I could be wrong, but I think running a "democrat-lite" candidate is the path to ruin.
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I agree, but here's the problem: I like Romney's positions better than McCain's. I doubt his ability to debate either of Lady Evita or BO. I agree with his immigration policies, but worry he has not accompanied them with word and deed that will enable the Reps to maintain competitiveness with the Dems for the Latino vote. As hard line as I am on illegals, I am also clear that good immigration is good and necessary for the US-- and Romney has not really paired this point with his properly hardline comments on illegals.
We saw this happen in California over an initiatitive some years back-- and now CA is a solidly Dem state. I doubt his ability to not get buttf*cked by a Dem congress and the Dem controlled MSM into compromising on just about everything. Current polls have McC beating both Lady Evita and BO, and Romney losing to both.
What to do?
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I think this is a "rebuilding year". Let the dems wins the white house and really FCUK things up. We can then get a good candidate in 2012.
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***Current polls have McC beating both Lady Evita and BO, and Romney losing to both.***
I am not sure I trust those polls.
The Dems seem very happy running against McCain to me.
I wonder what the secret "internal" polling shows.
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Nominating McAmnesty removes the most powerful wedge issue we have. Illegal immigration. Lose that and indeed we've lost.
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Unfortunately not nominating him means we've lost the most effective advocate for winning the war in Iraq, preventing Iran's nuke program, and fighting Islamic Fascism.
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When it comes to Iran's nuclear program, it's probably already too late. If it's not, by jan. 2009 it certainly will be. If we are going to move against Iran, President Bush will have to be the trigger puller.
As far as the war against the global jihad, it'll still be there in 2012. We may have a few more 9/11's under our belt by then, but let the dems shut down Gitmo and defang us globally. Much of the casualties CONUS will be in those densely populated blue states. We'll see how reality shapes future politics.
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A nicely made point on another forum:
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I was intrigued by the reason the Witch gave last night for being against driving licenses for illegal immigrants.
From the transcript
"I do not think that it is either appropriate to give a driver's license to someone who is here undocumented, putting them, frankly, at risk, because that is clear evidence that they are not here legally"
"If you want to round up into four (million) people, how many tens of thousands of federal law enforcement officials would that take ... And how much authority would they have to be given to knock on every door of every business and every home? I don't think Americans would stand for that."
Lets read between the lines. Registration is bad for illegal immigrants as Republicans would use it as a database to round them up.
Now lets go back to 2000 where The Witch said:
"We license drivers before they get behind the wheel to make sure they can drive safely. We register cars to make sure someone is responsible for every vehicle on the road. But we don't do the same for deadly weapons,"
So we need to register guns but don't worry registration will not lead to confiscation. We should not register illegal immigrants as that will lead to deportation... Now how can someone be prepared to swear to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" when they have no regard for the 2nd amendment but will twist the rules to keep illegals here?
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Someone who isn't McCain could hammer Hillary for statements like that in the general election.
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Kerry: "McCain approached me in 2004 about being my VP candidate"
http://mydd.com/story/2007/4/3/11936/97033
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Two post copied from another forum:
==========================================
John McCain: The Democrats' Favorite Republican I got this email today and thought that I'd share the info with you guy's. I haven't had a chance to read all of the links, but I thought that some of you might be interested anyway.
John McCain: The Democrats' Favorite Republican (Video) (1min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGrWt-XICHc
John McCain is a Liberal
"I believe my party has gone astray. I think the Democratic Party is a fine party, and I have no problems with it, in their views and their philosophy." - John McCain
McCain Calls Conservative Leaders 'Agents of Intolerance' (The Wall Street Journal)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB9517...?mod=googlewsj
"Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether ... on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right." - John McCain
McCain's Age (Townhall)
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/T...24/mccains_age
Age: 71
- McCain graduated 894th out of 899 in his class at the United States Naval Academy
Betrayal, deceit, corruption and John McCain (The U.S. Veteran Dispatch)
http://www.usvetdsp.com/nov07/mccain_deceit.htm
"While still married to Carol, McCain began an adulterous relationship with
Cindy. He married Cindy in May 1980 - just a month after dumping his
crippled wife and securing a divorce."
John McCain: The Geraldo Rivera Republican (Human Events)
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=24621
McCain: I'll Respect Hillary (NewsMax)
http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/m.../18/50422.html
"I Have No Doubt That Senator Clinton Would Make A Good President." - John McCain
The Real McCain Record (National Review Online)
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...Y5NTZiOGNhOGQ=
Abortion:
John McCain Supports Embryonic Stem Cell Research (Audio)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvl3sDW8T9c
McCain Softens Abortion Stand (The Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...cain082499.htm
"But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." - John McCain
Anger Issues:
Andy Card: I Have Seen John McCain's Anger (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...1/110824.shtml
John McCain: I Have Anger Issues (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...8/113442.shtml
John McCain's Temper Preceded Vietnam (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...0/123006.shtml
McCain Goes Nuts Near Senate Floor (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...9/210233.shtml
McCain's Out-of-Control Anger: Does He Have the Temperament to Be President? (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/.../5/00548.shtml
Vanity Fair Tiptoes Around McCain's Explosive Temper (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...0/182118.shtml
Endorsements:
Juan Hernandez, Open borders Advocate Endorses McCain (HotAir)
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/2...cain-campaign/
Republicans for Al Gore (Environmental Protection) Endorses McCain (Press Release)http://www.rep.org/opinions/press_re...ase08-1-8.html
The New York Times Endorses John McCain and Clinton (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCan...29487020080125
Foreign Policy:
McCain considers setting benchmarks for Iraqis (Arizona Daily Star)
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/166271
McCain falls asleep during the State of the Union Address (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkkTFVIxMQs
McCain: No 'Torture' for 9/11 Mastermind (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...6/113204.shtml
McCain to Close Gitmo: "The first day I am President" (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Co7x3A12s
McCain: Torture Worked on Me (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...9/100012.shtml
Global Warming:
McCain and Lieberman Push for New Anti-Global Warming Legislation (The National Center for Public Policy Research)
http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR1803.html
Senators McCain and Lieberman Propose Energy Tax (The National Center for Public Policy Research)http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR102103.html
"No drilling in ANWR, nor in the Everglades, nor off the coast of Florida ... To think that drilling in ANWR is the solution to our incredible energy needs is frankly, is not keeping in the reality of what's there, and what it would take to get it out." - John McCain
"I always have a glass of ethanol before breakfast every morning" - John McCain
Illegal Immigration:
McCain Would Sign Amnesty Bill as President (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWRW4GoGHY
John McCain gets a 'D' on his Immigration Voting Report Card (Americans for Better Immigration)http://grades.betterimmigration.com/...ct=AZ&VIPID=33
- McCain favors business lobbyists’ desires for foreign workers vs. protecting American workers’ wages and jobs
- McCain’s hopes of giving millions amnesty will saddle American taxpayers with huge costs of $20,000 per illegal per year
- McCain has taken the pro-amnesty position in nearly two dozen votes
- McCain only promises to make 2 million of the 12-20 million illegal aliens go home
John McCain Praises Pro-illegal Protests (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...2/120003.shtml
McCain aide touts 'Mexico first' policy (WorldNetDaily)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=59890
McCain: "Americans Will Not Pick Lettuce for $50 an Hour" (AFL-CIO)
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/04/05/50...ttuce-you-bet/
McCain called plan 'amnesty' in 2003 (WorldNetDaily)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=59567
"I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people, Amnesty has to be an important part..." - John McCain, 2003
McCain: U.S. Should Welcome Illegal Immigrants (FOXNews)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123844,00.html
Michigan Crowd Boos McCain On Illegal Immigration (Video) (1min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-nVJGsTdKU
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Endorsements:
Juan Hernandez, Open borders Advocate Endorses McCain (HotAir)
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/2...cain-campaign/
Republicans for Al Gore (Environmental Protection) Endorses McCain (Press Release)http://www.rep.org/opinions/press_re...ase08-1-8.html
The New York Times Endorses John McCain and Clinton (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCan...29487020080125
Foreign Policy:
McCain considers setting benchmarks for Iraqis (Arizona Daily Star)
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/166271
McCain falls asleep during the State of the Union Address (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkkTFVIxMQs
McCain: No 'Torture' for 9/11 Mastermind (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...6/113204.shtml
McCain to Close Gitmo: "The first day I am President" (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Co7x3A12s
McCain: Torture Worked on Me (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...9/100012.shtml
Global Warming:
McCain and Lieberman Push for New Anti-Global Warming Legislation (The National Center for Public Policy Research)
http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR1803.html
Senators McCain and Lieberman Propose Energy Tax (The National Center for Public Policy Research)http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR102103.html
"No drilling in ANWR, nor in the Everglades, nor off the coast of Florida ... To think that drilling in ANWR is the solution to our incredible energy needs is frankly, is not keeping in the reality of what's there, and what it would take to get it out." - John McCain
"I always have a glass of ethanol before breakfast every morning" - John McCain
Illegal Immigration:
McCain Would Sign Amnesty Bill as President (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWRW4GoGHY
John McCain gets a 'D' on his Immigration Voting Report Card (Americans for Better Immigration)http://grades.betterimmigration.com/...ct=AZ&VIPID=33
- McCain favors business lobbyists’ desires for foreign workers vs. protecting American workers’ wages and jobs
- McCain’s hopes of giving millions amnesty will saddle American taxpayers with huge costs of $20,000 per illegal per year
- McCain has taken the pro-amnesty position in nearly two dozen votes
- McCain only promises to make 2 million of the 12-20 million illegal aliens go home
John McCain Praises Pro-illegal Protests (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...2/120003.shtml
McCain aide touts 'Mexico first' policy (WorldNetDaily)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=59890
McCain: "Americans Will Not Pick Lettuce for $50 an Hour" (AFL-CIO)
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/04/05/50...ttuce-you-bet/
McCain called plan 'amnesty' in 2003 (WorldNetDaily)
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=59567
"I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people, Amnesty has to be an important part..." - John McCain, 2003
McCain: U.S. Should Welcome Illegal Immigrants (FOXNews)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123844,00.html
Michigan Crowd Boos McCain On Illegal Immigration (Video) (1min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-nVJGsTdKU
Open borders advocate Juan Hernandez has joined the McCain campaign (HotAir)http://hotair.com/archives/2008/01/2...cain-campaign/
- Juan Hernandez, McCain Advisor: Mexico First! (Video) (4min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i7dyp_nK_Q
U.S. Border Patrol Agents Angry with McCain (NewsMax)
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/...902.shtml?s=et
Marriage:
Christian Leader James Dobson says 'no way' to McCain candidacy (WorldNetDaily)http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=53743
"I think that gay marriage should be allowed if there's a ceremony kind of thing, if you wanna call it that. I don't have any problem with that." - John McCain
McCain: Same-sex marriage ban is un-Republican (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...cain.marriage/
Taxes:
"I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." - John McCain
McCain: For and Against Tax Cuts (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZcJWpmKwk
McCain Boasts That He Voted Against The Bush Tax Cuts (Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUDBV6RhQho
McCain Would Vote Against Tax Cuts Again (The Club for Growth)
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2007/12...gainst_tax.php
- McCain sponsored and voted for an enormous 282% tax increase on cigarettes in 1998
- McCain was one of only two Republican to vote against the $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001
- McCain was one of only two Republicans to twice vote against permanent repeal of the death tax in 2002
- McCain was one of only three Republican to twice vote against the $350 billion tax cut in 2003
McCain’s Costly Tax on Energy (National Review Online)
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...FhNTRlZTM5YzU=
- The EPA Estimates Sen. McCain's Plan Would Hike Gas Taxes By 68 Cents Per Gallon
- The EPA Estimates Sen. McCain's Plan Would Reduce United States GDP By As Much As $5.2 Trillion
McCain Rejects Anti-Tax Pledge (CNSNews)
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics....20080107b.html
Veterans:
McCain Can't Buy His Way Out of Votes Against Funding for Veterans
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/alerts/226
- McCain Voted Against $19 Billion for Military Hospitals
- McCain Voted Against Amendment to Provide $2.8 Billion For Veterans' Medical Care
- McCain Voted Against 2005 Amendment to Provide Guaranteed Funding Stream for Veterans' Health Care
- McCain Voted Against Establishing $1 Billion Trust Fund to Provide Improvements to Military and Veterans' Health Facilities
- McCain Voted Against Adding $1.5 billion to Veterans' Medical Services in FY 2007 by Closing Corporate Tax Loopholes
- McCain Voted Against Mandatory Funding of $6.9 Billion in FY 2007 and $104 Billion Over Five Years for Veterans' Health Care
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Woof,
The problem with McCain and other so called moderate Republicans is that they have gotten tons of support from the core leadership of the Republican Party and access to contributions from Conservatives at the same time that the more Conservative members of the party have been left out to dry. Because of this, I no longer contribute to the RNC; now I directly contribute only to individual candidates that are Conservatives. Frankly, I think it's time to consider forming a Conservative Party. There is no scenario in which I could bring myself to vote for a John McCain but my party has the balls to say to me that if you don't then a liberal will win the White House and it will be your fault. That's B.S., it will be the Republican Party's fault for creating this warn and fuzzy environment where the McCains of the political soup can float to the top. I'm backing Romney now and if enough conservatives see the light and start holding the Republican leadership accountable and stop sending in their nickles and dimes, we might still avoid a Liberal being the next President.
P.C.
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http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/new-mayor-rudy-1971979-republican-war
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Mark Steyn: It's a shame one of them has to win
MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
President McCain? Or Queen Hillary? Henry Kissinger said about the Iran/Iraq war in the '80s that it's a shame they both can't lose. Conservatives have a slightly different problem: It's a shame that neither of them will lose – that, regardless of who takes the oath come next January, the harmonious McCain-Clinton consensus policies on illegal immigration and Big Government solutions to global warming will prevail. Where's Neither-of-the-Above when you need him?
Alas, the only Neither-of-the-Above in the offing is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose candidacy would shake things up only insofar as we'd all suddenly be demanding: OK, where's None-of-the-Above when you need him? Mayor Bloomberg is a former Democrat, former Republican, and current Independent, if by "Independent" you mean "Man who agrees with the conventional wisdom on illegal immigration, global warming, health care and everything else."
Democracies get the political leaders they deserve, and that's particularly true in the United States, where the primary system allows rank-and-file citizens to choose not merely which party to vote for (as in Britain, Canada and Europe) but also which individuals will be the candidates of those parties. True, it helps to be wealthy – up to a point. But it wasn't enough for John Edwards, the curiously unconvincing "angry populist" muttering darkly that "they" would never stop him telling the truth about 9-year-old girls shivering without a winter coat because daddy had been laid off at the mill. "They" didn't need to stop him. The champion of America's mythical Coatless Girl laid himself off last week. High on a hill, the Lonely Coatherd suddenly realized he was yodeling to himself.
Yet Sen. Edwards can't even claim the consolation prize of Most Inept Candidate of 2008. The Rudy Giuliani campaign went from national front-runner to total collapse so spectacularly that they'll be teaching it in Candidate School as a cautionary tale for decades to come. As each state's date with destiny loomed, Giuliani retreated, declining to compete in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina. "America's Mayor" turned out to be Hizzoner of a phantom jurisdiction – a national front-runner but a single-digit asterisk in any state where any actual voters were actually voting.
Giuliani's fate unnerves me because, unlike the Coatless One, Rudy had the support of a lot of my columnar confreres: John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary; Andy McCarthy and Lisa Schiffren at National Review; and David Frum, author of the new book "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again." Yet he backed a candidate who took off and barely cleared the runway before nose-diving into the sod.
Rudy's views on abortion were always going to be a deal-breaker for a key segment of the Republican base. And his views on gun control were likewise beyond the pale for another big faction. That didn't leave much except his cleanup of New York (whose problems were blessedly alien to Iowa and New Hampshire) and, more recently, his "war on terror" credentials, which boils down to his marvelous performance on 9/11, barreling through the dust-choked streets of Lower Manhattan and showing leadership amidst the chaos – plus a splendid coda a couple of weeks later when he told some unsavory Saudi prince to take his gazillion-dollar donation and shove it. Every malign check from the House of Saud ought to meet the same fate: perhaps we could have a constitutional amendment to that effect.
As for his performance on Sept. 11, well, yes, he was good, and he was effective on a day when so many agencies of government, at least at the federal level, had failed spectacularly – FAA, INS, FBI, CIA, all the fancy-pants money-no-object acronyms, none of whose mediocrities paid any political price for their failures.
In 2000, Rudy had been in full public meltdown. His wife learned she was heading for divorcee status from a mayoral news conference. But, unlike so many officials on 9/11, in his rendezvous with history, Rudy Giuliani rose to the occasion. You would hope that would not be so exceptional, but apparently it is.
In contrast to the moral clarity Rudy showed in returning the Saudi check, the repugnant mayor of London, after the 2005 Tube bombings, artfully attempted to draw a distinction between Muslim terrorists blowing up his own public transit (which he didn't approve of) and Muslim terrorists blowing up Israeli public transit (which he was inclined to be sympathetic to).
In contrast with Giuliani's take-charge attitude, the boob presiding over New Orleans, Ray Nagin, raged as wildly as Katrina: "To those who would criticize, where the hell were you?" roared Mayor Culpa, pointing the finger in all directions. "Where the hell were you?" We were in a town you're not the mayor of, happily.
If Rudy's performance was "exceptional," that's less a reflection on him than on the general standards of officialdom. It seems odd to me that so many experts would expect the "America's Mayor" pitch to outpunch abortion and guns with the Republican base: 9/11 will be seven years old by Election Day 2008. A lot of voters have moved on, including a lot of Republican voters. And many of those Republican voters who still regard the forces unleashed that day as an ongoing threat want something different from the Orange Alert remove-your-shoes security-state approach. If this is a "long war," as the administration took to calling it, "America's Mayor" seemed in large part to embody an early phase that has already receded into history.
Another colleague of mine, Michael Ledeen, suggests that the rise of McCain through New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida indicates that for many voters "the war" is still the issue, because, after all, what else has the senator got going for him? Surely, it's not his global-warming hysteria or illegal-immigration amnesty or demonization of capitalism. It's because he's Mister Surge.
Well, maybe.
The senator is an eloquent defender of the U.S. armed forces. A President McCain will not permit a military defeat in Iraq. But it's not clear to me he has much of a strategic vision for the ideological struggle, for the real long-term battlefield in the mosques and madrassahs of Pakistan and Indonesia and Western Europe. McCain's lead is no evidence of popular commitment to "the long war," and, absent any surprising developments, this will not be a war election.
The Clintons are nothing if not lucky, and Hillary must occasionally be enjoying a luxury-length cackle at the thought of being pitted against a 71-year-old "maverick" whose record seems designed to antagonize just enough of the base into staying home on Election Day. In the 2000 campaign season, running in a desultory fashion for the New York Senate seat, Rudy Giuliani waged a brief half-hearted campaign just long enough to leave the Republican Party with no one to run against Hillary except a candidate who wasn't up to the job.
Has he managed to do the same this time round?
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I think Obama is the stronger of the two since Hillary has such high negatives.
If Obama maintains his composure I think he will win. Although it is also hard to know what backroom deals are happening with the Clintons, the unions, other endorsements, election shenanigans etc.
I think Romney still has a chance if he can only come accross with more emotional attachment to his ideals....
For the general election if he gets into it, he will have to reach out to some of voters the populists target because there are so many of them. IMHACO. (In my humble armchair opinion)
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 01, 2008
Leading for Patriotism or Lust?
John McCain scored the most memorable soundbite in the recent GOP debate, repeatedly telling rival Mitt Romney that "led for patriotism, not profit." The Arizona Senator was referring to his tour as executive officer (and later, commander) of a Navy Replacement Air Group in Jacksonville, Florida during the late 1970s, contrasting that experience with Mitt Romney's career in the business world.
There is a slight irony in McCain citing that assignment as proof of his leadership abilities. While he was, by most accounts, an effective commander, the Jacksonville assignment also marked a dark chapter in McCain's personal life, a period marked by serial philandering and the end of his first marriage.
Those events are described--delicately--in Robert Timberg's The Nightingale's Song, a best-selling chronicle of the U.S. Naval Academy, as viewed through the lives (and military service) of five graduates: McCain; Virginia Senator Jim Webb; former National Security Advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, and Iran-Contra figure-turned-media personality Oliver North.
Of the five, Timberg provides the most flattering potraits of Webb and McCain; Poindexter and McFarlane receive less laudatory treatment and the author can barely contain his contempt for Ollie North. While acknowledging the personal--and professional--problems of his subjects during their military careers, Timberg offers a (slightly) charitable explanation for the poor personal conduct that plagued McCain's assignment as group commander.
There was a dark side to the Jacksonville tour. The storybook marriage that had survived separation, pain and prison began to fray. Off-duty, usually on routine, cross-country flights to Yuma and El Centro, John began carousing and running around with women. To make matters worse, some of the women to whom he was linked by rumor were his subordinates. In some ways, the rumors were an extension of the John McCain stories that had swirled in his way since Academy days--some true, some with an element of truth, some patently absurd. Asked about them, he admitted to a series of dalliances during this period, but flatly denied any with females, officer or enlisted, under his command.
Though officially frowned upon, romantic relationships between officers of different grades are not uncommon and for the most part, free of a superior-subordinate element. Many have led to marriage. But fraternization between officers and enlisted members is considered over the line, not because of caste discrimination, but because the color of authority is too vivid, almost impossible to soften.
At the time, the rumors were so widespread that, true or not, they became part of the McCain persona, impossible not to take note of. What is true is that a number of POWs, in those first few years after their release, often acted erratically, their lives pockmarked by by drastic mood swings and uncharacteristic behavior before achieving a more mellow equilibrium.
More troubling, sad beyond words, was the failure of the marriage. If there was one couple that deserved to make it, it was John and Carol McCain. They endured nearly six years of unspeakable trauma with courage and grace. In the end, it was not enough. They won the war, but lost the peace.
To his credit, McCain has admitted his indiscretions during this period. And, Carol McCain has refused to publicly criticize her former husband, or discuss the end of their marriage in detail. She told Robert Timberg that "I attribute it more to John turning 40 and wanting to be 25 again than I do anything else." So, chalk it up as another middle-aged man suffering a mid-life crisis.
But we'd say the Jacksonville tour raises questions about McCain's judgment and leadership, issues that have never been fully explained. True, John McCain wasn't the first fighter jock to lose a marriage due to extra-curricular activities. It's also true that he had a reputation as a wild man, dating back to his time at the Academy and early tours as an attack pilot.
Still, the John McCain who led a naval training group wasn't the same junior aviator of the early 1960s. As the unit commander, McCain was supposed to set the example, both on and off-duty. Military regulations on adultery, fraternization and improper relationships don't differentiate between those that begin in the workplace, or in the Officers' Club. And, as one of the Navy's best-known officers (thanks to his heroism as a POW), you could argue that McCain had a special responsiblity to uphold standards.
If Timberg's description is correct--and McCain has never disputed it--then the Senator was potentially guilty of multiple violations of military law as a senior officer. Yet, there is no account of Captain McCain being investigated on accusations of adultery and fraternization, despite those "widespread rumors" that became a part of the McCain persona. Did he get a pass because of his POW status or family ties, as the son and grandson of Navy admirals? That's another question that has never been answered.
Obviously, no one is demanding that McCain be court-martialed for events that happened 30 years ago. But his misconduct in Jacksonville is relevant to McCain's subsequent political campaign. Those extra-marital "dalliances" reflect faulty judgment and poor choices, traits that have been evident in the Senator's subsequent legislative record. Anyone remember the Keating 5? McCain-Feingold? McCain-Leiberman? McCain-Kennedy? Voting against the Bush tax cuts on more than one occasion? Blocking conservative judicial nominees as part of the "Gang of Fourteen?"
That's why the Senator's repeated references to his Jacksonville tour struck us as a bit puzzling. If command of that group represented John McCain at his best (as a leader), then it highlighted some of his worst personal qualities as well. That's the "rest" of the Jacksonville story, which should provide some campaign grist for the Democratic attack mill.
We also wonder if McCain's reputation in Jacksonville is one reason that the area rejected him overwhelmingly in last week's Florida primary. Of the state's four major military regions, Jacksonville (the third-largest Navy town in the United States) was the only one that McCain lost, and by double-digit margins.
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ADDENDUM: We disagree with Timberg's explanation that McCain's conduct was "typical" of erratic behavior among former POWs in the late 1970s. During the early stages of our military service, we had the opportunity to meet--and know--several men who had been held in the Hanoi Hilton. While most suffered re-adjustment problems (to varying degrees), all the POWs we knew remained faithful to their wives.
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Sorry, I don't have a URL for this, but it seems legit.
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon and also of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group, has been an Obama donor.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.
Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.
“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”
The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.
Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.
Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.
In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.
The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time.
“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a perfect bill.”
Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.
Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a reaction from the industry.”
“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say where things will be a few years from now?”
Page 2 of 2)
Others say that turning the whole matter over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as Mr. Obama’s revised bill would have done, played into the hands of the nuclear power industry, which they say has little to fear from the regulators. Mr. Obama seemed to share those concerns when he told a New Hampshire newspaper last year that the commission “is a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industry it regulates.”
Paul Gunter, an activist based in Maryland who assisted neighbors of the Exelon plants, said he was “disappointed in Senator Obama’s lack of follow-through,” which he said weakened the original bill. “The new legislation falls short” by failing to provide for mandatory reporting, said Mr. Gunter, whose group, Beyond Nuclear, opposes nuclear energy.
The episode that prompted Mr. Obama’s legislation began on Dec. 1, 2005, when Exelon issued a news release saying it had discovered tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear power, in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. A few days later, tritium was detected in a drinking water well at a home near the plant, although the levels did not exceed federal safety standards.
At least as disturbing for local residents was the revelation that Exelon believed the tritium came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from the plant years earlier but went unreported at the time. Under nuclear commission rules, plants are required to tell state and local authorities only about radioactive discharges that rise to the level of an emergency.
On March 1, Mr. Obama introduced a bill known as the Nuclear Release Notice Act of 2006. It stated flatly that nuclear plants “shall immediately” notify federal, state and local officials of any accidental release of radioactive material that exceeded “allowable limits for normal operation.”
To flag systematic problems, it would also have required reporting of repeated accidental leaks that fell below those limits. Illinois’ senior senator, Richard J. Durbin, a fellow Democrat, was a co-sponsor, and three other senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, later signed on. But Mr. Obama remained its primary champion.
In public statements, Mr. Obama dismissed the nuclear lobby’s arguments that the tritium leaks posed no health threat.
“This legislation is not about whether tritium is safe, or at what concentration or level it poses a threat,” he said. “This legislation is about ensuring that nearby residents know whether they may have been exposed to any level of radiation generated at a nuclear power plant as a result of an unplanned, accidental or unintentional incident.”
Almost immediately, the nuclear power industry and federal regulators raised objections to the bill.
The Nuclear Energy Institute jumped out in front by announcing its voluntary initiative for plant operators to report even small leaks. An Exelon representative told an industry newsletter, Inside N.R.C., that Exelon was “working with Senator Obama’s office to address some technical issues that will allow us to support the legislation.”
Last week, an Exelon spokesman, Craig Nesbit, said the company sought, among other things, new language to specify what types of leaks should be reported, and assurance that enforcement authority remained with the nuclear commission and not state or local governments.
“We were looking for technical clarity,” Mr. Nesbit said.
Meanwhile, the nuclear commission told Mr. Obama’s staff that the bill would have forced the unnecessary disclosure of leaks that were not serious. “Unplanned releases below the level of an emergency present a substantially smaller risk to the public,” the agency said in a memorandum to senators, which ticked off about a half-dozen specific concerns about the bill.
Senate correspondence shows that the environment committee chairman at the time, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma who is a strong supporter of industry in battles over energy and environmental legislation, agreed with many of those points and held up the bill. Mr. Obama pushed back, at one point temporarily blocking approval of President Bush’s nominee to the nuclear commission, Dale E. Klein, who met with Mr. Obama to discuss the leaks.
But eventually, Mr. Obama agreed to rewrite the bill, and when the environment committee approved it in September 2006, he and his co-sponsors hailed it as a victory.
In interviews over the past two weeks, Obama aides insisted that the revisions did not substantively alter the bill. In fact, it was left drastically different.
In place of the straightforward reporting requirements was new language giving the nuclear commission two years to come up with its own regulations. The bill said that the commission “shall consider” — not require — immediate public notification, and also take into account the findings of a task force it set up to study the tritium leaks.
By then, the task force had already concluded that “existing reporting requirements for abnormal spills and leaks are at a level that is risk-informed and appropriate.”
The rewritten bill also contained the new wording sought by Exelon making it clear that state and local authorities would have no regulatory oversight of nuclear power plants.
In interviews last week, representatives of Exelon and the nuclear commission said they were satisfied with the revised bill. The Nuclear Energy Institute said it no longer opposed it but wanted additional changes.
The revised bill was never taken up in the full Senate, where partisan parliamentary maneuvering resulted in a number of bills being shelved before the 2006 session ended.
Still, the legislation has come in handy on the campaign trail. Last May, in response to questions about his ties to Exelon, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to a Nevada newspaper citing the bill as evidence that he stands up to powerful interests.
“When I learned that radioactive tritium had leaked out of an Exelon nuclear plant in Illinois,” he wrote, “I led an effort in the Senate to require utilities to notify the public of any unplanned release of radioactive substances.”
Last October, Mr. Obama reintroduced the bill, in its rewritten form.
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Second post of the AM on BO-- here some pro BO Dems say why they are for him:
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/02/02/video-the-disturbingly-cool-yes-we-can-video/
I sense a viral video that may well prove to be a historic tipping point.
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More BO-- this one on his economics. Its from a liberal website, so linear clarity of thought tends to be fleeting:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/index.html
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The economics of Barack Obama
Writing in the Guardian, Daniel Koffler offers a provocative analysis of the economics of Barack Obama, arguing that the senator and his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, have put together a platform that is "orthogonal to the traditional liberal-conservative axis." (Thanks to Trade Diversion for the link.)
If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism. Advancements in behavioral economics, public and rational choice theory, and game theory provide us with an opportunity to attend to inequality without crippling the economy, enhancing the coercive power of the state, or infringing on personal liberty (at least not to any extent greater than the welfare state already does; and as much as my libertarian friends might wish otherwise, the welfare state isn't going anywhere). The cost -- higher marginal tax rates -- is real, but eminently justified by the benefits.
On healthcare and on trade, argues Koffler, Obama is "moving more and more in the direction of economic freedom, competition and individual choice." This reflects the influence of Goolsbee, "who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them."
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programs to essentially democratize the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems.
In a recent forum for candidate economic advisors sponsored by the New American Foundation, Goolsbee offered an example of what he called Obama's "sleek and easy to use iPod version of government." Suppose the goal is to get Americans to save more by diverting some portion of their income into investment accounts. "The research is very clear," said Goolsbee. The way to get people to start doing that is to "default them into automatic enrollment." So, a worker starts a new job, and 3 percent of his or her paycheck is automatically deposited into an investment account. But if the workers wanted to opt out of such a program, said Goolsbee, they could easily do so.
The proposal manages to include elements of the "nanny-state" approach (we'll pass a law that automatically forces citizens to save more) and yet at the same time tells people that they don't have to participate if they don't want to. Technocratic: yes. Inspiring: maybe not.
Buzzwords like "economic freedom" and "individual choice" make it easy for strategists for other campaigns to attempt to portray Obama as Republican-lite, not to mention open up room for attacks from the left such as those relentlessly delivered by Paul Krugman. But when Goolsbee spoke at the NAF forum, he noted that the critical problem at the heart of the American economy is the growing disparity in income distribution between the richest Americans and the poor and middle class. Over the last six years, said Goolsbee, "the typical worker had not seen income grow hardly at all, while the cost of education, health care and energy have all gone up."
It hardly needs stressing that concerns about income inequality do not generally fall into the category "Republican-lite." But it is also true that Obama appears to be pushing a relatively market-friendly agenda that does not map neatly onto liberal Democratic traditions.
Of course, no one on the left ever accused Bill or Hillary Clinton of being raving liberals. It is one of the many peculiarities of this campaign season that Hillary Clinton's campaign strategists have decided that there is an advantage to be gained in attempting to position her as the progressive candidate, in comparison to Obama. Both candidates are much closer to the center than they are to, say, Ralph Nader. So as California and 20-odd other states get ready for, as Keith Olbermann likes to say, the biggest day of primaries in the history of the universe, should the decisive factor in choosing one or the other be the differences in the tactics they espouse, or how one estimates their chances of winning a general election, and getting the opportunity to execute their plans.
-- Andrew Leonard
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Ron Paul’s Immigration Pledge
February 4th, 2008 by Dan McCarthy Ron Paul has signed the Numbers USA pledge to oppose amnesty for illegal aliens and protect America’s borders. Here’s the text of the pledge:
NUMBERS USA Pledge
I pledge to oppose amnesty or any other special path to citizenship for the millions of foreign nationals unlawfully present in the United States. As President, I will fully implement enforcement measures that, over time, will lead to the attrition of our illegal immigrant population. I also pledge to make security of our borders a top priority of my administration.
Numbers USA includes six points of understanding as to what the pledge means and what it entails:
1. The 12 million illegal aliens now here will have to go home.
2. They will not get any legal status while here that allows them to remain long-term.
3. Once in their home countries, they may apply for re-admittance to the U.S. as immigrants, visitors or temporary workers through normal channels.
4. But they will not receive any special privileges on the basis of their having been in the U.S. illegally, such as being put to the front of a line.
5. There will be no new categories or programs through which they may re-enter.
6. There will not be an expansion of green cards in any existing categories that will speed up their movement to the front of the line.
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from RonPaul2008.com
The talk must stop. We must secure our borders now. A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked. This is my six point plan:
Physically secure our borders and coastlines. We must do whatever it takes to control entry into our country before we undertake complicated immigration reform proposals.
Enforce visa rules. Immigration officials must track visa holders and deport anyone who overstays their visa or otherwise violates U.S. law. This is especially important when we recall that a number of 9/11 terrorists had expired visas.
No amnesty. Estimates suggest that 10 to 20 million people are in our country illegally. That’s a lot of people to reward for breaking our laws.
No welfare for illegal aliens. Americans have welcomed immigrants who seek opportunity, work hard, and play by the rules. But taxpayers should not pay for illegal immigrants who use hospitals, clinics, schools, roads, and social services.
End birthright citizenship. As long as illegal immigrants know their children born here will be citizens, the incentive to enter the U.S. illegally will remain strong.
Pass true immigration reform. The current system is incoherent and unfair. But current reform proposals would allow up to 60 million more immigrants into our country, according to the Heritage Foundation. This is insanity. Legal immigrants from all countries should face the same rules and waiting periods.
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We all expected this. Just when it becomes more likely you will lose to the guy come out with the final last ditch play before your gal goes down: offer him the VP on *your* ticket. From the global crossing multimillionaire (how come I couldn't get in early? :wink:):
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/02/04/clinton-chairman-obama-would-be-good-running-mate/
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I'm shocked, absolutely shocked! :lol:
It is really beginning to look like BO could win. Today is HUGE.
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Maureen is my idea of , , , well, nevermind. Regardless, although she usually is to be utterly ignored, I find her interesting to read in this moment to see how the other side sees its intramural contest.
================================================
NYTimes
Darkness and Light
Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:
Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.
I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.
Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.
“I think we should never be derisive about somebody who has the ability to inspire,” Senator McCaskill told David Gregory on MSNBC on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve had some dark days in this democracy over the last seven years, and today the sun is out. It is shining brightly. I watch these kids, these old and young, these black and white, 20,000 of them, pour into our dome in St. Louis Saturday night, and they feel good about being an American right now. And I think that’s something that we have to capture.”
Tuesday’s voting showed only that the voters, like moviegoers, don’t want a pat ending. Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro. Her argument to the Democratic base has gone from a subtext of “You owe me,” or more precisely, “Bill owes me and you owe him,” to a subtext of “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”
Hillary’s strategist Mark Penn argued last week that because the voters have “very limited information” about Obama, the Republican attack machine would tear him down and he would lose the support of independents. Then Penn tried to point the way to negative information on Obama, just to show that Obama wouldn’t be able to survive Republicans pointing the way to negative information.
As she talked Sunday to George Stephanopoulos, a former director of the formidable Clinton war room, Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble.
“I have been through these Republican attacks over and over and over again, and I believe that I’ve demonstrated that much to the dismay of the Republicans, I not only can survive, but thrive,” she said.
And on Tuesday night she told supporters, “Let me be clear: I won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”
Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.
Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia, as well. His visceral reaction to Obama — from the “fairy tale” line to the inappropriate Jesse Jackson comparison — is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill’s legacy is protected. If Obama wins, he’ll be seen as the closest thing to J. F. K. since J. F. K. And J. F. K. is Bill’s hero.
For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic? Will he have the muscle to take on the opposition, from Billary to the Republican hate machine to the terrorists overseas?
“I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I’m tough,” he told a crowd of more than 15,000 in Hartford the other night, with the Kennedys looking on. “I’m from Chicago.”
The relentless Hillary has been the reticent Obama’s tutor in the Political School for Scandal. He is learning how to take a punch and give one back. When she presents her mythic narrative, the dragon she has slain is the Republican attack machine. Obama told me he doesn’t think about mythic narratives, and Tuesday night in Chicago he was reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”
But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.
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One can only wonder what kind of backroom bribery, and other means goes on for the fight for delegates. Obviously it ain't going to be "let the best man win". Not with the Clintons anyway:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8358.html
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Good find!
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Obama claims delegate lead
By: Mike Allen
Feb 6, 2008 08:24 AM EST
Updated: February 6, 2008 09:47 AM EST
In a surprise twist after a chaotic Super Tuesday, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) passed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in network tallies of the number of delegates the candidates racked up last night.
The Obama camp projects topping Clinton by nine delegates, 845 to 836.
NBC News, which is projecting delegates based on the Democratic Party's complex formula, figures Obama will wind up with 840 to 849 delegates, versus 829 to 838 for Clinton.
Clinton was portrayed in many news accounts as the night’s big winner, but Obama’s campaign says he wound up with a higher total where it really counts — the delegates who will choose the party’s nominee at this summer’s Democratic convention.
With the delegate count still under way, NBC News said Obama appears to have won around 840 delegates in yesterday’s contests, while Clinton earned about 830 — “give or take a few,” Tim Russert, the network’s Washington bureau chief, said on the “Today” show.
The running totals for the two, which includes previous contests and the party officials known as “superdelegates,” are only about 70 delegates apart, Russert said.
The bottom line is that the two are virtually tied.
Obama won 13 states, some of them smaller, and Clinton won eight.
On Wednesday morning, the battle was on to shape public perceptions about Tuesday.
The Clinton campaign said it was crunching its delegate numbers but was not sure it was correct that Obama got more.
The Obama campaign sent an e-mailed statement titled: “Obama wins Super Tuesday by winning more states and more delegates.”
Campaign Manager David Plouffe said: “By winning a majority of delegates and a majority of the states, Barack Obama won an important Super Tuesday victory over Sen. Clinton in the closest thing we have to a national primary.”
“From Colorado and Utah in the West to Georgia and Alabama in the South to Sen. Clinton’s backyard in Connecticut, Obama showed that he can win the support of Americans of every race, gender and political party in every region of the country,” Plouffe said. “That’s why he’s on track to win Democratic nomination, and that’s why he’s the best candidate to defeat John McCain in November.”
The Obama campaign attached an Excel spreadsheet containing “state-by-state estimates of the pledged delegates we won last night, which total 845 for Obama and 836 for Clinton — bringing the to-date total of delegates to 908 for Obama, 884 for Clinton.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8358.html
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Dems head for messy nomination process
By: Roger Simon
February 6, 2008 12:54 AM EST
The Democrats may be heading for a fine mess.
Because of party reforms in the past and a close race for delegates this year, a nightmare scenario is building for the Democratic National Convention in August: It is easy to imagine that Barack Obama could get to Denver with more pledged delegates than Hillary Clinton, but that she could get the nomination based on the votes of the superdelegates.
“And that,” a senior Obama aide told me Tuesday night, “would create havoc.”
Pledged delegates are those won in primaries and cacucuses. Superdelegates are party big-shots.
The Associated Press, CNN, CBS and a website called 2008 Democratic Convention Watch all disagree on exactly how the superdelegates are currently split.
But they all agree that Clinton has more of them than Obama, with hundreds still up for grabs.
Being a superdelegate is usually just a way of getting to go to the convention, cast a meaningless vote and have a good time.
But that could change this year.
And that’s because superdelegates make up one-fifth of all the delegates at the convention, and this year they could determine the nominee.
Why?
As Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson puts it: “The process is designed really to avoid picking a nominee rather than pick one.”
In other words, by banning winner-take-all contests and by awarding delegates on a proportional basis, the Democrats draw out the process.
They do this to be “fair” and to protect underdog candidates.
Usually it doesn’t matter. But this time it could because the pledged delegate race could be so close.
“We have a 15 pledged delegate lead going into tonight,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said on Super Tuesday evening.
(The number, with California still being counted, would grow to 43 according to the Obama campaign.)
“And with the superdelegates, we have made real progress. Before Iowa, Sen. Clinton had a lead over 100 to 120 and we have whittled that down to 55 by our count. A lot of [superdelegates] who chose Sen. Clinton, chose her last year. We think we will continue to do well.”
The system of superdelegates was invented not just to reward party fatcats, but to make sure “fairness” did not get out of hand.
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Page 2
Superdelegates are designed to protect front-runners and make sure dark horses don’t run away with things. Superdelegates grow in number as the party gets more successful: They include all Democratic members of Congress, members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic governors. They also are the party warhorses and include “all former Democratic presidents, all former Democratic vice presidents, all former Democratic leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic minority leaders, as applicable, and all former chairs of the Democratic National Committee.”
This means that not only Bill Clinton, but Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, are superdelegates. And their votes count just as much as the delegates chosen by actual primary voters.
But what happens if the margin of victory at the convention is the superdelegates. Is that the the way the party really will choose a nominee? By letting the big-shots pick the winner?
Instead, there could be a huge floor flight. The convention can make whatever rules it wants, and I am guessing there would be a fight to bar the superdelegates and accept the votes of only the pledged delegates.
And then there is the problem of Florida and Michigan, whose delegates, both pledged and superdelegates, are currently banned.
The Clinton campaign has announced it wants them to count.
“There is a role for superdelegates as per the rules of our party, and they are not rules that we set,” Wolfson of the Clinton campaign said. “We will play under rules we are given. [But] we believe the delegates from Michigan and Florida ought to be seated.
But how do you really do that? In Michigan, Hillary Clinton was the only name on the Democratic ballot. In Florida, Democratic candidates were banned from campaigning. Are the Democrats really going to seat them if they could make the difference in who wins and who loses?
As I said, a fine mess. Which, quite possibly, could lead to something we are not used to: a convention that is more than just a TV show whose ending we know in advance.
http://www.politico.com/rogersimon/
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The Democrat delegate process. Tell me the Clintons are not bribing delgates as we speak. Some key points
***Pledged delegates are those won in primaries and cacucuses. Superdelegates are party big-shots.***
Party bigshots???
***Being a superdelegate is usually just a way of getting to go to the convention, cast a meaningless vote and have a good time.***
***But that could change this year.***
***And that’s because superdelegates make up one-fifth of all the delegates at the convention, and this year they could determine the nominee.***
***As Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson puts it: “The process is designed really to avoid picking a nominee rather than pick one.”***
And there you have it - right from the horses mouth!!!!!!!!
***The system of superdelegates was invented not just to reward party fatcats, but to make sure “fairness” did not get out of hand.***
Open up the dictionary and look up fatcat - who do you find? The Clintons and their team!
That may be one reason the Clinton's want to avoid a spectacle of the true depth of the corrupted process. If Clinton gets the nomination in a really close race it will be Florida all over again. So what to do? Make Obama your VP and queit down the "disenfranchised".
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How many people know this:
Included on the list are Harold Ickes and none other then Terry MaCuliffe. Also is John Zogby? Does he announce his potentail conflict of interest with the announcement ofl his pol results that he also happens to be a superdelegate for the Democratic convention/party?!?!?
Talk about conflict of interests.
http://superdelegates.org/SuperDelegates
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You know the Clintons have been working the superdelegate process for years. This is crazy.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rob_kall_080114_superdelegates____ba.htm
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Stealing my wisdom from something I heard Newt say last night :lol: the Super Delegates are simply Super Politicians-- if BO has more support, I suspect most of them will go with BO.
Anyway, here's a piece in support of McCain:
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McCain or the Wilderness
February 7, 2008; Page A18
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham aren't the only conservatives in agony over John McCain. The base is bummed. At the Portofino Hotel in Orlando, Fla., where Rudy Giuliani went down with a graceful valedictory concession, an energetic Rudy guy in dark glasses and slicked black hair -- hours before ebulliently cheering up anyone who would talk to him -- ran up to a reporter waiting for a car. "My wife just heard. Rudy's gonna endorse McCain! S---!!!!"
Wonder Land Columnist Daniel Henninger says it's time conservatives play the hand they've been dealt.
Conservatives can't catch a break. Taxes, judges, the culture -- somewhere a conservative is always getting shafted. The party broke up on the rocks of the 2006 election. Its 2008 presidential nomination has been contested by men claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan but who in fact are: John McMaverick, a New York City mayor on his third marriage, the moderate governor of liberal Massachusetts, and the funniest governor ever from Hope, Ark.
There are murmurs of heading into the political wilderness. Sit this one out. Rather than sell the party's soul to John McCain, let Hillary have it, or Barack. Go into opposition for four years while the party gets its head together and comes up with an authentic conservative candidate. If this sourness takes hold at the margin, say among GOP anti-immigrant voters, it might happen.
The wilderness is a good place to find yourself, if you're a prophet. There are reasons, though, why a principled political retreat won't make conservative prospects better. The point of a principled retreat would be to rediscover coherence amid doctrinal confusion. The exact opposite is likely to happen.
Conservatives, like everyone else, live in a new political space. It's a 24/7 world of blogs, Web sites and talk shows. It's feisty and maybe even democratic. But consensus? This milieu makes consensus harder than ever.
The Web is an engine of constant complaint, not idea formation. The vaunted, take-no-prisoners style of the left-wing netroots came a cropper with John Edwards plateauing at 18% of the Democratic vote. In four years, conservatives will be more confused, incoherent and madder at each other than they are now.
In this world, ideological cohesion that voters can recognize is going to require a large, stabilizing force, like the office of the presidency. Newt Gingrich as House speaker gave a glimpse of how to use another such institution to organize ideas. The promise of the new technologies as intellectual drivers in politics has proven false. They mainly ensure that a big cost of being out of power will be endless intraparty warfare. Evangelicals especially could suffer.
The planets and vapors of politics have put Mr. McCain in this place. He is not Ronald Reagan, who arrived at his moment with decades of thinking about his beliefs. But the next president will have an opportunity to shape his party in ways rarely given to political figures.
This has become an unusual presidential election. If the gods have willed that Barack Obama should suddenly stir the electorate into a state of grand expectation -- another 1960 or 1980 -- then you shouldn't want to be on the losing side when the winning wave breaks in November. Gerald Ford losing to Jimmy Carter in 1976 was no big deal. This one will be a big deal. The energy exploding out of both parties' primaries, producing record turnout, makes that clear. This isn't just about "change" anymore. It's tectonic. Ask the Clintons. In such a time, many voters' allegiances are on offer. But one has to compete for them.
Conservatives, for whom any glass is always half full, have sold themselves short. Notwithstanding the moderate pedigrees of the three major GOP candidates on entry, all emerged from the debates as Reagan conservatives on what matters: taxes, spending, regulation and national defense. Most of the worrisome moderate positions were in the past.
When Reaganomics appeared in the late 1970s, the Republican establishment mocked it. Voodoo economics, someone said. Today for a Republican presidential candidate, it's gospel.
This is an achievement.
Some will say the debate promises were just politics. As opposed to what? Presumably moving people toward one's position is the point of all this daily political heavy-lifting. To now call a candidate's embrace of your ideas unacceptable is churlish and self-defeating. Conservatives won a decades-long debate in their party. Bank it. The demand now that Sen. McCain repudiate that old vote on the Bush tax cuts is an attempt at public humiliation. Ain't gonna happen. If life doesn't work for you without public penance, join a monastery.
Most of the distrust of the McCain candidacy is rooted in personal ill will. He's a hard case, and activists are often brittle. The fear is that one of the strongest impulses in a McCain presidency will be payback, and that he might sell out conservatives on taxes and the judiciary. That is possible, though by now it would require an act of deep duplicity by Mr. McCain. Here again, the conservatives should show more self-confidence.
The big lesson of the failed Harriet Miers nomination is that a real establishment on judicial nominations exists now in Washington. Throwing another David Souter over the transom and onto the Court is nearly impossible. A participant in this process who has discussed it with Sen. McCain tells me that he says his advisers on major judicial nominations will include Ted Olson, Sam Brownback and Jon Kyl. Miguel Estrada, a victim of the Gang of 14 senators on the judicial filibuster, has endorsed Mr. McCain.
Sen. McCain's capos on economics and taxes are Phil Gramm, the probable Treasury nominee, and Steve Forbes, a GOP Hall of Famer who in the 1996 and 2000 campaigns kept Reaganomics alive. By now, the coming sellout is reaching Himalayan proportions. One may still assume the worst. Conservatives always do, not without reason. It is politically obstinate, though, to ignore the presence of this ballast. (For those who still insist on sitting it out over immigration, global warming or stem cells, there is no hope.)
The idea of a concession on national security by conservatives is especially troubling. After six years of blood and treasure, and with the counterinsurgency working, to consciously turn over Iraq to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama . . . words fail.
This isn't an apologia for the senator. Unlike Reagan, he is too self-preoccupied. There is a danger his presidency would be mainly about legacy, and therefore disorganized. This is a call to play the cards on the table. Conservatives are not in the wilderness. They should get back in the game.
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Romney's concessison speech today.
IMHO if he had given speeches like this when he was running, he might be the nominee.
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Governor Mitt Romney Addresses CPAC
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Thursday, Feb 07, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Kevin Madden (857) 288-6390
Washington, D.C. – Today, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Governor Romney announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign for the sake of Republican unity and the future of our country. In 2008, Republicans must stand united if we are to prevent Senators Clinton and Obama from taking the White House. As a nation at war and facing uncertain economic times, the American people cannot afford the Democrats and their agenda for retreat and economic slowdown. With today's speech, Governor Romney outlined the significance of this election and the need for the Republican Party to remain strong.
Governor Romney's Address To CPAC (As Prepared For Delivery):
"I want to begin by saying thank you. It's great to be with you again. And I look forward to joining with you many more times in the future.
"Last year, CPAC gave me the sendoff I needed. I was in single digits in the polls, and I was facing household Republican names. As of today, more than 4 million people have given me their vote for President, less than Senator McCain's 4.7 million, but quite a statement nonetheless. Eleven states have given me their nod, compared to his 13. Of course, because size does matter, he's doing quite a bit better with his number of delegates.
"To all of you, thank you for caring enough about the future of America to show up, stand up and speak up for conservative principles.
"As I said to you last year, conservative principles are needed now more than ever. We face a new generation of challenges, challenges which threaten our prosperity, our security and our future. I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century – still a great nation, but no longer the leader of the world, no longer the superpower. And to me, that is unthinkable. Simon Peres, in a visit to Boston, was asked what he thought about the war in Iraq. 'First,' he said, 'I must put something in context. America is unique in the history of the world. In the history of the world, whenever there has been conflict, the nation that wins takes land from the nation that loses. One nation in history, and this during the last century, laid down hundreds of thousands of lives and took no land. No land from Germany, no land from Japan, no land from Korea. America is unique in the sacrifice it has made for liberty, for itself and for freedom loving people around the world.' The best ally peace has ever known, and will ever know, is a strong America.
"And that is why we must rise to the occasion, as we have always done before, to confront the challenges ahead. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is the attack on the American culture.
"Over the years, my business has taken me to many countries. I have been struck by the enormous differences in the wealth and well-being of people of different nations. I have read a number of scholarly explanations for the disparities. I found the most convincing was that written by David Landes, a professor emeritus from Harvard University. I presume he's a liberal – I guess that's redundant. His work traces the coming and going of great civilizations throughout history. After hundreds of pages of analysis, he concludes with this:
"If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference.
"What is it about American culture that has led us to become the most powerful nation in the history of the world? We believe in hard work and education. We love opportunity: almost all of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came here for opportunity – opportunity is in our DNA. Americans love God, and those who don't have faith, typically believe in something greater than themselves – a 'Purpose Driven Life.' And we sacrifice everything we have, even our lives, for our families, our freedoms and our country. The values and beliefs of the free American people are the source of our nation's strength and they always will be.
"The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960's welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven't given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug. We have got to fight it like the poison it is.
"The attack on faith and religion is no less relentless. And tolerance for pornography – even celebration of it – and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today's grim realities: 68% of African American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45% of Hispanic children, and 25% of White children. How much harder it is for these children to succeed in school and in life. A nation built on the principles of the Founding Fathers cannot long stand when its children are raised without fathers in the home.
"The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through Constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it.
"Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America's vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honored to stand on principle and to stand for principle.
"The attack on our culture is not our sole challenge. We face economic competition unlike anything we have ever known before. China and Asia are emerging from centuries of poverty. Their people are plentiful, innovative and ambitious. If we do not change course, Asia or China will pass us by as the economic superpower, just as we passed England and France during the last century. The prosperity and security of our children and grandchildren depend on us.
"Our prosperity and security also depend on finally acting to become energy secure. Oil producing states like Russia and Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran are siphoning over $400 billion per year from our economy – that's almost what we spend annually for defense. It is past time for us to invest in energy technology, nuclear power, clean coal, liquid coal, renewable sources and energy efficiency. America must never be held hostage by the likes of Putin, Chavez, and Ahmadinejad.
"And our economy is also burdened by the inexorable ramping of government spending. Don't focus on the pork alone – even though it is indeed irritating and shameful. Look at the entitlements. They make up 60% of federal spending today. By the end of the next President's second term, they will total 70%. Any conservative plan for the future has to include entitlement reform that solves the problem, not just acknowledges it.
"Most politicians don't seem to understand the connection between our ability to compete and our national wealth, and the wealth of our families. They act as if money just happens – that it's just there. But every dollar represents a good or service produced in the private sector. Depress the private sector and you depress the well-being of Americans.
"That's exactly what happens with high taxes, over-regulation, tort windfalls, mandates, and overfed, over-spending government. Did you see that today, government workers make more money than people who work in the private sector? Can you imagine what happens to an economy where the best opportunities are for bureaucrats?
"It's high time to lower taxes, including corporate taxes, to take a weed-whacker to government regulations, to reform entitlements, and to stand up to the increasingly voracious appetite of the unions in our government.
"And finally, let's consider the greatest challenge facing America – and facing the entire civilized world: the threat of violent, radical Jihad. In one wing of the world of Islam, there is a conviction that all governments should be destroyed and replaced by a religious caliphate. These Jihadists will battle any form of democracy. To them, democracy is blasphemous for it says that citizens, not God shape the law. They find the idea of human equality to be offensive. They hate everything we believe about freedom just as we hate everything they believe about radical Jihad.
"To battle this threat, we have sent the most courageous and brave soldiers in the world. But their numbers have been depleted by the Clinton years when troops were reduced by 500,000, when 80 ships were retired from the Navy, and when our human intelligence was slashed by 25%. We were told that we were getting a peace dividend. We got the dividend, but we didn't get the peace. In the face of evil in radical Jihad and given the inevitable military ambitions of China, we must act to rebuild our military might – raise military spending to 4% of our GDP, purchase the most modern armament, re-shape our fighting forces for the asymmetric demands we now face, and give the veterans the care they deserve.
"Soon, the face of liberalism in America will have a new name. Whether it is Barack or Hillary, the result would be the same if they were to win the Presidency. The opponents of American culture would push the throttle, devising new justifications for judges to depart from the Constitution. Economic neophytes would layer heavier and heavier burdens on employers and families, slowing our economy and opening the way for foreign competition to further erode our lead.
"Even though we face an uphill fight, I know that many in this room are fully behind my campaign. You are with me all the way to the convention. Fight on, just like Ronald Reagan did in 1976. But there is an important difference from 1976: today, we are a nation at war.
"And Barack and Hillary have made their intentions clear regarding Iraq and the war on terror. They would retreat and declare defeat. And the consequence of that would be devastating. It would mean attacks on America, launched from safe havens that make Afghanistan under the Taliban look like child's play. About this, I have no doubt.
"I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues, as you know. But I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq, on finding and executing Osama bin Laden, and on eliminating Al Qaeda and terror. If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.
"This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters – many of you right here in this room – have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming President. If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country.
"I will continue to stand for conservative principles. I will fight alongside you for all the things we believe in. And one of those things is that we cannot allow the next President of the United States to retreat in the face evil extremism.
"It is the common task of each generation – and the burden of liberty – to preserve this country, expand its freedoms and renew its spirit so that its noble past is prologue to its glorious future.
"To this task, accepting this burden, we are all dedicated, and I firmly believe, by the providence of the Almighty, that we will succeed beyond our fondest hope. America must remain, as it has always been, the hope of the Earth.
"Thank you, and God bless America."
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Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?
By PEGGY NOONAN
February 8, 2008
If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, "I concede" and go on vacation at a friend's house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?
Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it's part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.
She often talks about how tough she is. She has fought "the Republican attack machine" that has tried to "stop" her, "end" her, and she knows "how to fight them." She is preoccupied to an unusual degree with toughness. A man so preoccupied would seem weak. But a woman obsessed with how tough she is just may be lethal.
Does her sense of toughness mean that every battle in which she engages must be fought tooth and claw, door to door? Can she recognize the line between burly combat and destructive, never-say-die warfare? I wonder if she is thinking: What will it mean if I win ugly? What if I lose ugly? What will be the implications for my future, the party's future? What will black America, having seen what we did in South Carolina, think forever of me and the party if I do low things to stop this guy on the way to victory? Can I stop, see the lay of the land, imitate grace, withdraw, wait, come back with a roar down the road? Life is long. I am not old. Or is that a reverie she could never have? What does it mean if she could never have it?
We know she is smart. Is she wise? If it comes to it, down the road, can she give a nice speech, thank her supporters, wish Barack Obama well, and vow to campaign for him?
It either gets very ugly now, or we will see unanticipated--and I suspect professionally saving--grace.
I ruminate in this way because something is happening. Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing. It's not one big primary, it's a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor. She is having trouble raising big money, she's funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead. She doesn't have the excitement, the great whoosh of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign. The guy from Chicago who was unknown a year ago continues to gain purchase, to move forward. For a soft little innocent, he's played a tough and knowing inside/outside game.
The day she admitted she'd written herself a check for $5 million, Obama's people crowed they'd just raised $3 million. But then his staff is happy. They're all getting paid.
Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he'd tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.
And that is a grim and over-the-top analogy, which I must withdraw. What I really mean is they see her as the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction": "I won't be ignored, Dan!"
* * *
Mr. Obama's achievement on Super Tuesday was solid and reinforced trend lines. The popular vote was a draw, the delegate count a rough draw, but he won 13 states, and when you look at the map he captured the middle of the country from Illinois straight across to Idaho, with a second band, in the northern Midwest, of Minnesota and North Dakota. He won Missouri and Connecticut, in Mrs. Clinton's backyard. He won the Democrats of the red states.
On the wires Wednesday her staff was all but conceding she is not going to win the next primaries. Her superdelegates are coming under pressure that is about to become unrelenting. It was easy for party hacks to cleave to Mrs Clinton when she was inevitable. Now Mr. Obama's people are reportedly calling them saying, Your state voted for me and so did your congressional district. Are you going to jeopardize your career and buck the wishes of the people back home?
Mrs. Clinton is stoking the idea that Mr. Obama is too soft to withstand the dread Republican attack machine. (I nod in tribute to all Democrats who have succeeded in removing the phrase "Republican and Democratic attack machines" from the political lexicon. Both parties have them.) But Mr. Obama will not be easy for Republicans to attack. He will be hard to get at, hard to address. There are many reasons, but a primary one is that the fact of his race will freeze them. No one, no candidate, no party, no heavy-breathing consultant, will want to cross any line--lines that have never been drawn, that are sure to be shifting and not always visible--in approaching the first major-party African-American nominee for president of the United States.
* * *
He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy--or professionally desirable--to take him down in a low manner. If anything, they've learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you. (I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They'll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)
With Mr. Obama the campaign will be about issues. "He'll raise your taxes." He will, and I suspect Americans may vote for him anyway. But the race won't go low.
Mrs. Clinton would be easier for Republicans. With her cavalcade of scandals, they'd be delighted to go at her. They'd get medals for it. Consultants would get rich on it.
The Democrats have it exactly wrong. Hillary is the easier candidate, Mr. Obama the tougher. Hillary brings negative; it's fair to hit her back with negative. Mr. Obama brings hope, and speaks of a better way. He's not Bambi, he's bulletproof.
The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented--"He's too young, he's never run anything, he's not fully baked"--the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it.
The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.
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Contrast this piece to one Noonan wrote in 2005 essentially saying, Obama you ain't no Abraham Lincoln:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006884
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Morris and others think that if Obama has a sizable lead the Clinton superdelegates will have to vote for him.
I'm not so sure. I find this surprising from one who is clear that there is absolutely nothing that the Clintons won't do to win. Will their superdelegate cronies do the same? I think many would vote for HC anyway expecting the payoffs.
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Like Will Rogers said some 80 years ago "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat."
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To be fair, Peggy Noonan's observation that Obama is no Lincoln is from Jan. 2005 when Obama had been in the U.S. Senate for about a minute. He still is no Lincoln or even McCain for that matter in terms of any accomplishments, good or bad, but he is the candidate of excitement this year (which is exactly the quality that my candidate lacked). Obama's oratory deliberately lacks specifics and hasn't been challenged with tough follow up questions or substantive debate.
Democrats face two high-risk choices. Obama might or might not be a great candidate and President for them. At least he represents some up-side risk. Sen. Clinton could win a general election with high negatives but would serve more in the likeness of Richard Nixon than Abraham Lincoln. One of the legacies of the Clinton-I Presidency that she wishes to continue was that they lost congress for for 12 years and lost the White House for the 8 years following.
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My first post since superTuesday - I convened our Republican caucus in 2006 in a small Republican town on the outskirts of Minneapolis and I sat literally alone in a schoolroom until I finally approved adjournment. This year we rented City Hall and had 42 enthusiastic participants, mostly dissatisfied with elected Republicans and mostly dissatisfied with the existing choices of candidates, but the people showed up and express passion about their core beliefs. Romney was the winner of the moment, just shortly before he dropped out.
The Newt piece (posted elsewhere) complains that we are doing nothing about Iran and is perfect proof that conservatives including myself who dislike McCain can not and will not sit out this election in a time of war. While Obama wants dialog with terror organizations and Hillary just sees potential foreign contributors, McCain says he looked into Putin's eyes and saw the letters k-g-b.
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Getting to 270
Can John McCain win in November?
February 11, 2008
WSJ
The conventional wisdom is that Republicans start at a serious disadvantage in trying to hold the White House. A still-unpopular war and a softening economy certainly represent challenges. So far, most of the enthusiasm in the primaries has been on the Democratic side, with some 13 million voters casting Democratic ballots and fewer than 9 million picking a GOP one.
But despite these obstacles, John McCain will now begin to assemble his fall election team with surprisingly good poll results. The average of all the recent national polls summarized by RealClearPolitics.com show the Arizona senator leading Hillary Clinton by 47% to 45% and trailing Barack Obama by only 44% to 47%. Both results are within the statistical margin of error for national polls, so it's fair to say Mr. McCain starts out with an even chance of winning.
How could that be? The answer is that the same maverick streak and occasional departures from conservative orthodoxy that make conservatives queasy have the opposite effect on independents and even some Democrats. Mr. McCain's favorable numbers with independents exceed those of Barack Obama, who has emphasized his desire to work across party lines.
* * *
All of this plays out in the Electoral College map that is the key to victory in November. One candidate or the other must win at least 270 electoral votes. The assumption has been that Democrats have an advantage because they can supposedly win every state John Kerry took in 2004 plus Ohio, which has fallen on hard economic times and seen its state Republican Party discredited. That would give the Democratic nominee at least 272 electoral votes.
But Mr. McCain's rise to the GOP nomination throws that calculation out the window. He is the only potential GOP candidate who is clearly positioned to keep the basic red-blue template of how each state voted in 2004 intact and then be able to move into blue territory.
Let's assume that Ohio goes to either Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton. It's at least as likely that Mr. McCain could carry New Hampshire. The Granite State went only narrowly to Mr. Kerry, a senator from a neighboring state, and Mr. McCain has unique advantages there. New Hampshire elections are determined by how that state's fiercely independent voters go, and Mr. McCain has won over many of them in both the 2000 and 2008 GOP primaries. He spent 47 days in New Hampshire before this year's primary and is well-known in the state. If Mr. McCain lost Ohio but carried New Hampshire and all the other states Mr. Bush took in 2004, he would win, 270-268.
It's true that Democrats will make a play for states other than Ohio that Mr. Bush won. Iowa is a perennially competitive state that could go either way this fall. Arkansas polls show that Hillary Clinton might well be able to carry the state where she served as First Lady for over a decade.
But Mr. McCain's roots in the Rocky Mountain West complicate Democratic efforts to take states in that region. His fierce individualism and support for property rights play well in Nevada and Colorado, which were close in 2004. New Mexico, next door to Mr. McCain's Arizona, gave Mr. Bush a very narrow 49.6% to 49% victory in 2004. But Mr. McCain's nuanced position on immigration marks him as the GOP candidate who is most likely to hold the Hispanic voters who are the key to carrying New Mexico.
Mr. McCain also puts several Midwest battleground states in play. Should he pick Minnesota's Gov. Tim Pawlenty as his vice presidential choice, he might have a leg up on carrying both Minnesota and Wisconsin, which went narrowly for Mr. Kerry in 2004.
"The media markets in western Wisconsin get Minneapolis television and are oriented to their news--Pawlenty would be a plus there," says Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican. "McCain's independent stands would play well in that region--which is exactly where GOP presidential candidates have done poorly enough so that they lost statewide by 12,000 votes or so in both 2004 and 2000."
Mr. McCain can be competitive in other blue states. Michigan went Democratic in 2004 by only 3.4% of the total vote, and Oregon by just over 4%. The latest Field Poll in California puts Mr. McCain and Hillary Clinton in a statistical tie. If Democrats have to spend valuable time and resources holding down California, it will make it more difficult for them to take states they lost in 2000 and 2004.
Mr. McCain could even make a foray into the Northeast, where his support from Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party's 2000 vice presidential candidate, could put Connecticut in contention. Ditto New Jersey, which Mr. Bush lost by only 53% to 46% in 2004.
Then there is Pennsylvania, which John Kerry carried by only 2.5% points in 2004. Michael Smerconish, the most popular talk-show host in Philadelphia, believes Mr. McCain has a real chance to carry the state. While Mr. Smerconish is a conservative who didn't support Mr. McCain, he thinks "the conservative blasting of McCain is good publicity around here." His independence and maverick status are exactly the qualities that could help him carry the tightly contested Philadelphia suburbs that voted to re-elect GOP senator Arlen Specter, a moderate, in 2004 but rejected conservative Rick Santorum in 2006.
* * *
In some ways Mr. McCain resembles Nicolas Sarkozy, the French conservative who won last year's presidential election even though the retiring president, Jacques Chirac, was unpopular and a member of his own party. "Like Sarko, who was of Chirac's party but not of Chirac, America's swing voters have intuited over the years that there is little love lost between McCain and George Bush," says the blog Race42008.
Mr. Sarkozy was able to convince a majority of French voters that he represented real change that would improve conditions, while his socialist rival, Segolene Royal, represented risky change that could make matters worse. That is precisely the challenge Mr. McCain faces this year against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
When you hear that the demise of the Republicans is a foregone conclusion, remember that when the campaign is joined this fall and voters will have to make real choices about the direction of the country, the result is likely to be close. Recall that pundits were ready to crown Michael Dukakis the winner of the 1988 election after he opened up a 17-point edge over George H.W. Bush. In 2000, they declared the race over around Labor Day after Al Gore opened up a clear lead over George W. Bush.
Given that polls show Mr. McCain is currently in a dead heat against either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton, it would be wise for the pundits to show a little humility this year. The Democratic strategists I talk to believe the race will be hard-fought and close, regardless of the direction the economy or the war in Iraq takes.
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Hi Doug,
Yeah I like Mitt too. I have a relative who worked closely with his campaign. I'll try to find out his plans. Maybe he could run for congress for two years than run again.
Obama is no Abe Lincoln (never will be) and no McCain (yet) but the emotion he invokes is rare among politicians. It must be emotional with Blacks who are witnnessing history before their eyes. The last and probably only politician who invoke emotion with me was Ronald Reagan. No one else before or since. I like Bush senior. I like Bush junior though he annoys me with illegals and the deficit.
It certainly is true that the offspring of Latinos many who were here illegally are going to influence our elections now. We really have to get rid of the 200 year law that people born here are automatically citizens IMO.
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Thanks CCP. The selection process is ugly, but pretty soon we will see how well each party did putting its best foot forward. I don't like McCain but maybe the reality is that he is the only Republican (at least in name) who could win right now. It will be interesting to see if who he picks will become a likely successor, win or lose.
On the Dem side, I agree the emotion is with Obama, the momentum is with Obama and the key match up polls against McCain are with Obama. Counting out the Clintons is risky business for Democratic leaders and super delegates. Reminds me (just slightly) of the Sunnis in Anbar dealing with al Qaida. They needed to be 100% certain that these people wouldn't soon be in power before publicly and decisively turning against them.
I think Sen. Clinton would certainly pick Obama as her running mate and I think Obama would most certainly not pick Clinton. Who he picks will be interesting. Like Bush picking Cheney, Obama needs a boatload of experience and so-called gravitas. But what prominent Democrat or Clinton administration former cabinet member with national security experience can he pick (Sandy Burger? Madeline Albright isn't eligible) that doesn't bring with it more negatives. Since Obama doesn't know that he lacks experience, I predict he will make a bold move and pick someone else who lacks experience. Advantage on the VEEP choice should go to McCain.
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Interesting thoughts about BO's VP choice.
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The Caucus Men
By JAMES TARANTO
February 11, 2008
Years ago, before the Web was World Wide, we used to post our football picks to a Usenet newsgroup. Every Tuesday morning, we'd make predictions on which team would cover the spread in each of the past weekend's games. Other readers would make fun of us for posting predictions after the games had already been played, but they were just jealous because our picks were so uncannily accurate.
We think we're going to adopt that approach to political predictions, or at least to the Democratic nomination race, which has seen so many twists and turns. But if you listen to those who are still making predictions, everything's coming up Obama. The Politico's Ben Smith:
Obama's landslide victories in three mid-sized states Saturday suggest that he has the opportunity to build a significant lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton among the locked-in "pledged" delegates before the candidates face off in the big battlegrounds of Ohio and Texas on March 4.
The results in Washington and Nebraska vindicated Obama's strategy of preparing expensive efforts to organize votes after the Feb. 5 contests that many expected--wrongly--effectively to decide the race. Clinton's campaign, meanwhile, played down its own efforts in the states, though she did air television ads in both Washington and Nebraska.
Obama also won in Louisiana, buoyed by taking nearly 90 percent of the support of black voters, according to exit polls.
All three of these states are in regions where Obama has already shown strength, so his victories aren't surprising. The margins, however, are impressive: 57% to 36% in the Louisiana primary, 68% to 32% in the Nebraska caucus and 68% to 31% in the Washington caucus. Then on Sunday, Obama won the Maine caucus, 59% to 40%. Mrs. Clinton was supposed to have a pretty good shot in Maine, having won primaries in nearby New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
But here's an interesting pattern: Whereas Obama and Mrs. Clinton are almost even in the number of primaries they've won (she has an advantage in the larger states), Obama has won virtually every caucus or other nonprimary nominating contest.
By our count, Mrs. Clinton has won 11 primaries: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Tennessee. (Under current Democratic Party rules the Florida and Michigan primaries are meaningless.)
Obama has won 9 primaries: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina and Utah. Mrs. Clinton so far has had an advantage in the biggest states, which is why she is looking ahead hopefully to Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania.
But Obama has won 10 caucuses or nominating conventions: Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and Washington. Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, has won but a single caucus: in Nevada. She also has a slight lead in New Mexico's Feb. 5 caucus, in which provisional ballots are still being counted.
Blogger Kevin Drum offers some explanations for Obama's caucus advantage:
Caucuses require organization and Obama was better organized. They require enthusiasm and he has more enthusiastic supporters. They require time, and his demographic has more free time. They're mostly in small states, and Obama targeted small states. They're dominated by activists, and activists tend to support Obama.
To put it another way, caucuses require that a candidate's support be deep, while primaries require that it be broad.
It turns out that on the Republican side there is a primary/caucus gap too. John McCain has won 12 primaries: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina.
Mitt Romney won only 3 primaries, all in states where he had some personal connection: Michigan, where his father was governor; Massachusetts, where Romney himself was; and heavily Mormon Utah, where he ran the Olympics. And Mike Huckabee has won 5, all in the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee.
But Romney had considerable success in caucus or convention states, winning 8 of them: Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming. Huckabee has won 3: Iowa, Kansas and West Virginia. As for front-runner McCain, he has won only one caucus, in Washington state, and Huckabee is disputing the outcome there.
Winning a general election is largely a matter of getting more votes than the other guy. Having an enthusiastic base helps, but as President Goldwater and President McGovern can attest, it's not enough. If Obama faces McCain in November, the big question will be whether he can extend his appeal beyond the Democratic base. His reasonably strong showing in primaries suggests he may be able to do so.
As for our prediction, stay tuned: We'll have it for you on Nov. 5.
WSJ
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Washington Post
Obama's Farrakhan Test
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Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page A13
Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.
Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan "epitomized greatness." For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler -- "They helped him get the Third Reich on the road." His history is a rancid stew of lies.
It's important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.
Fine. But where I differ with Axelrod and, I assume, Obama is that praise for an anti-Semitic demagogue is not a minor difference or an intrachurch issue. The Obama camp takes the view that its candidate, now that he has been told about the award, is under no obligation to speak out on the Farrakhan matter. It was not Obama's church that made the award but a magazine. This is a distinction without much of a difference. And given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater. He could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage?
Any praise of Farrakhan heightens the prestige of the leader of the Nation of Islam. For good reasons and bad, he is already admired in portions of the black community, sometimes for his efforts to rehabilitate criminals. His anti-Semitism is either not considered relevant or is shared, particularly his false insistence that Jews have played an inordinate role in victimizing African Americans.
In this, Farrakhan stands history on its head. It was Jews who disproportionately marched for civil rights and, in Mississippi, died for that cause. Farrakhan and, in effect, Wright, despoil the graves of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and, of course, their black colleague James Chaney.
I can even see how someone, maybe even Obama, could dismiss Farrakhan as a pest, a silly man pushing a silly cause that poses no real threat to the Jewish community. Still, history tells us that anti-Semitism is not to be trifled with. It is a botulism of the mind.
The Obama and Clinton campaigns are involved in a tasteless tussle over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. What is clear from rereading King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech of Aug. 28, 1963, is how inclusive that dream was -- "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' "
This, though, is not Farrakhan's dream. He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.
And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his "depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation." He praised "his integrity and honesty." He called him "an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose." These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?
I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama's penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting "present" when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, "present" will not do.
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And here's another strand of BO support:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28915_A_Che_Guevara_Flag_in_Obamas_Houston_Office&only
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Word is Mitt is undecided as to whether he would stay in public or go back to private life.
I hope he gives it another shot.
It is thought he tactically erred by going "negative" too soon.
That may be why he seemed to be loathed by the others in the race.
Additional evidence towards this conclusion is that BO's success is partly due to his "positive" message. He is the "uniter" yada yada yada....
Mitt is smart and a fast learner. He won't make the same mistake twice from what I have heard.
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FWIW I think Mitt was disliked by the others because of his silver spoon.
FWIW I think Mitt failed to catch on until too late because he did not seem genuine. My impression of him was of a Ken doll. He seemed lacking in depth in the early debates e.g. when asked a question about what he would first do in the event of another attack on the US (or something like that) he said something about asking the lawyers what he could do. I remember the answer left me rolling my eyes.
Although he sometimes showed more substance in 1 on 1 interviews, for me it was not until his concession speech that I felt like the man expressed his vision and his passion. The communication of "That vision thing" was missing until that moment-- and its why he "went negative"-- which often was only a fair pointing out of genuine differences, but seemed negative for the lack of the positive-- "the vision thing".
I think if he had shown that man that gave his concession speech from the beginning things might have gone differently.
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"I think Mitt failed to catch on until too late because he did not seem genuine."
I agree. For me, Mitt and Fred both fit my views on issues well enough. Fred lack excitement. Mitt lacked an authenticity. I don't value excitement but others do and I value victory. Mitt's move to pro-life alone was plausible and his presumed negative of being Mormon I think was politically manageable. Mitt's move from governor of the most liberal state to perfectly conservative on all issues, just in time, was bizarre, leaving people not knowing what to think.
With non-Republican, non-conservative McCain as the nominee, the question remains - who is the leader in exile of the conservative movement. The answer unfortunately remains no one, though Romney could certainly take another shot if he chooses. On another try I see where he could be taken more seriously sooner and maybe not face so many competing voices. Fred, Rudy and some of the others are likely out forever.
Conservatives lack consistency, lack good leaders, lack good followers and lack good policy writers. Other than that ...
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If you are a billionaire, or a foreigner, and don't want it known that you are donating millions to a US presidential campaign, here's how (via Don Surber):
Secret Money Floods Campaigns
Big Count of Small Gifts Is Opaque to the Public
A torrent of secret money is flooding into the leading presidential campaigns, with more than $118 million, or one-quarter of the total raised in this cycle, banked without disclosure of who gave the funds or where the donations originated.
The money is coming from hundreds of thousands of donations of $200 or less, which have been widely praised for democratizing the system for funding White House bids. However, the surge in low-dollar gifts has come at the cost of transparency, since federal law only requires campaigns to itemize donations when a donor gives more than $200.
According to an analysis being released today by a Washington think tank, the Campaign Finance Institute, Senator Obama of Illinois led the pack with such small and secret donations, pulling in about $31 million during 2007. Rep. Ron Paul ran second in small gifts, raking in more than $17 million. At the end of the year, Senator Clinton and John EdwardsBusiness-Should-Not-Fear-Edwards Jan-08 , who has since dropped out, were essentially tied for third in unitemized, small contributions, with each candidate raising about $11 million.
...
However, one area of concern with the flood of donations, particularly those made online, is that foreigners could be weighing in illegally in an American election. Mr. Obama's Web site allows donors to choose an address in one of 227 possible countries or territories, including Iran, Iraq, Zimbabwe, and Yemen.
...
While it is a crime for most foreigners to donate to American campaigns at the federal level, those with so-called green card status can donate legally, as can Americans who live abroad.
And who's going to know if they aren't?
http://faustasblog.com/2008/02/foreign-millions-for-obama.html
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Excerpts from a column/rant that covered more than the presidential race:
Victor Davis Hanson, February 16, 2008
How We Got Where We Are—Turning Points of the Primaries
Candidates have intrinsic strengths and make their own fate, but the primary campaign did not necessarily have to end up where it did—since the following events were as pivotal as they were unexpected
1. Bill Clinton’s decision to drop the bite-the-lip therapeutic self and revert to the war-room hack, which along with Hillary’s clumsy civil rights revisionism turned off the liberal media.
2. Michelle Obama’s fiery speeches, that along with Oprah’s omnipresence, ended all notion that Barrack Obama was not black enough, and helped solidify the African-American base.
3. The Obama team’s decision to avoid detail and concentrate on his rock-star sermons on “change” and “hope”, that hypnotized voters, who after they woke and found he had said nothing had already joined the pied piper. In contrast, Huckabee’s specifics—fair tax, Bush’s “arrogant” foreign policy, invading Pakistan—proved the dangers of a rookie not talking only about “hope and change.”
4. Rudy Giuliani’s disastrous decision to delay, forgo face time and press coverage, and invest in Florida, based on the false assumption that leads in the national polls are static and are immune from the human desire to switch and side with the winner—even if the perception was created in tiny caucuses or small states primaries.
5. The New York Times’ decision to run serial stories on Giuliani’s personal life and petty sins of a decade prior.
6. Hillary’s scripted tear that gave her a second chance even as her cackle and screeching voice helped lose the first
7. The success of the surge by September/October that gave the McCain candidacy not only a second life, but also sanctioned his lonely and principled stand on the war when few were willing to invest in Iraq.
8. Mitt Romney’s decision to go negative in TV ads rather than give uplifting human speeches that proved effective only at the very end of his effort
9. Talk radio and right-wing base attacks on McCain that won him fides with independents and moderates, and some sympathy from mainstream Republicans
10. The vast dislike of the Clintons in the media, punditry, and among Democratic politicians—cf. Bill’s lectures and finger pointing and Hillary’s whining— who were all looking for a spark to ignite
He Kept Us Safe?
If we are not hit again, and if Iraq continues to settle down, in five years President Bush will be reassessed as the one who kept us safe after 9/11 when popular wisdom insisted that more attacks were to come. Soon someone will write a history detailing the losses al Qaeda suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq from a perspective other than “we created more terrorists”— such as “we killed thousands of committed terrorists over there, not here.”
Obamiana
Barrack Obama’s team should begin to worry that in the popular culture and even the mainstream media, people are beginning automatically to associate his set speech with vapidity, “hope” and “change” with saying nothing. If not curtailed, that Pavlovian identification will take on a life of its own.
Historians will wonder at what point the post-racialist Obama, who, it was alleged, “was not black enough”, transmogrified into “The Black Candidate” and began winning 85-95% of the black vote, even when head-to-head with the wife of the honorary “black” president. The downside, as Hillary’s campaign seems to be trying to exploit, is that racial identity politics married with appeals to upscale yuppie whites, is beginning to turn off other minorities such as Asians and Hispanics, as well as working whites. One lives and dies with appeals to the tribe, whether intended or not. A good example was Cruz Bustamante’s run for governor during the California Gray Davis recall. Suddenly commercials ran with crowds of Mexican-Americans shouting and waving red flags, and his ratings nosedived with each spot that aired.
Obama may well capture the nomination, but there is an outside chance that he will lose to Hillary all the key states so important in the general elections—California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Not a good sign for the November elections.
Much of the rhetoric of the Obama campaign concerns mortgage and student loans, with the clear implication that the borrower has been victimized, and is need of federal redress. Two observations: prior to the mortgage meltdown, the rhetoric had been “home ownership” or the notion that the “non-traditional” borrower had to be accommodated to get him into a first home. Now such marginal borrowers apparently were “tricked”, or coerced into buying more home than they could afford.
The same logic will apply to student loans, as we begin to hear all sorts of bail-out programs aimed at those “burdened”. Perhaps true, but in a great many of cases, many had no business going into debt for college, since they were not yet motivated and only limped through the undergraduate years, attending class haphazardly in a holding pattern, unsure whether to graduate or work or sort of both.
It may be a conservative canard, but the common theme of the Obama rhetoric is that the US is a depressingly oppressive place, where the poor citizen has not much income and gets no help from an uncaring government. It all sounds like 1929, not the entitlement colossus of 2008.
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The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 17, 2008
NY Times
THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.
Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.
But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”
For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.
The 2008 primary campaign has been so fast and furious that we haven’t paused to register just how spectacular that change is. All the fretful debate about whether voters would turn out for a candidate who is a black or a woman seems a century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama vanquished the Democratic field, including a presidential-looking Southern white man with an enthusiastic following, John Edwards. What was only months ago an exotic political experiment is now almost ho-hum.
Given that the American story has been so inextricable from the struggle over race, the Obama triumph has been the bigger surprise to many. Perhaps because I came of age in the racially divided Washington public schools of the 1960s and had one of my first newspaper jobs in Richmond in the early 1970s, I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of Virginia’s white vote last week. The Old Dominion continues to astonish those who remember it when.
Here’s one of my memories. In 1970, Linwood Holton, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction and a Richard Nixon supporter, responded to court-ordered busing by voluntarily placing his own children in largely black Richmond public schools. For this symbolic gesture, he was marginalized by his own party, which was hellbent on pursuing the emergent Strom Thurmond-patented Southern strategy of exploiting white racism for political gain. After Mr. Holton, Virginia restored to office the previous governor, Mills Godwin, a champion of the state’s “massive resistance” to desegregation.
Today Anne Holton, the young daughter sent by her father to a black school in Richmond, is the first lady of Virginia, the wife of the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine. Mr. Kaine’s early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a potent factor in his remarkable 28-point landslide on Tuesday.
For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship. In his brutal 2000 South Carolina primary battle against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was the target of a smear campaign. He was also pilloried for accurately describing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he started to bend this straight talk the very next day.) He is still paying for correctly describing Jerry Falwell, once an ardent segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a longtime defender of South African apartheid, as “agents of intolerance.” And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration.
Though Mr. Bush ran for president on “compassionate conservatism,” he diversified only his party’s window dressing: a 2000 Republican National Convention that had more African-Americans onstage than on the floor and the incessant photo-ops with black schoolchildren to sell No Child Left Behind. There are no black Republicans in the House or the Senate to stand with the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s G.O.P. primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.
Mr. Obama’s ascension hardly means that racism is kaput in America, or that the country is “postracial” or “transcending race.” But it’s impossible to deny that another barrier has been surmounted. Bill Clinton’s attempt to minimize Mr. Obama as a niche candidate in South Carolina by comparing him to Jesse Jackson looks more ludicrous by the day. Even when winning five Southern states (Virginia included) on Super Tuesday in 1988, Mr. Jackson received only 7 to 10 percent of white votes, depending on the exit poll.
Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.
Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.
The theory of the McCain candidacy is that his “maverick” image will bring independents (approaching a third of all voters) to the rescue. But a New York Times-CBS News poll last month found that independents have even a lower opinion of Mr. Bush, the war, the surge and the economy than the total electorate and skew slightly younger. Though the independents in this survey went 44 percent to 32 percent for Mr. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, they now prefer a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican by 44 percent to 27 percent.
Mr. McCain could get lucky, especially if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and unites the G.O.P., and definitely if she tosses her party into civil war by grabbing ghost delegates from Michigan and Florida. But those odds are dwindling. More likely, the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs. Clinton does. I was startled to hear last week from a friend in California, a staunch anti-Clinton Republican businessman, that he was wavering. Though he regards Mr. McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I have drifted toward Obama.”
Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush media maven who has played a comparable role for Mr. McCain in this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago that he would not work for his own candidate in a race with Mr. Obama. Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr. McKinnon said that while he is “100 percent” for Mr. McCain and disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very fundamental issues,” he likes Mr. Obama and what he’s doing for the country enough to stay on the sidelines rather than fire off attack ads.
As some Republicans drift away in a McCain-Obama race, who fills the vacuum? Among the white guys flanking Mr. McCain at his victory celebration on Tuesday, revealingly enough, was the once-golden George Allen, the Virginia Republican who lost his Senate seat and presidential hopes in 2006 after being caught on YouTube calling a young Indian-American Democratic campaign worker “macaca.”
In that incident, Mr. Allen added insult to injury by also telling the young man, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia. A national rout in 2008 just may be that Republican Party’s last stand.
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Just a stray observation. I find it remarkable how Lady Evita remains smiling, happy, confident, etc. as everything appears to be going down in flames.
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Hi Crafty,
Yes I agree with your thoughts.
It will be interesting to see how the two of them handle it if they go on to lose.
You know at least behind the scenes they will play the blame game.. It is the media's fault, Penns fault, or blame anybody but themselves. Would this mean they are done with politics? My guess is they will run again someday. How old is Evita? 60? She is still a Senator. He can't handle the private life.
Or maybe they'll kick him out of Harlem and he'll move to Hollywood and go onto making movies. They will love him there. He would love the paparazzi, and the girls.
BTW, what is the story about hedge funds and politicians? John Edwards made a kiilling. Now Chelsea. We need a good journalist to look into this.
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Just a stray observation. I find it remarkable how Lady Evita remains smiling, happy, confident, etc. as everything appears to be going down in flames.
Behind closed doors? I think not.....
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During the Clinton era there were a lot of stories about her being a real foul mouthed c*nt to the people who worked for her. Recently a deep LEO friend told me about being on a detail which included Secret Service, one of whom confided a little story , , ,
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WSJ
Obama's New Vulnerability
By KARL ROVE
February 21, 2008; Page A17
In campaigns, there are sometimes moments when candidates shift ground, causing the race to change dramatically. Tuesday night was one of those moments.
Hammered for the 10th contest in a row, Hillary Clinton toughened her attacks on Barack Obama, saying he was unready to be commander in chief and unable to back his inspiring words with a record of action and leadership.
John McCain also took on Mr. Obama, with the Arizona senator declaring he would oppose "eloquent but empty calls for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than people."
Mr. McCain, too, raised questions about Mr. Obama's fitness to be commander in chief. Mr. McCain pointed to Mr. Obama's unnecessary sabre-rattling at an ally (Pakistan) while appeasing our adversaries (Iran and Syria). Mr. McCain also made it clear that reining in spending, which is a McCain strength and an Obama weakness, would be a key issue.
Mr. Obama had not been so effectively criticized before. In the Democratic contest, John Edwards and Mrs. Clinton were unwilling to confront him directly or in a manner that hurt him. Mr. McCain was rightly preoccupied by his own primary. On Tuesday night, things changed.
Perhaps in response to criticisms that have been building in recent days, Mr. Obama pivoted Tuesday from his usual incantations. He dropped the pretense of being a candidate of inspiring but undescribed "post-partisan" change. Until now, Mr. Obama has been making appeals to the center, saying, for example, that we are not red or blue states, but the United States. But in his Houston speech, he used the opportunity of 45 (long) minutes on national TV to advocate a distinctly non-centrist, even proudly left-wing, agenda. By doing so, he opened himself to new and damaging contrasts and lines of criticism.
Mr. McCain can now question Mr. Obama's promise to change Washington by working across party lines. Mr. Obama hasn't worked across party lines since coming to town. Was he a member of the "Gang of 14" that tried to find common ground between the parties on judicial nominations? Was Mr. Obama part of the bipartisan leadership that tackled other thorny issues like energy, immigration or terrorist surveillance legislation? No. Mr. Obama has been one of the most dependably partisan votes in the Senate.
Mrs. Clinton can do much more to draw attention to Mr. Obama's lack of achievements. She can agree with Mr. Obama's statement Tuesday night that change is difficult to achieve on health care, energy, poverty, schools and immigration -- and then question his failure to provide any leadership on these or other major issues since his arrival in the Senate. His failure to act, advocate or lead on what he now claims are his priorities may be her last chance to make a winning argument.
Mr. McCain gets a chance to question Mr. Obama's declaration he won't be beholden to lobbyists and special interests. After Mr. Obama's laundry list of agenda items on Tuesday night, Mr. McCain can ask why, if Mr. Obama rejects the influence of lobbyists, has he not broken with any lobbyists from the left fringe of the Democratic Party? Why is he doing their bidding on a range of issues? Perhaps because he occupies the same liberal territory as they do.
The truth is that Mr. Obama is unwilling to challenge special interests if they represent the financial and political muscle of the Democratic left. He says yes to the lobbyists of the AFL-CIO when they demand card-check legislation to take away the right of workers to have a secret ballot in unionization efforts, or when they oppose trade deals. He won't break with trial lawyers, even when they demand the ability to sue telecom companies that make it possible for intelligence agencies to intercept communications between terrorists abroad. And he is now going out of his way to proclaim fidelity to the educational unions. This is a disappointment since he'd earlier indicated an openness to education reform. Mr. Obama backs their agenda down the line, even calling for an end to testing, which is the only way parents can know with confidence whether their children are learning and their schools working.
These stands represent not just policy vulnerabilities, but also a real danger to Mr. Obama's credibility and authenticity. He cannot proclaim his goal is the end of influence for lobbies if the only influences he seeks to end are lobbies of the center and the right.
Unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. Obama is completely unwilling to confront the left wing of the Democratic Party, no matter how outrageous its demands, no matter how out of touch it might be with the American people. And Tuesday night, in a key moment in this race, he dropped the pretense that his was a centrist agenda. His agenda is the agenda of the Democratic left.
In recent days, courtesy of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Mr. Obama has invoked the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Franklin Roosevelt to show the power of words. But there is a critical difference between Mr. Obama's rhetoric and that of Jefferson, King and FDR. In each instance, their words were used to advance large, specific purposes -- establishing a new nation based on inalienable rights; achieving equal rights and a color-blind society; giving people confidence to endure a Great Depression. For Mr. Obama, words are merely a means to hide a left-leaning agenda behind the cloak of centrist rhetoric. That garment has now been torn. As voters see what his agenda is, his opponents can now far more effectively question his authenticity, credibility, record and fitness to be leader of the free world.
The road to the presidency just got steeper for Barack Obama, and all because he pivoted on Tuesday night.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. And top consultants collected about $5 million in January, a month of crucial expenses and tough fund-raising.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings. Several of them, echoing political analysts, expressed concerns that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to costly errors in judgment that have hamstrung her competitiveness against Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
“We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,” said a prominent New York donor. “So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.”
The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.
The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.
Howard Wolfson, the communications director and a senior member of the advertising team, earned nearly $267,000 in January. His total, including the campaign’s debt to him, tops $730,000.
The advertising firm owned by Mandy Grunwald, the longtime media strategist for both Mrs. Clinton and Bill Clinton, the former president, has collected $2.3 million in fees and expenses, and is still owed another $240,000.
“Fees and payments are in line with industry standards,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Spending priorities have been consistent with overall strategic goals.”
But some Democrats are now asking if the money spent on a campaign that appears to be sputtering — $106 million so far — was worth it.
“It’s easy to be critical, but had she won Iowa, none of this would have mattered. It wouldn’t have mattered what she spent because money would have come pouring in,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant and a veteran of Mr. Clinton’s successful 1996 re-election bid. “But the fact that she did not has made everyone focus on where the dollars went — and where they think the money should’ve gone.”
Mrs. Clinton came into January with a cash advantage over Mr. Obama, with about $19 million available for the primary, compared with about $13 million for him. She wound up spending at roughly the same rate as Mr. Obama, about a million dollars a day, but because she performed dismally compared to him in raising money, she ended the month essentially in the red and was forced to lend her campaign $5 million, while he had $19 million for the coming contests.
Over all, Mrs. Clinton has spent more than $35 million on media, polling and consulting. A comparison with Mr. Obama’s spending is difficult because of the ways the campaigns labeled expenses, but it appears he spent about $40 million in those areas.
In other notable expenditures during the lean month of January, Mrs. Clinton paid $275,000 to Sunrise Communications, a South Carolina firm that was supposed to turn out black voters for her and collected nearly $800,000 in total. She lost that state to Mr. Obama by a wide margin. Even small expenses piled up in January: the campaign spent more than $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts runs.
Mr. Penn, the chief strategist, said in an interview that, since 2001, he no longer owned any of the political consulting firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. He said the firm’s fees were capped at $20,000 a month and that the “great bulk” of the payments went for direct mail.
Joe Trippi, who was a senior adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign, said he believed that the Clinton team had made two fundamental errors.
First, he argued, Mrs. Clinton built a top-down fund-raising operation that relied on a core group of donors to write checks early on for the maximum amount, $4,600 for the primary and the general election, which left few of them to go back to when money became tight. Mr. Obama, by contrast, focused on building a network of small donors whose continued ability to give has been essential to his success this winter.
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And second, Mr. Trippi said, the Clinton campaign spent money as though the race were going to be over after a handful of states had voted and was not prepared for a contest that would stretch for months.
“The problem is she ran a campaign like they were staying at the Ritz-Carlton,” Mr. Trippi said. “Everything was the best. The most expensive draping at events. The biggest charter. It was like, ‘We’re going to show you how presidential we are by making our events look presidential.’ ”
For instance, during the week before the Jan. 19 caucuses in Nevada, the Clinton campaign spent more than $25,000 for rooms at the Bellagio in Las Vegas; nearly $5,000 was spent at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas that week. Some staff members also stayed at Planet Hollywood nearby.
From the start of the campaign, some donors had concerns about the Clinton team’s ability to manage money.
Patti Solis Doyle, Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign manager until she was replaced on Feb. 10, also ran her Senate re-election bid in 2006. That campaign spent about $30 million even though Mrs. Clinton faced only token Democratic and Republican opposition.
“The Senate race spending in 2006 was an omen for a lot of us inside the campaign, but Hillary assured us that her presidential bid would be the best run in history,” said one major Clinton fund-raiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations within the campaign.
Yet the Clinton campaign at times found itself spending money on items that were not ultimately helpful. As part of their get-out-the-vote effort in Iowa, the campaign came up with a plan to have a local supermarket deliver sandwich platters to pre-caucus parties. It spent more than $95,384 on Jan. 1 at Hy-Vee Inc., a local grocery chain in West Des Moines, Iowa, in addition to buying loads of snow shovels to clear the walks for caucusgoers. Mrs. Clinton came in third in the Jan. 3 caucus. It did not snow.
Mr. Obama’s fund-raising surged after his Iowa victory. In January, he brought in more than $2.50 for every $1 she was given, and from Jan. 5 to Feb. 5, Mr. Obama spent nearly $16 million on political advertisements — more than $4 million more than Mrs. Clinton, according to a survey by the Campaign Media Analysis Group at TNS Media Intelligence. Mr. Obama broadcast 3,000 more advertisements than she did, and he was able to air those ads not only in the states that were immediately up for grabs but also in contests on Feb. 5 and beyond.
For instance, Mr. Obama spent nearly $480,000 on 1,331 spots in Missouri; he won the state’s primary, a closely fought contest and a national political bellwether, by one percentage point.
Mr. Obama’s campaign is not without highly paid consultants. His top media strategist is David Axelrod, whose firm received $175,000 in January and has collected $1.2 million over all. Mr. Obama’s polling is spread between four firms that have received $2.8 million collectively.
“Obviously, some campaigns are more careful and wise with their money than others,” Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant who ran John Kerry’s presidential campaign until November 2003. “But these budgetary post-mortems tend to follow a familiar pattern; winners are by definition smart, and losers are dumb and wasteful. In truth, campaign budgeting is hard and complicated and three-dimensional and just impossible to understand without the full time-and-place context of the whole race.”
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/02/24/good-news-ralph-nader-running-for-president/
Oh, thank god! Now if only Bloomberg would get in.... :evil:
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HRC tosses a Hail Mary...... http://drudgereport.com/flashoa.htm :-D
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Is That Your Final Question?
Published: February 26, 2008
NY Times
Tonight, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will debate in Ohio. It will be the 20th debate, and possibly the last, of the Democratic presidential campaign. Is there anything left to ask? The Opinion section asked five experts to pose the questions that they feel have not been answered over the course of more than a year of campaigning. Here’s what they would ask the candidates if they were moderating tonight’s debate.
1. Responding to a questionnaire from The Boston Globe on presidential power, you both criticized President Bush’s use of signing statements, with which he has asserted a constitutional right to bypass more than 1,000 sections of bills that he has signed into law. You both also said you would continue using signing statements, though in a less aggressive way.
But the American Bar Association has called for an end to this practice, and Senator John McCain says he will never issue a signing statement. Why are they wrong?
2. Both of you have said the Constitution does not allow a president to detain a citizen without charges as an enemy combatant. But President Bush won court rulings upholding the indefinite detention of two Americans as enemy combatants. Were the courts wrong? Does a president have the authority to interpret the Constitution differently from the judiciary? Would you ever use the court-approved authority to hold a citizen indefinitely as an enemy combatant?
3. Both of you have said that President Bush cannot attack Iran without first obtaining Congressional authorization for the use of military force. But two Democratic presidents, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton, ordered American forces into extended armed conflicts without Congressional authorization. Did the Korean and Kosovo wars violate the Constitution? Would an attack on Iran be legally different, and if so, how?
4. Are there any circumstances — including in matters of detention, surveillance, interrogation and troop deployments — under which you believe that presidents have the constitutional power as commander in chief to bypass laws in order to take an action they think is necessary to protect national security?
5. Proponents of the so-called unitary executive theory argue that the Constitution does not allow Congress to enact statutes that place the actions of executive-branch officials beyond the president’s control, such as by giving independent decision-making authority to the head of a regulatory agency. Do you agree?
— CHARLIE SAVAGE, a reporter for The Boston Globe and the author of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”
1. Social Security will go into a cash deficit during the next president’s prospective second term. Therefore, if elected, you will: a) do nothing and leave growing deficits to your successor; b) cut benefits, eligibility or both, as President Bush tried; c) raise the payroll tax; or d) there is no d. Those are the only options.
2. Domestic gun owners kill more Americans each year than terrorists have in total since 2000 (even if you define all American fatalities in Iraq as related to terrorism). Can the homeland be secure when our schools are not? If your answer is no, will you take on the National Rifle Association and work for a gun law with teeth?
3. Senator Obama, virtually all economists say trade is good for growth, but you have blamed trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement for the loss of American jobs. Do you really think building an economic wall along the Rio Grande will promote a stronger, more resilient American economy, and if so why?
4. Senator Clinton, will you take on your Wall Street friends and raise the effective income tax on private-equity fund managers and hedge fund managers, who are now taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent? Please explain why the richest Americans should pay the lowest taxes.
5. Senator Obama, you rail against the oil companies, but under the American system of free enterprise, aren’t companies supposed to earn a profit — and even to charge what the market will bear?
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6. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a president you both have evoked, said Americans need fear only fear itself. Under President Bush, Americans have been told to so fear terrorism that the executive branch has been permitted to snoop on citizens, hijack the powers of Congress and torture foreigners. Do you agree that fear of terrorism has been pushed too far, and if so, what measures would you adopt to return the United States to a more normal civilian life?
— ROGER LOWENSTEIN, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming “While America Aged.”
1. Both of you have argued for more widespread access to the Internet in schools. Given the recent “To Read or Not to Read” report from the National Endowment for the Arts, which revealed a steep decline in reading among young people, and the lack of evidence that computers in the classroom help students learn, wouldn’t federal funds be better spent on projects that encourage reading and engagement with the arts?
2. The Internet is often praised as a liberating force in American culture, but it has also drawn comparisons to an unruly mob. Would you support a federally financed, long-term study of how our use of this technology is changing our behavior, for good and for ill?
3. You have both admitted to being BlackBerry addicts. How has this desire for constant connection and endless information changed your personal relationships and how has it transformed political culture?
— CHRISTINE ROSEN, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society.
The long advocacy for universal health-care coverage by Democrats has earned a base of public support, but it has also provided an easy focus for political attacks. Although universal coverage will protect businesses and families from unmanageable costs, it will also increase government spending considerably and increase government involvement in health care.
The strategy you have adopted as candidates is the same one that Democrats have used for decades without success (including in 1993, when I was a health policy adviser in the first Clinton administration). You have both designed plans that aim to minimize government costs and to minimize changes for Americans with good health coverage, while still constructing a safety net of coverage for the growing millions without insurance.
This approach, however, inevitably increases the complexity of our Rube Goldberg health system. It has made your policies difficult to explain. It has failed to prevent charges that you are promoting “socialized medicine.” And it has cost you the enthusiasm of Americans who want a simpler, tax-based, Medicare-for-all system.
How do you persuade supporters of single-payer health care that your proposals are worth fighting for? And how can you assure the rest of us that the costs and complexities of your plans are actually manageable?
— ATUL GAWANDE, a general surgeon, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance.”
1. Senator Obama, as commander in chief an American president must understand the sense of honor that motivates his armed forces. Last September, MoveOn.org ran an advertisement in The Times that mocked Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, as “General Betray Us.” You chose not to vote on the Senate resolution that condemned the advertisement. Would you still characterize the Senate vote as a “stunt” and “empty politics”?
2. Samantha Power, one of Senator Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers, strongly criticized the United States in her book “A Problem From Hell” for failing to intervene in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and for the three-year delay in intervening in the Bosnian war, until the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Saddam Hussein also committed genocide by killing thousands of Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons in the late 1980s and massacring thousands of Shiite marsh dwellers in southern Iraq after the first gulf war. How could we have left Mr. Hussein in power? How can Senator Obama say that removing a genocidal killer was a “dumb” war?
3. Senator Clinton, you have stated that American troop withdrawals from Iraq will begin as soon as you take office as president. But you also note on your campaign Web site that you will order “narrow and targeted operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.”
Isn’t that what the surge is about? The United States and local leaders have allied to drive out members of Al Qaeda from Baghdad and other areas. How is your policy any different from the policy of President Bush?
4. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution bars any former president from election to a third term. Is it truly consistent with the spirit of the Constitution to have the same professional couple occupying the White House for 12 years? Isn’t this all the more true when Bill Clinton promised that voters would receive, during his first term, “two for the price of one”?
— RUTH WEDGWOOD, a professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins, was an adviser to the Rudolph Giuliani campaign.
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WSJ
Cut and Run and Then Run Back
By JAMES TARANTO
February 28, 2008
With Hillary Clinton being written off (perhaps prematurely), the eight-month general election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama seems to be getting under way. Obama, apparently moving to the right, is now threatening military intervention in Iraq after years of demanding America's immediate surrender. As the Associated Press reports:
McCain criticized Obama for saying in Tuesday night's Democratic debate that, after U.S. troops were withdrawn, as president he would act "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq."
"I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It's called 'al-Qaida in Iraq,' " McCain told a crowd in Tyler, Texas, drawing laughter at Obama's expense. He said Obama's statement was "pretty remarkable."
Quips Glenn Reynolds: "In Obama's defense, he probably reads the New York Times, which always calls it 'Al Qaida in Mesopotamia.' That may have confused him."
Obama's response to McCain, described in the same AP dispatch, makes even less sense:
"I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq and that's why I have said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets," he told a rally at Ohio State University in Columbus.
"But I have some news for John McCain," Obama added. "There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. . . . They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be al-Qaida in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001."
Obama said he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq "so we actually start going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan like we should have been doing in the first place."
So let's see if we have this straight. Al Qaeda in Iraq isn't worth fighting because it wouldn't be there if it weren't for Bush and McCain. Obama is going to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq to go fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although he will send them back to Iraq if al Qaeda are there, even though he now wants to withdraw notwithstanding al Qaeda's presence.
Yes, we can!
By the way, the left has been denying al Qaeda's presence in Iraq since before the 2003 liberation. This is from a February 2003 article in In These Times, a leftist magazine:
[Secretary of State Colin] Powell told the world, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants." This information, Powell said, came from "detainees." But American officials have admitted those very detainees are subjected to torture, raising questions about the reliability of that information. . . .
Meanwhile, someone at Britain's Defense Intelligence Staff leaked a document to the BBC indicating that its agents doubt there is any link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. And the the [sic] New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials "said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden's network." The Times quoted an unnamed intelligence official: "We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there . . . the intelligence is obviously being politicized."
At least Zarqawi isn't in Iraq anymore.
Blame Canada?
"Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously," reports Canada's CTV:
Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama's campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.
The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.
Apparently the real enemy isn't Canada, it's cynicism.
Let's Get Metaphysical
Mystified by the Obama phenomenon? Let Susan Neiman of the Einstein Forum, writing in the Boston Globe, explain it all to you:
Strange as it sounds, this is an election where metaphysics may count more than demographics, and focusing on the latter misses the point. Metaphysics determines what you hold to be self-evident and what you hold to be possible; what you think has substance and what you can afford to ignore. Hope is based on, or undermined by, your metaphysical standpoint. . . .
If it's a message so catchy that it has now made the rounds of cyberspace as a star-studded video, it's also one with roots as deep as Immanuel Kant. The "Critique of Pure Reason" is not easy reading, but it makes some startling claims. Kant tells us that Plato's ideal of a perfectly just state was always dismissed as a utopian dream; but if everyone had worked to realize those ideals, they would be true today. . . .
Obama's is a message to demand more--and not just for the young. His idealism is unsettling to many not because it's naive, but because it poses a challenge. If you assume that things cannot get better you have nothing to do but sit back and watch them get worse.
Yes, we Kant!
McCain's Canal Birth
Having failed to gin up a sex scandal, the New York Times tries a new tack to stop John McCain:
Mr. McCain's likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a "natural-born citizen" can hold the nation's highest office.
The Times labors mightily to present this as an actual controversy. It notes that in 1790 Congress passed a law "that did define children of citizens 'born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born,' " and, further, that "laws specific to the Canal Zone," then a U.S. territory, leave no doubt that McCain was born a citizen. So why does the Times think this is an issue? Because "whether he qualifies as natural-born has been a topic of Internet buzz for months." And if it's on the Internet, there has to be something to it.
The Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post have both dealt with this question, the latter way back in 1998, and both concluded with little trouble that McCain is indeed natural born. So he should have no problem--unless, perhaps, his mother had a caesarean section.
Where's the Rest of Me?
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Over the Top
March 7, 2008
An overview:
From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren't magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn't. Meaning Obama isn't magic.
Two nonmagical beings are left.
What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the '08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of "Over the top," bayonets fixed.
M.E. Cohen
Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.
This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. Do it now, they'll forget by the summer. The president does not understand how unpopular he is and after a year on the trail with the faithful neither does Mr. McCain. Mr. Bush confided to a friend a few months ago, as he predicted a Giuliani win, that he'll eventually come out and campaign for the nominee big time. Talk about throwing the drowning man an anvil.
But it is not good for Mr. McCain that when he officially won this week it barely made page three. The lightning is on the Democratic side. Everything else seems old, like something that happened a year ago that you forgot to notice.
How did Hillary come back? Her own staff doesn't know. They fight over it because if they don't know how she carried Ohio and Texas they can't repeat the strategy.
So they figure backward. She won on Tuesday and did the following things in the weeks before, so . . . it was the kitchen-sink strategy. Or Hispanic outreach. Or the 3 a.m. ad. (The amazing thing was not that they lifted the concept from Walter Mondale's '84 run, but that the answer to the question "Who are you safer with?" was, The Woman. Not that people really view Hillary as a woman, but still: That would not have been the answer even 20 years ago.)
Did she come back because Mr. Obama's speech got a little boring? Was he coasting and playing it safe? Or was it that he didn't hit her hard enough? "He hasn't been able to find a way to be tough with a woman opponent," they say on TV. But that's not it, or is only half the truth. The other half is that it has long been agreed in the Democratic Party that one must not, one cannot, ever, refer to the long caravan of scandals that have followed the Clintons for 15 years. "We don't speak of the Clintons that way."
But why not? Everyone else does. Yes, the Obama sages will respond, that's the point: Everyone knows about cattle futures, etc. Everyone knows that if you Yahoo "Clintons" and "scandals" you get 4,430,000 hits.
But what if they do need to be reminded? What if they need to be told exactly what Mr. Obama means when he speaks of the tired old ways of Washington?
But voicing the facts would violate party politesse. So he loses the No. 1 case against her. But by losing the No. 1 case, he loses the No. 2 case: that she is the most divisive figure in the country, and that this is true because people have reason to view her as dark, dissembling, thuggish.
* * *
One Obama supporter on Root.com apparently didn't get the memo. That is the great threat to the Clintons, the number of young and independent Democrats who haven't received the memo about how Democrats speak of the Clintons. Writer Mark Q. Sawyer: "If Obama won't hit back, I will. Why aren't we talking about impeachment, Whitewater and Osama?"
What do I think is the biggest reason Mrs. Clinton came back? She kept her own spirits up to the point of denial and worked it, hard, every day. She is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity. The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.
In any case the Clinton campaign, which has always been more vicious than clever, this week did a very clever thing. They pre-empted any criticism of past scandals by pushing a Democratic Party button called . . . the Monica story. Mr. Obama is "imitating Ken Starr" by speaking of Mrs. Clinton's record, said Howard Wolfson. But Ken Starr documented malfeasance. Mr. Obama can't even mention it.
* * *
Back to Verdun. There a bitter officer corps debated a strategy of pointless carnage—so many deaths, so little seized terrain, all of it barren. In a bark-stripping piece of reportage in the Washington Post, Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut captured "a combustible environment" in Hillary Headquarters. They cannot agree on what to do, or even what has been done in the past. And the dialogue. Blank you. Blank you! No blank you, you blank. Blank all of you. It's like David Mamet rewritten by Joe Pesci.
These are the things that make life worth living.
As for the Clinton surrogates, they are unappealing when winning. My favorite is named Kiki. When Hillary is losing, Kiki is valiant and persevering on the talk shows, and in a way that appeals to one's sympathies. "Go, Kiki!" I want to say as she parries with Tucker. But when Hillary is winning they're all awful, including Kiki. By memory, from Tucker, this week: Q: Why won't Hillary release her tax returns? A: It's February. Taxes are due April 15, are your taxes done? Q: No, no, we're talking past years, returns that have already been prepared. A: Are your taxes done? Mine aren't.
Wicked Kiki! This is my great fear, in a second Clinton era: four, eight years of wicked Kiki.
I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio's Hugh Hewitt, because, "there's something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don't want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end."
It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film "Lawrence of Arabia": "One of them's mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous." It's the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. "They win in the end." Gave me a shudder.
WSJ
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March 08, 2008, 9:00 a.m.
Chain, Chain, Chain, Chain of Fools
When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim.
By Mark Steyn
Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around terrorizing folks all over again. “She is a monster,” Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from the Scotsman — and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry long-distance kind of way but something far more repulsive and in your face. “You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’” continued Ms. Power, warming to her theme perhaps more than is advisable even in an interview with an overseas newspaper.
The New York Times took a different line. The only monster is you — yes, you, the American people. Surveying the Hillary-Barack death match, Maureen Dowd wrote: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?”
Do even Democrats really talk like this? Apparently so. As Ali Gallagher, a white female (sorry, this identity-politics labeling is contagious) from Texas, told the Washington Post: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”
When everybody’s a victim, nobody’s a victim. Poor Ms. Gallagher can’t appreciate the distinction between purely metaphorical chains and real ones, or even how offensive it might be to assume blithely that there’s no difference whatsoever. But, if her sisters really came here in chains, it must have been Bondage Night at the Mayflower’s Swingers’ Club. On the other hand, Barack’s ancestors didn’t come here in chains either: his mother was a white Kansan, so was presumably undergoing menstrual hell with the Gallagher gals, and his dad was a black man a long way away in colonial Kenya. Indeed, Senator Obama would be the first son of a British subject to serve as president since those slaveholding types elected in the early days of the republic. As some aggrieved black activist sniffed snootily on TV, Barack isn’t really an “African-American” — unless by “African-American,” you mean somebody whose parentage is half-American and half-African, and let’s face it, no one would come up with so cockamamie a definition as that.
As for victims, you have to feel sorry for John Edwards. He was born in a mill. He weighed 1.6 pounds and what did his dad get? Another day older and deeper in debt. John spent most of his childhood in chains workin’ in the coalmine. He spent most of the 19th century as a spindly seven-year-old sweep with rickets cleaning chimneys in Dickensian London until Fagin spotted him and trained him up as a trial lawyer. And it worked swell in the 2004 primary but it counted for nothing this time round because, even with all that soot on his face, he’s still a white boy. Bill Richardson was the first Hispanic candidate but nobody needs a Hispanic called “Bill Richardson”. Hillary assumed she’d be the last identity-pol standing in a field of bouffant poseurs like Joe Biden, only to discover that by the time she got to the final round the Democratic primary process had descended to near parody — or, as the New York Times headline put it, a “Duel Of Historical Guilts.”
That’s one “historical guilt” too many. If it’s Historical Guilt vs. Joe Biden and John Edwards, bet on Historical Guilt, and the Democratic base uniting around Hillary and baying “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar”. Instead, it’s “I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine About The Unfairness Of It All,” as the Clintonites go nuclear and accuse Obama, the ultimate cool black dude, of “imitating Ken Starr,” the ultimate uptight squaresville honky. Which may be a marginally less ineffective line of attack than Gloria Steinem (now 112 but still fabulously hot) complaining to The New York Observer that way too many Americans want “redemption for racism” but not enough want “redemption for the gynocide.” Which may, in turn, be a marginally less fatal shot in the foot than former Carter-administration honcho Andrew Young’s perplexing boast that Bill Clinton has slept with more black women than Obama.
The Democratic primary season seems to have dwindled down into a psycho remake of Driving Miss Daisy. The fading matriarch Mizz Hill’ry (Jessica Tandy) doesn’t want to give up the keys to the Democratic-party vehicle but the dignified black chauffeur Hokey (Morgan Freeman) insists it’ll be a much smoother ride with him in the driver’s seat, full of gear change you can believe in, etc. Yet, just as he thinks the old biddy’s resigned to a nomination as Best Supporting Actress, the backseat driver plunges her hat pin into his spine, wrests the wheel away and lurches across the median.
Is the Democratic presidential process a Karl Rove plot? Right now, neither Mizz Hill’ry nor Hokey can win without the votes of the “super-delegates,” whose disposition is apparently in flux. The gay super-delegates, as I noted a week or two back, are apparently sticking to Hillary like the Hello, Dolly! waiters to Carol Channing. But others are said to be moving Barackwards. Are they jumping to a stalled bandwagon? One Historical Guilt gives upscale white liberals a chance to demonstrate their progressive bona fides in unison and with nary a thought. Two Historical Guilts shrivels from transformative feelgood fluffiness into sour tribalism. Like Hillary’s “I Am Woman” routine, Obama’s cult of narcissism — “We are the change we have been waiting for” — would have been a shoo-in against Biden, Dodd, and Edwards. But the gaseous platitudes wafting up to Cloud Nine are suddenly very earthbound. “Yes, we can!” is an effective pitch if you’re the new messiah, not so much when you’re pulling in a very humdrum fortysomething percent against a divisive and strikingly inept campaigner.
Go back to that Maureen Dowd line: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater.”
“People won’t, Democrats will,” the blogger Orrin Judd responded. “People will elect John McCain in November, demonstrating that we don’t share their guilt.”
Maybe. But a Democrat nominating process that’s a self-torturing satire of upscale liberal guilt confusions will at least give us a laugh along the way.
© 2008 Mark Steyn
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjczMDE2Zjk3ODlhNDUwMGQyOGExNTU5YTE1OTBjMTE=
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It’s over By Dick Morris Posted: 03/06/08 06:02 PM [ET] The real message of Tuesday’s primaries is not that Hillary won. It’s that she didn’t win by enough.
The race is over.
The results are already clear. Obama will go to the Democratic Convention with a lead of between 100 and 200 elected delegates. The remaining question is: What will the superdelegates do then? But is that really a question? Will the leaders of the Democratic Party be complicit in its destruction? Will they really kindle a civil war by denying the nomination to the man who won the most elected delegates? No way. They well understand that to do so would be to throw away the party’s chances of victory and to stigmatize it among African-Americans and young people for the rest of their lives. The Democratic Party took 20 years to recover from the traumas of 1968 and it is not about to trigger a similar bloodletting this year.
John McCain’s nomination guarantees that the superdelegates wouldn’t dare. A perfectly acceptable alternative for most Democrats, McCain would harvest so large a proportion of Obama’s votes if Hillary steals the nomination that he would probably win. Even putting Obama on the ticket would not allay the anger of his supporters; it would just make him complicit in the robbery.
Will Hillary win Pennsylvania? Who cares? Even if she were to sweep the remaining primaries and caucuses by 10 points, she would move just 60 votes closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates. And she won’t sweep them all. Even if Hillary wins Pennsylvania, the largest prize up for grabs, Obama will probably win North Carolina, which is almost as large. He’s likely to win Mississippi and Wyoming and has a good shot in Oregon and Indiana. The most likely result of these coming contests is that Obama will be roughly where he is now, about 140 elected delegates ahead of Hillary.
Suppose that Hillary will carry those states by enough to offset Obama’s delegate lead. The proportional representation system makes a knockout impossible and so mutes relatively narrow victories as to make them almost inconsequential. Little Vermont, with 600,000 people, gave Obama a net gain of four delegates, half of what Hillary won from the Texas primary, a state with 20 million residents. Even after Hillary won big-state victories in Ohio and Texas, she drew only 20 closer to Obama’s total of elected delegates.
Hillary won’t withdraw. That much is for sure. The tantalizing notion that 800 insiders can offset a season of primaries and caucuses will drive both Clintons to ever-escalating rhetoric. Will their attacks hurt Obama? Likely all they will achieve is to give him needed experience in the cut and thrust of media politics.
Left out of the entire equation is poor John McCain. Unable to get a word in edgewise and unsure of which Democrat to attack, he will have to watch from the sidelines as Hillary and Obama hog the headlines. If the superdelegates deliver the nomination to Hillary in the dead of night without leaving fingerprints at the crime scene, McCain’s nomination will be worth having. If Obama prevails, it won’t be worth the paper on which it is written. The giant killer, Obama will have soared to new heights of popularity and McCain won’t be able to bring him back to Earth in the nine weeks that will remain.
Suggestion for Obama:
The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat Midwestern accent, answer it and say, “Hold on” into the receiver. Then she should shout, “Bill! It’s for you!”
Because with Hillary’s complete lack of any meaningful experience in foreign affairs, and her lack of the “testing” that she boldly claims, she’ll be yelling for Bill.
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BO may win the Dem nomination with stuff like this, but I think/hope? he loses the general election with it. If the American people decide that this in C in Chief material truly we are done for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl32Y7wDVDs
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A couple of nights ago Mitt Romney was interviewed at length by Sean Hannity.
I was VERY impressed by the man. He spoke with a depth that spoke to me of spiritual grounding. Amongst other things, he essentially offered himself to be McCain's Veep. Given the heated battle between the two men, this can seem hard to imagine if you hadn't seen the interview, but the way Romney handled himself in the interview made it seem quite plausible indeed.
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March 14, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
It’s Identity, Stupid
Is this campaign about anything else?
By Charles Krauthammer
Elections can be about policy, personality, or identity. The race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is surely not about policy. The differences between the two are microscopic.
It did not start out that way. Last year, when Hillary was headed toward a coronation, she deliberately ran to the center. She took more moderate views on Iraq, for example, and voted to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
When she began taking heat for these positions from the other candidates and the Democratic party’s activist core, and as her early lead began to erode, she quickly tacked left and found herself inhabiting precisely the same ideological space as Obama.
With no substantive differences left, the Obama-Clinton campaign was reduced to personality and identity. Not advantageous ground for Hillary. In a personality contest with the charismatic young phenom, she loses in a landslide.
What to do? First, adjust your own persona. Hence that New Hampshire tear and an occasional strategic show of vulnerability to soften her image. It worked for a while, but personality remakes are simply too difficult to pull off for someone as ingrained in the national consciousness as Clinton.
If you cannot successfully pretty yourself, dirty the other guy. Hence the relentless attacks designed to redefine Obama and take him down to the level of ordinary mortals, i.e. Hillary’s. Thus the contrived shock on the part of the Clinton campaign that an Obama economic adviser would tell the Canadians not to pay too much attention to Obama’s anti-NAFTA populism or that Samantha Power would tell the BBC not to pay too much attention to Obama’s current withdrawal plans for Iraq.
The attack line writes itself: Says one thing and means another. So much for the man of new politics. Just an ordinary politician — like Hillary.
That same maladroit foreign-policy adviser is caught calling Hillary a monster. A resignation demand nicely calls attention to the fact that the Obama campaign — surprise! — hurls invective. And a strategic mention of Tony Rezko, the Chicago fixer who was once Obama’s patron, nicely attaches to Obama a whiff of corruption by association.
These attacks have a cumulative effect. Obamamania is beginning to wear off. Charisma is intrinsically transient. But Hillary’s attacks have succeeded in hastening its dissipation.
So if there are no policy issues between them and the personality differences have been whittled down, what’s left? Identity. Race, age, and gender. Is this campaign about anything else?
Nationally, the older white woman — Clinton — carries the senior vote, the white vote and the women’s vote. The younger black man — Obama — carries the youth vote, the black vote and the male vote. This was perhaps inevitable in the first campaign in which a woman and an African-American have a serious chance at the presidency. But it received a significant gravity assist from Bill Clinton’s South Carolina forays into racial politics.
Did Bill Clinton deliberately encourage racial polarization by saying before South Carolina that one expects women to vote for Hillary and blacks for Obama? Or, after the primary, by dismissing Obama’s victory with: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice”?
With Bill Clinton you never know. And there is no proving cause and effect, but the chronology is striking. Two weeks before the South Carolina primary, Obama was leading Hillary among blacks by only 53 percent to 30 percent. Ten days later, Obama was ahead 59 to 25. On Election Day, he got 78 percent of the black vote. By the time the campaign trail reached Mississippi on Tuesday, Obama was getting 92 percent of the black vote. And only 26 percent of the white vote.
The pillars of American liberalism — the Democratic party, the universities, and the mass media — are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender. They have insisted, moreover, that pedagogy and culture and politics be just as seized with the primacy of these distinctions and with the resulting “privileging” that allegedly haunts every aspect of our social relations.
They have gotten their wish. This primary campaign represents the full flowering of identity politics. It’s not a pretty picture. Geraldine Ferraro says Obama is only where he is because he’s black. Professor Orlando Patterson says the 3 A.M. phone call ad is not about a foreign policy crisis but a subliminal Klan-like appeal to the fear of “black men lurking in the bushes around white society.”
Good grief. The optimist will say that when this is over, we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest, and its looming ugly endgame, as the low point of identity politics, and the beginning of a turning away. The pessimist will just vote Republican.
© 2008, The Washington Post Writers Group
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjE4NzFjYTI1NDJhZWRhNjlmNDNjMThkZGVlYjVkMzI=
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Holy S%$@!^$#!^%,
I think the dems might just snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Puleeze, please, PLEASE!
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CAPITAL GAINS TAX
MCCAIN
15% (no change)
OBAMA
28%
CLINTON
24%
How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.
DIVIDEND TAX
MCCAIN
15% (no change)
OBAMA
39.6%
CLINTON
39.6%
How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama or Clinton become president. The experts predict that 'Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.'
INCOME TAX
MCCAIN
(no changes)
Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $31,250
OBAMA
(reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)
Single making 30K - tax $8,400
Single making 50K - tax $14,000
Single making 75K - tax $23,250
Married making 60K - tax $16,800
Married making 75K - tax $21,000
Married making 125K - tax $38,750
CLINTON
(reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)
Single making 30K - tax $8,400
Single making 50K - tax $14,000
Single making 75K - tax $23,250
Married making 60K - tax $16,800
Married making 75K - tax $21,000
Married making 125K - tax $38,750
How does this affect you? No explanation needed. This is pretty straight forward.
INHERITANCE TAX
MCCAIN
0%
(No change, Bush repealed this tax)
OBAMA
keep the inheritance tax
CLINTON
keep the inheritance tax
How does this affect you? Many families have lost businesses, farms and ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will not only lose them to these taxes.
NEW TAXES BEING PROPOSED BY BOTH CLINTON AND OBAMA
* New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet
* New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already)
* New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity)
* New taxes on retirement accounts
and last but not least....
* New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!
Can you afford Clinton or Obama?
(in case you want more information on Obama's tax and spend agenda:
If Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) Could Enact All Of His Campaign Proposals, Taxpayers Would Be Faced With Financing $874.35 Billion In New Spending Over One White House Term:
Updated February 14, 2008: Obama's National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank Will Cost $60 Billion Over Ten Years; Equal To $6 Billion A Year And $24 Billion Over Four Years. Obama: 'I'm proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years.' (Sen. Barack Obama, Remarks On Economic Policy, Janesville, WI, 2/13/08)
Obama's Health Care Plan Will Cost Up To $65 Billion A Year; Equal To $260 Billion Over Four Years. '[Obama] campaign officials estimated that the net cost of the plan to the federal government would be $50 billion to $65 billion a year, when fully phased in, and said the revenues from rolling back the tax cuts were enough to cover it.' (Robin Toner and Patrick Healy, 'Obama Calls For Wider And Less Costly Health Care Coverage,' The New York Times, 5/30/07)
Obama's Energy Plan Will Cost $150 Billion Over 10 Years, Equal To $15 Billion Annually And $60 Billion Over Four Years. 'Obama will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial-scale renewable energy, invest in low-emissions coal plants, and begin the transition to a new digital electricity grid.' (Obama For America, 'The Blueprint For Change,' www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/14/08, p. 25)
Obama's Tax Plan Will Cost Approximately $85 Billion A Year; Equal To $340 Billion Over Four Years. '[Obama's] proposed tax cuts and credits, aimed at workers earning $50,000 or less per year, would cost the Treasury an estimated $85 billion annually.' (Margaret Talev, 'Obama Proposes Tax Code Overhaul To Help The Poor,' McClatchy Newspapers, 9/19/07)
Obama's Plan Would Raise Taxes On Capital Gains And Dividends, And On Carried Interest. Obama's tax plan includes: 'ncreasing the highest bracket for capital gains and dividends and closing the carried interest loophole.' (Obama For America, 'Barack Obama: Tax Fairness For The Middle Class,' Fact Sheet, www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/8/08)
Obama's Economic Stimulus Package Will Cost $75 Billion. 'Barack Obama's economic plan will inject $75 billion of stimulus into the economy by getting money in the form of tax cuts and direct spending directly to the people who need it most.' (Obama For America, 'Barack Obama's Plan To Stimulate The Economy,' Fact Sheet, www.barackobama.com, 1/13/08)
Obama's Early Education And K-12 Package Will Cost $18 Billion A Year; Equal To $72 Billion Over Four Years. 'Barack Obama's early education and K-12 plan package costs about $18 billion per year.' (Obama For America, 'Barack Obama's Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education,' Fact Sheet, www.barackobama.com, 11/20/07, p. 15)
Obama's National Service Plan Will Cost $3.5 Billion A Year; Equal To $14 Billion Over Four Years. 'Barack Obama's national service plan will cost about $3.5 billion per year when it is fully implemented.' (Obama For America, 'Helping All Americans Serve Their Country: Barack Obama's Plan For Universal Voluntary Citizen Service,' Fact Sheet, www.barackobama.com, 12/5/07)
Obama Will Increase Our Foreign Assistance Funding By $25 Billion. 'Obama will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and he will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal.' (Obama For America, 'The Blueprint For Change,' www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/14/08, p. 53)
Obama Will Provide $2 Billion To Aid Iraqi Refugees. 'He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe-haven.' (Obama For America, 'The Blueprint For Change,' www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/14/08, p. 51)
Obama Will Provide $1.5 Billion To Help States Adopt Paid-Leave Systems. 'As president, Obama will initiate a strategy to encourage all 50 states to adopt paid-leave systems. Obama will provide a $1.5 billion fund to assist states with start-up costs and to help states offset the costs for employees and employers.' (Obama For America, 'The Blueprint For Change,' www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/14/08, p. 15)
Obama Will Provide $1 Billion Over 5 Years For Transitional Jobs And Career Pathway Programs, Equal To $200 Million A Year And $800 Million Over Four Years. 'Obama will invest $1 billion over five years in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Americans succeed in the workforce.' (Obama For America, 'The Blueprint For Change,' www.barackobama.com, Accessed 1/14/08, p. 42)
Obama Will Provide $50 Million To Jump-Start The Creation Of An IAEA-Controlled Nuclear Fuel Bank. Obama: 'We must also stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology and ensure that countries cannot build -- or come to the brink of building -- a weapons program under the auspices of developing peaceful nuclear power. That is why my administration will immediately provide $50 million to jump-start the creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency-controlled nuclear fuel bank and work to update the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.' (Sen. Barack Obama, 'Renewing American Leadership,' Foreign Affairs, 7-8/07)
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The tax comparison chart is extremely helpful. Curious about the source. Before I spread it further, want to ensure accuracy.
Explanation for Capital Gains tax says: "If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes". Correction(?): I assume home sale exemption up to certain amount continues 250k single, 500k married (?)
Add 55% to Clinton/Obama reinstated inheritance tax with $1mil exclusion (?)
I am surprised at the tax tables. I thought liberals were only admitting to raising the upper brackets. These show significant increases down to a single making 30k. Is that accurate?
And a reminder always for reading tax burdens - Federal is not usually the only tax. Add 9% for my state to capital gain and upper income tax and add 11% state estate tax to inheritance tax. Add FICA etc. and state income tax to all individual rates etc. Plus gas taxes, sales taxes, telecom tax, property taxes...
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Quite right-- so I have asked the friend who sent it to me, who is usually a reliable source, for the URL and he is going back to the friend who sent it to him.
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My friend responds:
======================
Marc:
He said it was from the John McCain website, www.johnmccain.com. I don't have the time to find its exact location, sorry.
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Clinton Campaign Touts
Value of Big-State Victories
Primary Argument
Overlooks Outcomes
In General Elections
By AMY CHOZICK
March 24, 2008; Page A4
If a Democrat wins a primary in a Republican stronghold, is it really a win? That is the question Clinton supporters will be posing to superdelegates in the coming weeks.
With neither Democratic presidential candidate likely to reach the number of pledged delegates required to secure the nomination, the Clinton campaign is relying on its argument that victories in big states such as California and Ohio make Sen. Hillary Clinton a stronger candidate to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.
Clinton aides are highlighting that Sen. Barack Obama has won among affluent voters in caucuses and primaries in states with small populations of Democrats -- such as Idaho and Wyoming -- and among African Americans in Republican states unlikely to turn blue in November -- such as South Carolina and Georgia.
A Clinton campaign memo released early this month noted Sen. Obama has won 10 out of the 11 core Republican states that have held primaries or caucuses this year. Wyoming, for one, the campaign later noted, hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has rejected the Clinton campaign's attempts to give greater importance to certain states and notes that Sen. Obama won Missouri and Illinois, two large swing states.
The Clinton campaign has been using the big-state argument on and off since Super Tuesday, when Sen. Clinton won big prizes including New York, California and New Jersey. The argument has been central to the campaign since her Ohio and Texas victories, and Clinton aides will be aggressively pushing the point in the weeks before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22.
Pennsylvania represents another battleground state for the Democrats in November. A recent poll of likely voters conducted by SurveyUSA puts Sen. Clinton ahead in the Keystone State, with 55% favoring her compared with 36% favoring Sen. Obama. Other polls give her a narrower lead.
"I think it is significant that I have won Ohio and I won Florida and I've won the big states that serve as those anchors on the electoral map," Sen. Clinton told reporters on board the campaign plane in Scranton, Pa.
Monday in Philadelphia, Sen. Clinton is expected to deliver a speech addressing the housing crisis followed by an event to reach women voters.
The Clinton campaign also has been making an aggressive push for primaries in Michigan and Florida to be counted or redone. Both states were stripped of their delegates to the Democratic National Convention after staging contests earlier than party rules allowed. Last week, Michigan Democrats rejected the idea of a vote-by-mail presidential primary to replace the January vote and were unable to agree to a bill that would authorize a state-run, privately funded primary. Florida also has ruled out a revote.
Clinton adviser Harold Ickes says a revote would prove Sen. Clinton can win in the big, swing states that are important in a general election.
But even if Sen. Clinton won revotes in Michigan and Florida, she would probably still lag in the delegate count. Sen. Obama leads the delegate race with 1,620 to Sen. Clinton's 1,499, including superdelegates, according to the Associated Press; roughly 2,025 are needed to secure the nomination.
A Gallup tracking poll conducted last week shows Sen. Obama leading nationally with 48% of the vote compared with 45% for Sen. Clinton. Other polls show Sen. Clinton slightly ahead nationally.
Historians and political pundits caution that victories in a primary don't necessarily produce dividends in a general election.
"She can win every Democratic vote in the world [during the primary] and not win a general election," says Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. He points to the small segment of more liberal Democrats who participate in a primary compared to the huge cross section of voters likely to turn out in a general election.
Sen. Clinton won Ohio, for example, with 54% of the vote, compared with 44% for Sen. Obama. But a recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters projected her losing Ohio to Sen. McCain in a general election, 46% to 40%. The poll showed Sen. McCain defeating Sen. Obama in the state by the same margin; 14% of respondents said they were undecided.
Allan Lichtman, a political historian at American University, says a candidate's primary showing has very little to do with the general-election result. "The argument holds no water at all, not even a thimbleful," Mr. Lichtman says. He points to the 1980 primary, when incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter carried most of the big swing states, and early polls predicted he would defeat Republican Ronald Reagan in the general election by as much as 25 percentage points. Instead, Mr. Reagan decisively captured the White House. Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry racked up primary victories in key swing states in 1988 and 2004, respectively, only to then lose those states to Republicans.
The Clinton campaign says that just because Sen. Clinton has won in the big states in the primary doesn't mean Sen. Obama will lose those states in a general election. "Nobody is saying Barack Obama will definitely lose Pennsylvania in the fall," says that state's governor, Ed Rendell, a Clinton backer. "If Sen. Obama is the nominee, we will work our hearts out for him...but we are much more confident we would win with Sen. Clinton."
The campaign also argues that big states typically have primaries rather than caucuses, and that primaries are more reflective of the results of a general election.
Part of the reason Sen. Clinton has done well in larger states is strategy. The campaign chose to pour limited resources into advertisements and field offices in delegate-rich Ohio and Texas, rather than make a big push in small caucus states where Sen. Obama was favored.
Sen. Clinton's wins also reflect her solid base of support among Catholics, working-class white voters and Hispanics, three important swing groups for the Democrats to capture in November.
Sen. Obama rejects the notion that he has failed to attract a broad coalition of voters important to the party. "In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans," he said in a speech last week.
On Friday, Sen. Obama picked up the endorsement of former presidential candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Gov. Richardson, a Mexican-American, could help Sen. Obama broaden his appeal among Hispanics.
Write to Amy Chozick at amy.chozick@wsj.com
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Obama is mortally wounded but a Clinton nomination will have literal and figurative blood on the floor in Denver. Still, the Clinton campaign is trying to sway the supers to her side, post-Wrightgate.
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According to this analysis from Weekly Standard, North Carolina is the key for Obama as independents and centrists hold the key for McCain:
Obama-McCain Race Takes Shape - Some thoughts on the Presidential race:
1) Obama is 90 percent likely to be the Democratic nominee, although the press seem to have continuing trouble with basic arithmetic and thereby doubt this. It's important to note that many of the superdelegates are DNC members which means many are not unfeeling calculators of general election odds who are likely to switch in a second but instead real live ideological activists. That helps Obama even more. HRC will be out in early May, after losing North Carolina.
2) General election polls now, like those before the actual primary contests began, are close to meaningless. Wait till after both nominees have given their convention speeches to take a real look.
3) Nonetheless, the Wright kerfuffle has hurt Obama in the long run. He is off his pedestal now. This tension between the inspiring idea of Obama's campaign and the reality of his pragmatic political climb through the hard corners of Chicago Democratic politics is a growing fault line inside the Obama candidacy.
4) Despite a generic political environment that is as awful as awful can be for Republicans, McCain still stands an excellent chance to win the general election but only if he commits to the one obvious and powerful strategy available to him.
5) McCain wins by being acceptable to the independents and white Democrats who will inevitably, over time, crumble off Obama's imperfect reality. He loses if he becomes caught in a partisan base versus base contest with the Democrats. The job for Team McCain is not to tear down Obama, it is to give those who will become increasingly disenchanted from him (Hillary voting blue-collars, Jews, moderates) a reason to see McCain as acceptable. This means McCain should return to his roots and run as the different kind of Republican he truly is. The GOP base will not enjoy this, but they--sorry AM radio crowd--will not control the outcome of this election. Ticket-splitters and swing voters will.
6) Does McCainland understand this? It's unclear. So far, the only strategic news out of the McCain campaign has been a half-baked scheme to fool around with regional offices and "decentralization." Such plumbing and wiring trivia misses the critical point: what McCain needs at once is a well-executed back to the center message strategy to enlarge his appeal beyond just national security issues and win this vital election.
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6) Does McCainland understand this? It's unclear. So far, the only strategic news out of the McCain campaign has been a half-baked scheme to fool around with regional offices and "decentralization." Such plumbing and wiring trivia misses the critical point: what McCain needs at once is a well-executed back to the center message strategy to enlarge his appeal beyond just national security issues and win this vital election.
Never interfere when your opponent, or opponents are busy committing suicide. McCain might well glide into the white house while the dems get caught in a civil war. IMHO, he's playing it exactly right, for right now.
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http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=44aed783-8357-4491-8589-ee15290e6e96
Slouching Toward Denver
The Democratic death march.
Noam Scheiber, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, April 09, 2008
When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign's current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a kind of Hail Mary.
Any candidate trailing at the convention must employ divisive tactics, almost by definition. For example, much of the bitterness in 1980 arose from the floor votes Kennedy engineered to drive a wedge between Carter and his delegates. At one point, Kennedy forced a vote on whether each state's delegation should be split equally between men and women. Carter counted many feminists among his delegates, but the campaign initially opposed the measure so as to deny Kennedy a victory. "You had women who were with Jimmy Carter who were crying on the floor," recalls Joe Trippi, then a young Kennedy organizer.
The Kennedy strategy worked both too well and not well enough. Kennedy won many of the floor votes thanks to Carter's unwillingness to squeeze conflicted delegates. He captivated the rank and file with his mythic "Dream shall never die" speech--a stark contrast to Carter's ham-handed rhetorical style. (In his own speech, Carter famously confused former vice president Hubert Humphrey with Horatio Hornblower, a fictional character from a British book series.) But, for all the maneuvering, the delegate tally barely budged. Kennedy won the convention's hearts and minds; Carter locked up the nomination.
One of the iconic images from that episode has the two men on a crowded stage in Madison Square Garden. Carter edges toward Kennedy expectantly, hoping for a symbolic show of unity. But Kennedy's back is turned, and he's moving in the opposite direction. Capping four days of intramural mud-wrestling, it perfectly captured the party's rift heading toward the general election. Carter himself later lamented news accounts portraying the scene as "an indication that the split in our ranks had not healed." "This accurate impression was quite damaging to our campaign," he wrote in his memoir, Keeping Faith.
As it happens, it's possible that Kennedy never intended the cold-shoulder treatment. The original idea was for Kennedy and Carter to appear alone together at the podium. But, thanks to some horrific Manhattan traffic, Kennedy didn't show up until legions of Carter supporters had flooded the stage. He may have been disoriented amid all the chaos. "To this day, I don't know that there was deliberate effort by Kennedy to snub Carter. It was just a big confusion," says Bill Carrick, one of Kennedy's floor managers. "The lesson is that, if you go into conventions, you're going to have messes. These are not manageable processes."
With little chance that either candidate this time around can clinch the nomination at the polls, it's not inconceivable that Democrats will re-enact this spectacle in Denver this August. (One direct link: Clinton operative Harold Ickes oversaw Kennedy's convention effort in 1980 and would likely oversee Hillary's.) The sequel could be even more damaging. It's true that the ideological gulf separating Kennedy and Carter doesn't divide Obama and Clinton. But, precisely because the substantive differences are so small, the temptation to court delegates along racial and gender lines would be even greater. And the sense of alienation among the losers would be overwhelming. Says former Al Gore campaign manager (and undecided superdelegate) Donna Brazile: "I don't have the 1980 experience, but that was two white men. This is a woman and a black. What's different about this fight is that, when they attack each other, supporters feel like they're attacking them personally." Remember the recent firestorm over Geraldine Ferraro's comment that, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position"? Well, imagine that flap playing out continuously over four days among hundreds of people with no other news to displace it, and you begin to see the problem.
The good news is that an ugly convention fight is highly preventable. The one advantage of a scenario that's both completely hair-raising and utterly foreseeable is that everyone has an incentive to stop it. The bad news is what's not preventable: a contest that rolls into June. Even without a messy convention, the current trajectory of the primary campaign could easily destroy the party's White House prospects.
Democrats have never been known for Spock-like rationality, but even they see the logic of avoiding a convention fiasco. "It's in nobody's interest in the Democratic Party for that to happen," says Mike Feldman, another former Gore aide. "There is a mechanism in place--built into the process--to avoid that." That mechanism, such as it is, involves an en masse movement of uncommitted superdelegates to the perceived winner of the primaries. Almost everything you hear from such people suggests this will happen in time. "I think once we have the elected delegate count, things will move fairly quickly, " says Representative Chris Van Hollen, who oversees the party's House campaign committee. Increasingly, there is even agreement on the metric by which a winner would be named. Just about every superdelegate and party operative I spoke with endorsed Nancy Pelosi's recent suggestion that pledged delegates should matter most.
Assuming Feldman and Van Hollen are right, that means Democrats won't wait much past June 3--currently the last day on the primary calendar--before crowning a nominee. At the same time, it means there's very little chance of ending the contest sooner. Undecided superdelegates on Capitol Hill, along with party elders like Pelosi, Gore, and Harry Reid, "don't want to be seen as elites coming in and overturning the will of the people," says one senior House aide. A Senate staffer says his boss "thinks this give and take is natural, it will be helpful in the end." "That's a view held by a majority of these guys who have been through the cut and thrust of politics," he adds. Which means early June it is.
The problem is that each day Clinton and Obama spend consumed with the other is a day that moves John McCain closer to the White House. McCain's biggest asset is his political brand, which evokes a straight-talking, party-bucking reformer. Among his biggest liabilities is the suspicion he inspires among conservatives thanks to these same attributes. McCain apparently plans to spend the next few months making nice with his base. But anything he accomplishes on this front clearly diminishes his swing-voter appeal and, therefore, his chances in November.
Ideally, the Democrats would be exploiting this tension like mad. They would highlight the anti-Catholic, anti-gay ravings of John Hagee, the evangelical minister whose endorsement McCain recently accepted. They would ridicule his chumminess with supply-side Neanderthals like Jack Kemp and his flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts. They'd dwell on McCain's less-noticed association with crony-capitalists during his tenure as Commerce Committee chairman.
Instead, something close to the opposite is happening. McCain's courtship of the lunatic right and his ties to K Street have largely been hidden from view, while the Democrats' dirty laundry has been aired for swing voters. The upshot for Democrats has not been good. In late February, a Gallup poll showed Obama leading McCain among independents by 15 points. By March 6, a Newsweek poll put McCain up ten points among this group--and that was before Jeremiah Wright weighed in. Hillary went from down five to down 15 among independents during the same time.
A quick look at some recent campaign coverage sheds light on why this is happening. On March 12, Ferraro and the racially polarized Mississippi primary were A-1 news in The Washington Post. It wasn't until page A-6 that you stumbled across a story about McCain's ties to the parent company of Airbus, the Boeing rival to whom the Pentagon recently handed a lucrative contract. The second story could have muddied McCain's reformist credentials, but it barely caused a ripple on cable or the blogosphere.
McCain has no doubt stumbled while trying to consolidate GOP support. He prompted some grumbling with his recent appointment of former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a moderate Republican with little history of party activism, to head Victory '08, a key campaign committee. But there's evidence that, on balance, he's well ahead of schedule. Since Super Tuesday, three-quarters of Republicans have routinely proclaimed themselves satisfied with McCain as their nominee.
If McCain winds up facing Obama, he'll enjoy yet another advantage: a nominee weakened by attacks from a fellow Democrat. "Clinton hit a raw nerve several weeks ago when she said she had thirty-something years of experience, McCain had twenty- to thirty-something years, and Barack Obama had a speech," says Representative Artur Davis, an Obama supporter. The suggestion that Obama isn't ready to be commander-in-chief is "unusually corrosive," Davis complains. Indeed, when I asked various Republican and neutral Democratic operatives to name the most damaging twist in the primaries, most cited this same critique. "It's very good messaging--that he's not fit to be commander-in-chief," crowed one Republican strategist. "When you get the Democrats saying it, that's kind of the nuke in the whole thing." One of his Democratic counterparts was even more blunt: "It's one thing for John McCain to say [Obama's] not as muscular. It's another thing to have a girl saying it. It has some influence on swing voters."
Of course, if Obama's the nominee, he's unlikely to win a national security debate against McCain, with or without Hillary's broadsides. Obama's best bet is to focus the discussion specifically on Iraq. On the other hand, debating national security credentials during the primaries invariably alters the general-election landscape. You can now count on seeing another "3 a.m." ad sometime this fall--not to mention a "3 a.m." debate question from Tim Russert, and a shadowy, "3 a.m."-obsessed 527 group. ("Insomniac Prank-Callers For Truth"?) "I do believe the winner of the 3 a.m. ad is John McCain," says Kevin Madden, a former aide to Mitt Romney. "It's like an NCAA bracket. She may get the play-in game [against Obama], but she'd lose that in the championship game."
And there will surely be more body blows to come. Ad hominem attacks are an almost necessary feature of an unusually long campaign in which policy differences are minimal. At a certain point, there's just no other way to get traction against your opponent. That's one reason Pelosi has informally spoken with colleagues about stepping in if the tone abruptly deteriorates. But there's a catch-22 involved here: Party elders won't forcefully intervene unless an attack does serious damage. But, by then, the damage will have already been done.
Worse, any missile that hits its target would also destroy the person who launched it. Given the delegate math, Hillary's only path to the nomination, barring a meltdown by Obama, is to destroy his electability. But harsh attacks on Obama will inevitably discourage African Americans from voting in the fall, and Hillary can't beat McCain without strong black turnout in places like Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Conversely, any attack on Hillary that alienated moderate Republican women could cripple Obama's chances.
Opinion journalists have a time-honored technique for dealing with news they don't like: Keep making phone calls. In my case, this yielded a depressingly meager haul. The most optimistic scenario I could plausibly construct didn't end the campaign until the second week in May. To make it happen, Obama would have to overtake Hillary among superdelegates--a key psychological barrier. He'd have to limit his margin of defeat in Pennsylvania to ten points, then hold serve two weeks later in North Carolina and Indiana, a pair of states he's slightly favored to win. At that point, Hillary would face nearly impossible odds of overtaking him in the delegate race.
Unfortunately for anyone who wants the race to end soon, there are several problems with this scenario. For one thing, even if all this comes to pass, Hillary would still have to bow out voluntarily--an unlikely twist in any event, but highly implausible if the limbo states of Florida and Michigan still offer her hope. Meanwhile, any one of the aforementioned steps could easily fall through. Polls currently show Obama trailing by double digits in Pennsylvania; the good Reverend Wright could make that tough to change. And, though Obama now leads in North Carolina and Indiana, his advantage is either small or, in the latter case, based on a single, flimsy poll. As for superdelegates, as of this writing, the last two out of the closet opted for Hillary.
So, to review: The most optimistic scenario we have relies on a highly tenuous assumption; it's unlikely to happen even if that assumption holds; and, regardless, it allows the Democratic contest to drag on for six more brutal weeks. The dream may never die, but it's seen some better days.
Noam Scheiber is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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:-D :-D :-D
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/03/obama-iowa-co-c.html
Key Obama Iowa Adviser Invokes 'Monica's Blue Dress' When Assailing Bill Clinton's 'Patriotism' Comments
March 24, 2008 11:07 AM
Gordon Fischer, the former director of the Iowa Democratic Party and a senior adviser for Sen. Barack Obama's efforts in the Hawkeye State, is still very much involved in making sure Obama gets delegates as the caucus process continues.
He's also quite fired up about former President Bill Clinton's comments in front of a North Carolina VFW Hall, which the Obama campaign took to be an impugning of Obama's patriotism.
In his blog, Fischer writes:
"B. Clinton questions Obama's patriotism. In repsonse (sic), an Obama aide compared B. Clinton to Joe McCarthy. This is patently unfair. To McCarthy.
"When Joe McCarthy questioned others' patriotism, McCarthy (1) actually believed, at least aparently (sic), the questions were genuine, and (2) he did so in order to build up, not tear down, his own party, the GOP. Bill Clinton cannot possibly seriously believe Obama is not a patriot, and cannot possibly be said to be helping -- instead he is hurting -- his own party. B. Clinton should never be forgiven. Period. This is a stain on his legacy, much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress."
That's not quite the kind of comment that keeps with Obama's pledge to focus on policy differences instead of personal attacks, I think it's safe to say.
- jpt
UPDATE: Fischer writes to say, "On my individual blog, I made a stupid comment. I sincerely apologize for a tasteless and gratituous comment I made here about President Clinton. It was unnecessary and wrong.
"I have since deleted the comment, and again apologize for making it. It will not happen again.
"I hope my readers will accept my apology and we can move on to the very important issues facing our state and country. Thank you."
UPDATE 2: Obama spox Tommy Vietor writes, "As Senator Obama has said repeatedly, comments like this have no place in our political dialogue and he strongly rejects them.”
Vietor also says that Fischer was not a co-chair, though he's been identified as such, as well as an
adviser, someone who organized Iowa for Obama, etc. etc. So I changed his label to "key adviser." The point is he's directly affiliated with the Obama campaign and he was invoking the blue dress.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/25/hillary-on-wright-i-would-have-quit-the-church/
HRC does some sniping herself. :evil:
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Life in the Vast Lane
By JAMES TARANTO
March 26, 2008
A year ago, we noted that Hillary Clinton, then the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, was reprising the theme of the "vast right-wing conspiracy," the specter of which she first raised in a "Today" show interview in January 1998, just after the Monica Lewinsky scandal became public. To quote from that interview:
This is--the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it--is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it. But it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this may do it.
Politics make strange bedfellows, and no, we're not referring to that woman, Miss Lewinsky. National Review's Byron York notes that Mrs. Clinton was photographed yesterday with one of the key VRW conspirators:
Here is a photo from Hillary Clinton's visit . . . to the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In this picture, she is seen talking to none other than Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the paper and the man who once said that the death of Vincent Foster was the "Rosetta stone" of the Bill Clinton administration. (He also funded the so-called "Arkansas Project" at The American Spectator.)
Wait, it gets better. Get a load of this item, also from late yesterday, from Marc Ambinder, a blogger from The Atlantic:
The Clinton campaign is distributing an article in the American Spectator (!) about Obama foreign policy adviser Merrill McPeak and his penchant for.. well, the article accuses him of being an anti-Semite and a drunk.
Here we should disclose that we write regularly for the Spectator, that the Spectator is a member of the OpinionJournal Federation, and that we considered reprinting the article in question as a Federation Feature but decided it was too over the top.
The Atlantic's liberal bloggers are puffed up with outrage that Mrs. Clinton would "dignify" the Spectator, as James Fallows puts it:
If, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder's report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from the American Spectator, this is simply disgusting. . . .
That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s. . . .
I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article. That the Clinton team would circulate it I'm still trying to deal with.
Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan, a self-described "Clinton hater" who seems to be in love with Barack Obama, piles on, quoting Atlantic blogger James Fallows as calling the Clinton campaign's distribution of the Spectator piece "simply disgusting." This is known as "blogrolling."
But it's more convoluted still. It turns out The Atlantic, whose bloggers are now ganging up on the Spectator, has a longtime rivalry with the latter magazine. In 2001 The Atlantic published an article titled "The Life and Death of The American Spectator." The online blurb reads, "The conservative magazine survived and prospered for twenty-five years before Bill Clinton came into its sights. Now the former President is rich and smiling, and the Spectator is dead."
Reports of the Spectator's death turned out to be exaggerated, but it is fair to say the magazine had fallen on hard times in 2001, in part as a result of a fruitless Clinton administration grand jury probe. The Atlantic article also attributed the Spectator's difficulties to the Arkansas Project:
Why couldn't [editor Bob] Tyrrell see that the project--which involved nonjournalists and a private detective funded by a third party--was an extraordinarily dangerous proposition for any journalistic enterprise? Perhaps because Tyrrell never saw the Spectator solely as a journalistic enterprise. Since the early days in Bloomington, Tyrrell had envisioned The Alternative as an adjunct to a political movement. They had their party, we had ours. They had their magazine, we had ours. Years later his letters to Ronald Reagan ("we shall continue the good fight with you") suggested that his views had not changed. Still more years later, as he began the Arkansas Project, he felt the same way.
Well, the Spectator is an opinion magazine. As is National Review, which now employs the author of the Atlantic article on the Spectator--Byron York, a former Spectator staffer.
So to sum up: On one side we have Barack Obama, The Atlantic, its bloggers and Byron York; on the other, Hillary Clinton, Dick Scaife and The American Spectator.
Key unanswered question: On which side does MediaMatters.org come down? That is the left-wing group headed by David Brock, who spent the early '90s investigating the Clintons for the Spectator, then contracted to write a biography of Mrs. Clinton, produced a surprisingly sympathetic account that sold poorly, jumped ship, and became a liberal Democrat.
After all this, we defy anyone to say with a straight face that Saddam Hussein would not have supported al Qaeda because he was secular.
Obama and the 'Ethnic Bomb'
Blogger Steve Gilbert uncovers another gem from the annals of the Trinity United Church of Christ. In its June 10, 2007, newsletter, the church, whose most famous member is Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama, published an "Open Letter to Oprah" (see pp. 8-11 of PDF) by one Ali Baghdadi, whose description alone ought to raise eyebrows:
Ali Baghdadi, an Arab-American activist, writer, columnist; worked with several African-American groups on civil and human rights issues since the mid sixties; acted as a Middle East advisor to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad the founder of the Nation of Islam, as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan; visited more than 80 countries throughout the world and met with many of their leaders, including Mandela, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad, Qathafi, Abdallah ibn Abdel-Aziz, Rafsanjani, Ayatollah Khamenei, among many others.
Baghdadi's "open letter" is an anti-Israel screed, in which he states, among other things, that "what the Zionist Jews did to the Palestinians is worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews, because . . . Jews should have learned from their tragic experience" (a sentiment he attributes to Arnold Toynbee) and that Israel and apartheid South Africa "both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs."
On the page immediately after Baghdadi's rant appears an article by Robert M. Franklin, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at Emory University, titled "Obama's Faith: A Civil and Social Gospel." Franklin anticipates and tries to defuse Obama's current difficulties:
Some media hounds have focused on Obama's home church of choice. Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side is one of the nation's most progressive African American mega-churches. Led for thirty-five years by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., the church fuses into its core Christian identity a set of cultural strains that are vibrant in contemporary Black life, including liberation theology, Afrocentrism, and progressive politics.
The church has appealed especially to baby boomers who came of age during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Dr. Wright has managed to bring together the disciples of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Black Nationalist disciples of Malcolm X, and to put them all in the service of promoting more equitable policies for the least advantaged members of our society. Indeed, he is often credited with making it possible for many disaffected Black separatists to return to the church and to seek change within the system.
Unfortunately, uninformed pundits (a deliberate oxymoron) from Fox TV recently weighed in on a congregation and a community about which they know very little. Their purpose is to embarrass Obama by insinuating that he is a closeted Black separatist or worse. But they fail to appreciate something distinctive about American religion and public life. The best of American political tradition permits--and perhaps requires--candidates both to acknowledge their ethnic and regional particularity, and to transcend that particularity in loyalty to the general human condition.
As an aside, it appears that the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at Emory University doesn't know what an oxymoron is.
More to the point, what exactly do the anti-Semitic ravings of Ali Baghdadi, who describes himself as a Palestinian Arab and a Muslim, have to do with Obama's "ethnic and religious particularity"? We're pretty sure Obama is neither Arab nor Muslim. Is there anything that is not excusable as a "black thing"?
Note, too, that Baghdadi in his bio boasts of having "met" with many "leaders" who were avowed enemies of the U.S. (along with Mandela and the Saudi King Abdullah), something that Obama has also promised to do if elected president.
Obama apologists will say that none of this matters, that there is no proof that Obama agrees with or countenances the views of Ali Baghdadi, that to even raise the matter is to engage in "guilt by association."
But a political campaign is not a criminal trial. Voters are free to judge Obama, and other candidates, by whatever criteria they see fit, including their dubious associations. One needn't reach a verdict of guilty to conclude that Obama seems less fit than his opponents to occupy the most powerful position in the world.
Accountability Journalism
As long as Hillary Clinton is a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, let's defend her against Associated Press editorializing. Here's the lead sentence from a Washington dispatch:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, apparently trying to deflect the embarrassing fuss over her exaggerated account of a trip to Bosnia 12 years ago, told reporters at a Democratic presidential campaign stop that she would have left the church that rival Barack Obama attends over critical remarks his pastor made about America.
Now, maybe Mrs. Clinton is "trying to deflect the embarrassing fuss." But to whom exactly is this apparent? Isn't this a pretty blatant example of a reporter inserting his opinions into a news story?
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Hillary's Last Hope
By LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY
March 27, 2008; Page A15
WSJ
I'm a numbers guy, especially if they have to do with politics or economics. So even though I am a Republican, analyzing the Democratic primary results has become a great pastime. This is especially true when it comes to the Democrats' dilemma about how to handle Florida and Michigan -- two states that broke party rules by holding their primaries before the allowed date, but which probably hold the key to the Democratic presidential nomination. To this numbers guy, the solution is pretty obvious from the data.
But the Democrats appear to be a party of lawyers. Only lawyers could have invented delegate selection rules as complicated and opaque as the ones the Democrats are struggling under. It also looks like only lawyers have a chance at the Democratic nomination. Harvard Law (Obama) and Yale Law (Clinton) candidates have survived, while University of North Carolina Law (Edwards), Syracuse Law (Biden), and the University of Louisville Law (Dodd) have been eliminated. And lawyers at the DNC Rules Committee will decide what happens next.
Still, sometimes lawyers call in numbers guys as expert witnesses.
The first question is whether Florida and Michigan voters acted like these primaries mattered, even though they knew the delegates they chose were not recognized by the national party. This can be discerned from turnout, and in the case of Florida the answer is yes.
Florida had a closed primary in which only registered Democrats could vote; turnout amounted to 46.7% of John Kerry's 2004 popular vote. The primary turnout relative to Kerry's 2004 vote in other closed primaries ranged from 39.8% in New York and 40.8% in Connecticut to 48% in Delaware, 49% in Arizona to 58.5% in Maryland. In other words, Florida Democrats acted as if their primary mattered just as much as other Democrats. By contrast, turnout in Michigan was only 23.7% of Kerry's 2004 vote, and it is an open primary. Michigan Democrats did not act like their primary mattered.
The second question is whether the two states' primary votes were skewed because of their timing, or whether they looked like what would have occurred had they happened on some "legal" day like Super Tuesday. A survey of exit polls from the primaries held so far shows patterns of voting by factors like age, gender, racial and ethnic identification, income, education and religion. This allows us to test whether the Florida and Michigan results looked the way they "should," based on how the voting occurred in other states.
Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by 17 points in Florida. If one takes the voting by age in large Super Tuesday states like California and New Jersey and applies it to the demographics of Florida, a predicted margin of 16 points emerges.
The similarities don't end there. For example, Jewish voters made up 9% of the Democratic electorate in Florida and New Jersey. Mrs. Clinton won this group by 32 points in Florida and 26 points in New Jersey. This is not surprising, since many Jewish residents of Florida emigrated from up north, and thus voted the same way their cousins, nieces, nephews and children did.
The statistical evidence strongly suggests that the outcome in Florida reflected what would have occurred had the state voted on Super Tuesday rather than one week earlier.
The voting in Michigan reflects many similarities to other states, but is far less conclusive. Sen. Obama's name was of course not on the Michigan ballot. Yet voters had the option of voting "uncommitted" -- and the demographic evidence suggests they understood that voting "uncommitted" was a vote for Mr. Obama, or at least against Mrs. Clinton. California and New Jersey votes by age, where Mr. Obama was on the ballot, were almost exactly the same as in Michigan, where "uncommitted" was the alternative to Mrs. Clinton. A difference does emerge in the over-60 group, which gave Mrs. Clinton a 37-point margin in Michigan compared with 21 in California, 25 in Missouri and 28 in New Jersey. The average of those would have reduced her 15-point overall margin in Michigan to 12 points.
That difference in margin is virtually identical to the key difference between Michigan and other states: less of a racial gap. Among the 23% of Michigan Democrats who identified themselves as black, "uncommitted" beat Clinton by 38 points. Remember that Michigan voted four days before South Carolina, when the racial issue moved to the forefront. In South Carolina and the Super Tuesday states, Mr. Obama beat Mrs. Clinton by margins between 50 and 60 points. Had this happened in Michigan, Clinton's victory margin would have been 11 points instead of 15. Although unprovable without access to the actual polling questionnaires, the likelihood is that older black voters trended decisively to Mr. Obama after Michigan and South Carolina. That same conclusion also appears to be consistent with national polling.
In sum, the Michigan vote was flawed in ways the Florida vote was not. The most statistically valid conclusion would be that changes in voter attitudes in the second half of January would have produced a much narrower win for Mrs. Clinton of 10-12 points (not 15) had the state voted on Super Tuesday instead of Jan. 15. Still, Mrs. Clinton would almost certainly have won.
The behavior of Mrs. Clinton, who went to Michigan to lobby for a revote, and that of the Obama campaign, which worked to thwart a Michigan revote, indicate that both camps know this would be the outcome. Demographically Michigan looks almost identical to Ohio, which gave Clinton a 10-point victory.
Discussion among Democrats on how to deal with Florida and Michigan centers on three options. The first is not to seat them at all. Legally appropriate, but it would doubtless hurt the Democrats in both states in November -- which may be why Republicans in the state legislatures found themselves as allies of Mr. Obama in working against a revote.
The second option would be to seat delegations that were evenly split between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama. This would make the votes of 2.3 million Democrats irrelevant, while creating artificial representation for the states. It is very much like the 72 bonus delegates selected by party leaders to "represent" women, ethnic minorities, the gay and lesbian communities and the handicapped.
The third option would be to let the early primary votes stand, and select delegates according to the outcome. On a statistical basis, this is clearly the right result for Florida. The easiest solution for Michigan is to simply award the 45% of the vote uncommitted or for another candidate to Mr. Obama. This appears to be the intent of those voters, as well as the likely result of a rematch. It would reduce Mr. Obama's current edge in pledged delegates to 115 from 167. It would also reduce the adjusted popular-vote margin, that converts caucus votes to primary votes, to an edge for Mr. Obama of 466,000. If Mrs. Clinton wins Pennsylvania by the margin polls now suggest, the two candidates would be essentially tied in popular votes, with an Obama edge in delegates of about 80. That would leave the remaining primaries and the superdelegates to decide the outcome of an essentially tied race.
Democrats are clearly going to have to rewrite their delegate selection rules after this contest, like they did after similar fiascos in 1968 and 1988. Until then, it's up to the lawyers, and may the cleverest lawyer win. My money is on Mr. Obama blocking the statistically based solution described above. After all, as a product of Harvard myself, I know perfectly well that Harvard produces cleverer lawyers than Yale, regardless of what the numbers might say.
Mr. Lindsey is president and CEO of the Lindsey Group, and author of "What a President Should Know . . . But Most Learn too Late" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
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May I suggest the author of these suggestions to be McCain s choice for VP. - Doug
Ten Things a Candidate Might Want to Say, by Victor Davis Hanson
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/victordavishanson/2008/03/26/ten_things_a_candidate_might_p.php
Date: 2008-04-06, 12:52AM CDT
1. Surplus! Talk of the notion of surplus, rather than mere budget-balancing. Deficits, and national and foreign debt, are matters of more than statistics. They are barometers of a nation’s self-confidence, its mood and self-image. Percentages of GDP may be the real indicator of debt, but in practical terms Americans think in terms of dollars owed. So we need a candidate not only to outline a balanced budget, but one of surplus that will pay down the debt as well, and by spending cuts rather than tax increases. Do that and much of the American malaise will disappear. Economists might shudder, but imagine no annual deficit, a national surplus of $1 trillion or so, the Social Security Trust Fund in Al Gore’s lockbox, $10 trillion in foreign bonds held by US interests, a dollar at a Euro (yes, we know the trade difficulties that would accrue), and gold at about $300 an ounce.
2. Close the borders. No need now to fight about amnesty, guest workers, deportation, assimilation, etc. All these key issues loom in the future. For now simply reduce the number of illegal arrivals to zero—through border fencing, more patrolling and manpower, employer sanctions, and stern negotiations with Mexico. Then as we squabble and fight, the number of foreign nationals or those not assimilated will begin to shrink in a variety of ways—once it is not growing. We need to take step one, rather than bicker over steps five and six. Who knows—we might just see many state treasuries miraculously recover, and thereby be spared the mantra that illegal aliens ‘really’ are a budget plus for states?
3. Iraq. Explain Iraq in blunt terms—that the first war against Saddam was won, but the second, more important one against radical Islam is still being won in the heart of the caliphate. Here Americans wish to know how many of the enemy we’ve killed, the degree to which other nations have stopped nuclear proliferation (cf. Libya or Dr. Khan), and the degree to which bin Laden and the tactic of suicide bombing have lost popularity. We need to explain to the American people how the tactical success of the surge translates to strategic victory, in the way stabilizing Korea, for example, allowed the powers of capitalism and constitutional government to be unleashed in the south and eventually to make a mockery of the fossilized north. If we can stabilize Iraq, its government and economy might do the same vis a vis Iran or Syria. In any case, we need some strategic vision of what Iraq is supposed to look like in five years and our role in it. A viable prosperous free Iraq is the worst nightmare of al Qaeda—but why and how needs to articulated daily.
4. Race. No more “conversations on race” but simply an end to identity politics. Americans are worn out with racial tribalism. The post-racial candidate Obama recently posed with Bill Richardson to gain a “Latino” endorsement, on the hope apparently that just as African-Americans are supposedly voting 90% for Obama, Hispanics might do likewise on Richardson’s prompt. But the scene was Orwellian. Both Obama and Richardson are elites of mixed ancestry and they just as well might have argued that they were “white” candidates. When either one claims fides to one side of their heritage, they implicitly reject the other. I can’t believe that a naturalized citizen from Oaxaca would vote for the grandee Obama because the grandee Richardson claimed that as an authentic Latino of similar background and perspective he should. And if he were to do that, then we are simply a tribal nation after all.
5. Taxes. Some simplification of the tax code. Americans can’t figure out their taxes. When in their 50s some of them finally make good money, more than 50% go to taxes while they are demonized as “the wealthy”—even as the mega-wealthy either pay on “income” as capital gains at 20%, or are so embedded in corporations that their expenses are taken care of as business deductions. In America, the couple that makes between $150,000-500,000 carries the country and gets less relief than the really well-to-do, but just as much grief and envy from the less well off. Some sort of flat-tax, simple-form is critical to our survival as a nation (I confess I just filled out my taxes and found it much harder than reading the choruses of Aeschylus).
6. Fuel. We don’t need to be “energy independent”—as opposed to cutting our appetite for imported oil by 5-6 million barrels per day. We have the world’s largest coal reserves. There are still a million or two barrels a day to be captured off our coasts and in Alaska. If every other family were to have a second electric commute car plugged into a nuclear-powered electric grid, we could easily accomplish all that rather quickly—until we arrive in 20 years at the so-called big rock candy mountain of hydrogen, flex-fuels, sustainable ethanols, etc. At $108 a barrel Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and the Middle East kleptocracies have the cash to cause us great trouble abroad, at $40 they are merely thugs. Would it help if someone said, “Ok, either drill in Anwar, or cut sales of SUVs by 10% per year,” or “Drill off the coast and build nuclear power plants, or have gas at over $5 a gallon—your choice”?
7. Colleges. We need more transparency in our universities. Why do tax-exempt private institutions use their funds largely to enrich an elite rather than to subsidize student tuitions? Universities avoid taxes, but as non-profits don’t use that saving to help those for whom they exist, but rather spend their fortunes more often subsidizing faculty and administrators. They are no different than those scandalous charities who exist for their apparat. How universities have been able to up their tuitions consistently above the rate of inflation, while exploiting part-time, poorly paid contractual faculty, and masquerading all the while as liberal institutions are among the great mysteries of the modern age. Yet any inquiry into the labyrinth of identity politics, racial quotas, the absence of intellectual diversity or the problems with tenure are met by charges of “McCarthyism” or worse. American universities are rated the world’s best only because of our sciences and engineering—and thus despite, not because of, our failed liberal arts curriculum
8. Health Care. Simply mandate, as in the case of car insurance, that everyone buy catastrophic health care plans, and use health saving accounts for everything else. When we go to K-Mart and see a sign that says “Strep Diagnosis and antibiotics—$50” or ”Check our rates for heart exam and medication” and expect to pay cash up-front out of our saving accounts, while reserving insurance for emergencies and major illnesses, the price of health care will plunge and the patient will become an adult again—rather than rushing to the emergency room at 3AM with the “flu” and no insurance, and less ability or willingness to pay. As someone who has been in emergency rooms four times the last five years for either kidney stones or broken bones, two facts I discovered: more than half don’t have health insurance, and 100% had cell phones, the costs of which per month would nearly pay for catastrophic medical plans. Americans for some reason are outraged that they might pay $3000 in health or drug uninsured costs per year, but hardly object to an extra $2000 in moon roof, rims, or GPS on their new cars. We are Hillary’s proverbial “nation uninsured” with plasma TVs and 4x4 trucks.
9. Infrastructure. The objections to government spending revolve around redistribution, not construction. We need a slash in entitlements and more investment in bigger, better, and more roads, rails, and airports. A highway 101 (note I don’t call it a freeway yet after a half-century, given its suicidal cross-traffic breaks) is a cruel joke. In California, there are still only two major winter routes in and out of the state on an east-west axis. Driving a highway 152 or 41 east-west is circa 1955. Most of our Sierra roadways are wonderful up to the crest, where they suddenly stop in their tracks or devolve into pot-holed paved cattle trails—on the apparent assumption there is not ecological damage driving up the western slope, but would be plenty descending the eastern (or that our forefathers were scoundrels that gave us these beautiful roads to the summit, but we are saints for using them and offering nothing of improvement to our children to get over the other side).
10. National Security. Talk honestly about terror and national security. Why can’t a candidate say—“We will monitor what we think are terrorist calls routed through the US. So do you think this is right, or an abject violation of your privacy?” And instead of “Close Down Gitmo!”, one might say, “We prefer to have about 400 Padilla-like trials instead”. Or we could say, “No water boarding and we will take our chances that what damage a terrorist might do is overshadowed by the damage we will do to our reputation.” I don’t think Americans quite know what they want, but they are very tired of being told the question is black/white, win/lose rather than a mess where each answer poses another question. Treat us like adults, and let the public back a candidate who apprises them of the costs and benefits and risks, instead of either mouthing “police state!” or “a nuke will go off!”
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Feckless FEC
The Federal Election Commission, down to only two out of its six required members since January, suffered another blow yesterday. A Democratic nominee for a vacancy announced he was withdrawing. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says it will "most likely" take several months to find a replacement for Robert Lenhard, who said in a statement he couldn't wait any longer in limbo.
Leaving the FEC with only a skeleton crew means the agency can't open new cases, hold public meetings or even issue advisory opinions. Michael Toner, a former FEC chairman, says the inability of the White House and the Senate to agree on nominees "hurts the ability of parties and candidates to comply with the law." The commission does not have the legal authority without a quorum to release the public financing funds that may be vital to John McCain's fall campaign -- a situation that perhaps suits Barack Obama, who has declared that his large haul of private Internet donations represents a new kind of "public financing" and who seems intent on reneging on his previous pledges to abide by the public financing system.
Democrats created the FEC impasse last year when they balked at confirming Hans von Spakovsky, who had served on the FEC for two years. Ironically, it was Sen. Obama himself who put the nomination on hold because Mr. von Spakovsky, as a Justice Department official, had supported laws requiring voters to show photo ID. Those laws have since been upheld as Constitutional by several federal courts and the Supreme Court is likely to follow suit in a decision it will hand down this June.
So much for Mr. Obama's call to transcend partisanship. So much for Democratic insistence on the importance of maintaining a strong federal watchdog to enforce all the campaign-finance regulations Democrats created. And so much for the wisdom of John McCain in promoting his infamous McCain-Feingold regulations -- which now appears to have entangled him in a federal snafu that is likely to damage his candidacy.
-- John Fund
White House, Green House
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McCain-omics
April 16, 2008; Page A18
John McCain gave his big economic speech in Pittsburgh Tuesday, and many of the policies he proposed are laudable – the highlight being an optional flat tax for individuals. The weakness – especially heading into a general election amid a struggling economy – is that his pudding still has no theme.
Being able to provide a guiding economic narrative is not just a matter of having a catchy soundbite, a la the "ownership society." It's essential for two reasons. First, it offers voters an explanation of how we got to the current moment, which means why the economy is struggling. The two Democrats already have their story: The 1990s were a golden age for the middle class that has been ruined by Republican tax cuts that rewarded only rich lenders and speculators. Mr. McCain needs a different policy narrative.
AP
John McCain
Second, a guiding philosophy shows voters that future decisions will be made according to a set of principles they can understand. Example: A month ago, Mr. McCain gave a speech saying it wasn't the government's obligation to rescue those who took out loans they couldn't afford. Then last week he, ahem, supplemented that view by supporting an FHA-guaranteed loan-restructuring program in what looked to be a bid to compete with Democrats in the housing bailout auction.
Without some guiding principles, voters are left to wonder whether Mr. McCain's next lurch will be to the populist left, where his instincts sometimes run, or to the fiscally conservative right, where he is also sometimes found.
True to form, yesterday's speech offered support for both McCains. On the pro-growth side, he spoke out strongly for tax reform and endorsed the specific idea of an optional flat tax. "We are going to create a new and simpler tax system – and give the American people a choice," he said. Tax reform is precisely the kind of big domestic proposal that will let him plausibly campaign as the real agent of "change." And by making it optional, he can deflect Democratic claims that he'll rob Americans of their tax deductions.
We were also glad to see Mr. McCain repeat his proposal to cut the corporate tax rate to 25% from its current 35%. This is a competitive necessity, as the rest of the world marches its way down the corporate Laffer Curve. The U.S. now has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world – after Japan – and every CEO we talk to says the punitive U.S. rate is one reason so much investment is being made overseas.
The Senator also took a hard line on spending, saying "we need to make a clean break from the worst excesses of both political parties." And he put some specific ideas behind it: A promise to veto any bill with earmarks, and a "one-year pause in discretionary spending increases," except for defense and veterans. You can already hear the squealing on both of those from Capitol Hill, where spending increases have long been automatic and earmarks are nearly a matter of natural right. This attack on spending is credible given Mr. McCain's voting record, and it will serve as a contrast with either Democratic candidate, who will be promising vast new spending programs.
Less credible is Mr. McCain's call for Washington to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day to help consumers hit by high oil prices. There are few tax cuts we don't like, but this one smacks of poll-driven gimmickry. If Mr. McCain wants to cut the price of gasoline, he should tell the Federal Reserve to stop fueling the commodity boom by cutting interest rates.
Mr. McCain had almost nothing to say about prices and inflation, yet both are among the major concerns of voters in the polls. Like most of today's politicians, he seems to see gasoline prices only through the prism of energy policy. But the single major cause of the recent oil and gas price spike is monetary policy. Mr. McCain needs to find a way to tell voters, as Ronald Reagan did, that inflation is the great thief of the middle class and that he wants a Federal Reserve that will protect the value of the dollar and personal thrift.
Which brings us back to the matter of an agenda without a theme. To win in November, Mr. McCain is going to have to do more than mimic the Democrats by blaming the housing bust on greedy lenders and rich Wall Street CEOs. If voters believe that narrative, they'll elect a President Obama. He needs to be the tribune of the middle-class family that pays its bills and didn't gamble on property.
He'll also need to say more than that Democrats will raise taxes while he will cut them. He needs to explain to voters why low tax rates are vital in an increasingly competitive world; why they can help revive growth at home; and why growth and economic security go hand in hand with national security.
In yesterday's speech, Mr. McCain tried to show voters he feels their pain. What they need and want to hear is a speech that shows that he understands and is willing to fight for the policies that produce prosperity.
WSJ
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Many liberals exploded in anger last night over the fact that Barack Obama was asked by ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos for the first time to explain his relationship with William Ayers, a former member of the 1960s terrorist group Weather Underground, which set off bombs in the Pentagon and Capitol.
Mr. Ayers, asked in the Sept. 11, 2001 New York Times if he regretted his actions, said he only wished he had set off more bombs.
Mr. Obama knew enough to try to distance himself from Mr. Ayers. "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from.... The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George."
What disturbed liberals most was not that the question brought back the turbulent 60s, but that its genesis apparently came from conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Mr. Stephanopoulos was on Mr. Hannity's radio show on Tuesday, and was asked why no one in the media had asked Mr. Obama about the association with Mr. Ayers. Mr. Stephanopoulos told the radio audience he was writing down all the information Mr. Hannity was giving him.
"It's a question that should have been asked a year ago, it's about time," Mr. Hannity e-mailed me last night. George did not seem to even know about it till I told him. The left wing blogs are going nuts over this (and crying foul)."
That's understandable, given that the way Mr. Obama handled the question almost guarantees he will have to address it again. But that doesn't mean the issue is illegitimate or inappropriate. It just means it's finally been raised in a campaign that has given Mr. Obama too many passes on his background.
-- John Fund
Hillary's Doggedness Vindicated
Since neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will have enough in elected delegates to clinch the nomination when the primaries end, last night's ABC debate largely had them trying to influence one elite audience: the superdelegates who will represent almost 20% of the Democratic convention floor vote and who will decide the nominee.
Based on last night's performance, Mr. Obama shouldn't expect a lot of superdelegates to break for him in the near future. Most observers agreed that, faced with the toughest questioning he has ever gotten in a debate, he was tense, evasive and obscure in many of his answers. Even blogger Andrew Sullivan, a fervent Obama supporter, acknowledged that he was "having an awful night."
He singled out Mr. Obama's insistence that the capital gains tax be raised even after confronted with evidence that previous cuts had actually led to higher revenues. Mr. Sullivan noted that "Obama's convoluted capital gains tax answer was a brutal reminder to folks like me that he is indeed a redistributionist, and someone who seems to see the tax system as a way to decide what people 'deserve' to have and keep. Ugh."
Last night's debate demonstrated one thing: Hillary Clinton's strategy of hanging on in hopes that Mr. Obama will lose luster over time hasn't been a bad one. She is still unlikely to win the nomination, but she has even more reason now to keep fighting until the last primary is held in June.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"On Rev. Wright he took a direct hit. He couldn't get off the treadmill and just kept making things worse. On William Ayers he was tough and in your face, but it came off defensive and clearly put him further off his stride. It was clear he wasn't used to it.... Obama hasn't had this type of questioning before. No doubt his supporters will be upset, while Clinton's supporters likely feel it was long overdue. The truth is that [ABC News moderators] Gibson and Stephanopoulos asked questions that have been on people's minds, but nobody else in the media had the spine to bring up" -- liberal blogger and radio host Taylor Marsh.
Quote of the Day II
"All the signs point to a big Democratic year, and I still wouldn't bet against Obama winning the White House, but his background as a Hyde Park liberal is going to continue to dog him. No issue is crushing on its own, but it all adds up. For the life of me I can't figure out why he didn't have better answers on Wright and on the 'bitter' comments. The superdelegates cannot have been comforted by his performance" -- New York Times columnist David Brooks, blogging last night's debate.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/04/16/dem-debate-obamas-waterloo/
Dem Debate: Obama’s Waterloo
POSTED AT 10:30 PM ON APRIL 16, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
The last Democratic debate has finally concluded, and perhaps the last chances of ending the primaries early. Thanks to a surprisingly tenacious set of questions for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from ABC moderaters Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous, Barack Obama got exposed over and over again as an empty suit, while Hillary cleaned his clock. However, the big winner didn’t even take the stage tonight.
The first 45 minutes of the scheduled 90-minute debate (which went 15 minutes over) wound up focusing on the series of gaffes and stumbles from both candidates. Hillary more or less defused the Tuzla Dash by admitting she essentially lied about it, trying at one point to use the “sleep deprivation” defense. Obama, however, never did figure out the First Rule of Holes. Once again, he described religion as a refuge people use when government doesn’t work — a fatal misreading of religious faith in America. He not only came up with bad answers, he looked lost and tentative throughout the entire period.
Hillary didn’t let him off the hook, either, not when it came to Crackerquiddick or on the Wright Stuff. Noting that “you choose your pastor, not your family,” Hillary once again pounded Obama for not doing anything about Wright when he had the chance. She also jumped at the chance to note that former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers was more than just a “neighbor”, as Obama described him. Hillary pointed out that Obama and Ayers worked on a foundation together for years, even after 9/11, even after Ayers said publicly that he didn’t regret his terrorism.
And what was Obama’s response? He compared Ayers to Senator Tom Coburn, who opposes abortion. Of course, Coburn hasn’t bombed abortion clinics, but Obama can’t tell the difference between a Senator and a terrorist. That won’t help him in Middle America either, and Coburn may have a few words for Obama after this night.
By the time Gibson got around to the issues, Obama looked lost and upset. It got worse when Gibson asked about capital-gains tax rates, which Obama has pledged to raise. When Gibson repeatedly pointed out that decreasing the rates actually increased the revenues, Obama simply couldn’t come up with an answer, stammering while trying to change the subject. On guns, both Hillary and Obama stumbled through tortured explanations of how they support a Constitutional right for individuals to own guns while backing gun bans like the one in DC.
The winner of this debate? John McCain. Both Democrats came out of this diminished, but Obama got destroyed in this exchange. If superdelegates had begun to reconsider their support of Obama after Crackerquiddick, they’re speed-dialing Hillary after watching Gibson dismember Obama on national TV tonight.
And kudos to ABC News for taking on both candidates fearlessly. John McCain has to feel grateful not to be included. Don’t forget that you can read through our live blog at any time.
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And here's another point of view... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/17/AR2008041700013.html?nav=hcmodule
In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC
By Tom Shales
Thursday, April 17, 2008; Page C01
When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates' debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.
For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.
The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.
Gibson sat there peering down at the candidates over glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking prosecutorial and at times portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class. Blunderingly he addressed an early question, about whether each would be willing to serve as the other's running mate, "to both of you," which is simple ineptitude or bad manners. It was his job to indicate which candidate should answer first. When, understandably, both waited politely for the other to talk, Gibson said snidely, "Don't all speak at once."
For that matter, the running-mate question that Gibson made such a big deal over was decidedly not a big deal -- especially since Wolf Blitzer asked it during a previous debate televised and produced by CNN.
The boyish Stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network's Sunday morning hour, "This Week" (as, indeed, has Gibson with the nightly "World News"), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy. He came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. That was "40 years ago, when I was 8 years old," Obama said with exasperation.
Obama was right on the money when he complained about the campaign being bogged down in media-driven inanities and obsessiveness over any misstatement a candidate might make along the way, whether in a speech or while being eavesdropped upon by the opposition. The tactic has been to "take one statement and beat it to death," he said.
No sooner was that said than Gibson brought up, yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama. "Charlie, I've discussed this," he said, and indeed he has, ad infinitum. If he tried to avoid repeating himself when clarifying his position, the networks would accuse him of changing his story, or changing his tune, or some other baloney.
This is precisely what has happened with widely reported comments that Obama made about working-class people "clinging" to religion and guns during these times of cynicism about their federal government.
"It's not the first time I made a misstatement that was mangled up, and it won't be the last," said Obama, with refreshing candor. But candor is dangerous in a national campaign, what with network newsniks waiting for mistakes or foul-ups like dogs panting for treats after performing a trick. The networks' trick is covering an election with as little emphasis on issues as possible, then blaming everyone else for failing to focus on "the issues."
Some news may have come out of the debate (ABC News will pretend it did a great job on today's edition of its soppy, soap-operatic "Good Morning America"). Asked point-blank if she thought Obama could defeat presumptive Republican contender John McCain in the general election, Clinton said, "Yes, yes, yes," in apparent contrast to previous remarks in which she reportedly told other Democrats that Obama could never win. And in turn, Obama said that Clinton could "absolutely" win against McCain.
To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. The director cut several times to reaction shots of such Clinton supporters as her daughter, Chelsea, who sat in the audience at the Kimmel Theater in Philly's National Constitution Center. Obama supporters did not get equal screen time, giving the impression that there weren't any in the hall. The director also clumsily chose to pan the audience at the very start of the debate, when the candidates made their opening statements, so Obama and Clinton were barely seen before the first commercial break.
At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates -- or was he really patting himself on the back? -- for "what I think has been a fascinating debate." He's entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/04/18/obamas-strange-defense-of-william-ayers/
Obama’s strange defense of William Ayers
POSTED AT 8:34 AM ON APRIL 18, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
Barack Obama has decided to push back against criticisms of his association with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, but the arguments he offers sound less than convincing. Rather than chalk it up to political naivete and issue a non-apology apology, Obama has decided to argue that he can’t be expected to consider the actions of people that took place in his childhood, and that Ayers only was bad for a few days. No, really, this is his entire opening argument:
REALITY: OBAMA WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD WHEN THE WEATHERMEN WERE ACTIVE
Obama Turned Eight In September 1969, The Days Of Rage Occurred In October 1969. Barack Obama was born on September 4, 1961. He turned eight on September 4, 1969. The Days of Rage, in which William Ayers participated, occurred in October 1969. [Obama Birth Certificate, UPI, 10/21/81]
William Ayers Participated In The “Days Of Rage” In 1969. The AP reported, “In the autumn of 1969, the Weatherman, led by Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, converged on Chicago and planned a series of demonstrations to dramatize their beliefs. The riots, which came to be known as the “Days of Rage,” caused thousands of dollars in damage in the downtown and Near North Side areas and resulted in injuries to several policemen. Rudd and Ms. Dohrn were named in federal riot indictments with ten others — William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Michael Spiegel, Howard Machtinger, Terry Robins, Lawrence Weiss, Linda Sue Evans and Judy Clark. Another prominent activist, Cathy Wilkerson, was arrested on state charges of mob action and resisting a police officer. Some surrendered years ago. Two — Ms. Dohrn and Ayers, son of the former chairman of Commonweath Edison Co. — surfaced Wednesday. Charges against Ayers had been dropped in 1978 but Ms. Dohrn still faces charges of aggravated battery and jumping bail.” [AP, 12/3/80]
Well, at least he got his age right, unlike his association with events in Selma in his speech from March 2007. In that speech, Obama didn’t mind deriving authenticity with a march that occurred when he was less than four years old and with people he had never met, let alone with whom he partnered on foundation boards.
The age issue is a transparent dodge. When terrorists killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, I was nine years old. Would that give me a pass if I chose to associate myself on a board with Mahmoud Abbas, the reported mastermind of the Black September operation? Of course not. Obama wasn’t eight years old when he sought Ayers out for his support and later worked with him at the Woods foundation.
Ayers doesn’t help matters with his own dodge, claiming he wasn’t a terrorist at all. Ben Smith explains:
He contests the notion — central to the objection to him, as opposed to other people who were bad actors 35 years ago — that he he has “no regrets” about bombings– but he doesn’t exactly contradict his 2001 line that “I don’t regret setting bombs.”
I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings …
Terrorism—according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N.—is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten, or coerce a population toward some political end…. I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it.
Ayers tries to argue that terrorism is defined by its randomness, but that’s absurd. Ayers committed acts of violence intending on forcing the kind of political change he couldn’t get through the democratic process. That’s not only terrorism but an assault on self-government. The fact that he still can’t acknowledge that shows the unrepentant nature of William Ayers very clearly.
Obama’s inability to grasp this has him grasping at straws instead. He winds up being an apologist for Ayers, most laughably in this passage:
REALITY: AYERS COMMENTS WERE PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 11; THE INTERVIEW OCCURRED PRIOR TO PUBLICATION
On September 11, 2001, A Story About William Ayers’ Memoir Was Published In The New York Times; The Interview Occurred Prior To Publication. “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’ Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.” [New York Times, 9/11/01]
I think almost everyone sophisticated enough to hold a newspaper right-side-up understands that an interview gets conducted before publication. No one claims that Ayers said this at the moment the towers fell. The point is that after a decade of terrorist attacks against American interests, Ayers still hadn’t reconsidered his own terrorism after 30 years, and the publication of that fact on 9/11 had its own twisted sense of irony.
The bigger question is why Obama spends so much energy defending Ayers. If he wasn’t that important to Obama, why offer this page on the campaign website to rehabilitate Ayers?
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/18/moveons-definition-of-hurting-the-country/
MoveOn’s definition of “hurting the country”
By Michelle Malkin • April 18, 2008 08:02 AM
Yes, it’s true. The left-wing anti-patriots at MoveOn.org, who didn’t think twice about handing jihadists potent ammunition the day before the sixth anniversary of 9/11 with their despicable attack on Gen. Petraeus, are now worried about actions that “hurt the country.”
Dangerous, perilous, damaging, harmful actions…like having a Democrat debate moderated by journalists who aren’t complete and total sycophants.
Heaven forfend!
Sound the alarm!
Issue the Important Action Alerts ASAP!
The Soros water-carriers say they will run an ad against ABC–Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulous photoshopped as Hitler and Eva Braun? Nah, too subtle–if they gather 100,000 signatures.
And, of course, MoveOn blames Karl Rove:
Moderators George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson spent the first 50 minutes obsessed with distractions that only political insiders care about–gaffes, polling numbers, the stale Rev. Wright story, and the old-news Bosnia story. And, channelling Karl Rove, they directed a video question to Barack Obama asking if he loves the American flag or not. Seriously.
Enough is enough. The public needs the media to stop hurting the national dialogue in this important election year. Can you sign the petition to ABC and other media outlets and pass it on to friends who are also fed up?
A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to ABC and other media.
What’s your over/under on ABC and other media caving in to the MoveOn/nutroots ultimatum?
***
On an even more hysterical side note, one nutroots blogger has now dubbed the ABC News debate the “‘Michelle Malkin/Steve Doocy’ driven non-policy based debate.”
The country will not be safe until the Schoolmarm/Snoozefest regime of Democrat debates is restored.
MoveOn to the rescue!
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**Best argument for McCain yet**
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/006dgrlw.asp
24 Hours on the 'Big Stick'
What you can learn about America on the deck of the USS 'Theodore Roosevelt.'
by P.J. O'Rourke
04/28/2008, Volume 013, Issue 31
Landing on an aircraft carrier is...To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft--a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog. C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls the C-2 is the "COD." This is an acronym for "Curling the hair Of Dumb reporters," although they tell you it stands for "Carrier Onboard Delivery."
There is only one window in the freight/passenger compartment, and you're nowhere near it. Your seat faces aft. Cabin lighting and noise insulation are absent. The heater is from the parts bin at the Plymouth factory in 1950. You sit reversed in cold, dark cacophony while the airplane maneuvers for what euphemistically is called a "landing." The nearest land is 150 miles away. And the plane doesn't land; its tailhook snags a cable on the carrier deck. The effect is of being strapped to an armchair and dropped backwards off a balcony onto a patio. There is a fleeting moment of unconsciousness. This is a good thing, as is being far from the window, because what happens next is that the COD reels the hooked cable out the entire length of the carrier deck until a big, fat nothing is between you and a plunge in the ocean, should the hook, cable, or pilot's judgment snap. Then, miraculously, you're still alive.
Landing on an aircraft carrier was the most fun I'd ever had with my trousers on. And the 24 hours that I spent aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt--the "Big Stick"--were an equally unalloyed pleasure. I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn't get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that's longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world--86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.
The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God has given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can't blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up .??.??. gosh, where to start?
But I didn't visit the Theodore Roosevelt just to gush patriotically--although some patriotic gushing is called for in America at the moment. And while I'm at it let me heap praise upon the people who arranged and guided my Big Stick tour. I was invited on the "embark" thanks to the kindness of the Honorable William J. (Jim) Haynes II, former Department of Defense general counsel. The trip was arranged by Colonel Kelly Wheaton, senior military assistant to acting Department of Defense general counsel Daniel Dell'Orto, and by Lt. Commander Philip Rosi, public affairs officer of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.
I traveled with the Honorable Mr. Dell'Orto and a group of ten Distinguished Visitors (minus me). Onboard we met people more distinguished yet, including Captain C.L. Wheeler, commanding officer of the Theodore Roosevelt, Rear Admiral Frank C. Pandolfe, commander of the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group, and Command Master Chief Petty Officer Chris Engles, who--as anyone with experience in or of the Navy knows (my dad was a chief petty officer)--actually runs everything.
I could go on about the TR and its crew at epic length. And one day, if they'll invite me back, I'll do so. But, being a reporter, I wasn't there to report on things. I was there to get a journalistic hook--a tailhook, as it were--for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about Senator John McCain. And as soon as our distinguished visitor group donned "float coats" and ear protection and went to the flight deck and saw F-18s take off and land, I had something to say.
Carrier launches are astonishing events. The plane is moved to within what seems like a bowling alley's length of the bow. A blast shield larger than any government building driveway Khomeini-flipper rises behind the fighter jet, and the jet's twin engines are cranked to maximum thrust. A slot-car slot runs down the middle of the bowling alley. The powered-up jet is held at the end of its slot by a steel shear pin smaller than a V-8 can. When the shear pin shears the jet is unleashed and so is a steam catapult that hurls the plane down the slot, from 0 to 130 miles per hour in two seconds. And--if all goes well--the airplane is airborne. This is not a pilot taking off. This is a pilot as cat's eye marble pinched between boundless thumb and infinite forefinger of Heaven's own Wham-O slingshot.
Carrier landings are more astonishing. We were in heavy seas. Spray was coming over the bow onto the flight deck, 60 feet above the waterline. As the ship was pitching, 18 tons of F-18 with a wingspan of 40-odd feet approached at the speed of celebrity sex rumor. Four acres of flight deck has never looked so small. Had it been lawn you'd swear you could do it in 15 minutes with a push mower.
Four arresting cables are stretched across the stern, each thick as a pepperoni. The cables are held slightly above the runway by metal hoops. The pilot can't really see these cables and isn't really looking at that runway, which is rising at him like a slap in the face or falling away like the slope of a playground slide when you're four. The pilot has his eye on the "meatball," a device, portside midship, with a glowing dot that does--or doesn't--line up between two lighted dashes. This indicates that the pilot is . . . no, isn't . . . yes, is . . . isn't . . . is . . . on course to land. Meanwhile there are sailors in charge of the landing hunched at a control panel portside aft. They are on the radio telling the pilot what he's doing or better had do or hadn't better. They are also waving colored paddles at him meaning this or that. (I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about here.) Plus there are other pilots on the radio along with an officer in the control tower. The pilot is very well trained because at this point his head doesn't explode.
The pilot drops his tailhook. This is not an impressive-looking piece of equipment--no smirks about the 1991 Tailhook Association brouhaha, please. The hook doesn't appear sturdy enough to yank Al Franken offstage when Al is smirking about the presidential candidate who belonged to the Tailhook Association. The hook is supposed to--and somehow usually does--strike the deck between the second and third arresting cables. The cable then does not jerk the F-18 back to the stern the way it would in a cartoon. Although watching these events is so unreal that you expect cartoon logic to apply.
Now imagine all concerned doing all of the above with their eyes closed. That is a night operation. We went back on deck to see--wrong verb--to feel and hear the night flights. The only things we could see were the flaming twin suns of the F-18 afterburners at the end of the catapult slot.
Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There's Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"
Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?
A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it's full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.
McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets at a make-believe political tea party. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.
And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can't. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts--yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can't hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can't do that. Really, they communicate by "training telepathy." They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.
These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. The average age, officers and all, is about 24. "These are the same kids," a chief petty officer said, "who, back on land, have their hats bumped to one side and their pants around their knees, hanging out on corners. And here they're in charge of $35 million airplanes."
The crew is in more danger than the pilots. If an arresting cable breaks--and they do--half a dozen young men and women could be sliced in half. When a plane crashes, a weapon malfunctions, or a fire breaks out, there's no ejection seat for the flight deck crew. While we were on the Theodore Roosevelt a memorial service was held for a crew member who had been swept overboard. Would there have been an admiral and a captain of an aircraft carrier and hundreds of the bravest Americans at a memorial service for you when you were 20?
Supposedly the "youth vote" is all for Obama. But it's John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the "women's vote" is . . . well, let's not go too far with this. I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the "women's vote."
These would have been interesting subjects to discuss with the Theodore Roosevelt shipmates, but time was up.
Back on the COD you're buckled in and told to brace as if for a crash. Whereupon there is a crash. The catapult sends you squashed against your flight harness. And just when you think that everything inside your body is going to blow out your nose and navel, it's over. You're in steady, level flight.
A strange flight it is--from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters--who, put together, don't have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick--presume to run for president of the United States. They're not just running against the hero John McCain, they're running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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Arch liberal :lol: Maureen Dowd fusses and fulminates :lol:
Wilting Over Waffles
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By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 23, 2008
He’s never going to shake her off.
Skip to next paragraph
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Maureen Dowd
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Go to Columnist Page »Not all by himself.
The very fact that he can’t shake her off has become her best argument against him. “Why can’t he close the deal?” Hillary taunted at a polling place on Tuesday.
She’s been running ads about it, suggesting he doesn’t have “what it takes” to run the country. Her message is unapologetically emasculating: If he does not have the gumption to put me in my place, when superdelegates are deserting me, money is drying up, he’s outspending me 2-to-1 on TV ads, my husband’s going crackers and party leaders are sick of me, how can he be trusted to totally obliterate Iran and stop Osama?
Now that Hillary has won Pennsylvania, it will take a village to help Obama escape from the suffocating embrace of his rival. Certainly Howard Dean will be of no use steering her to the exit. It’s like Micronesia telling Russia to denuke.
“You know, some people counted me out and said to drop out,” said a glowing Hillary at her Philadelphia victory party, with Bill and Chelsea by her side. “Well, the American people don’t quit. And they deserve a president who doesn’t quit, either.”
The Democrats are growing ever more desperate about the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. With gas prices out of control, with the comically oblivious President Bush shimmying around New Orleans — the city he let drown — and Condi sneaking into Baghdad as rockets and mortars hail down on the Green Zone, beating the Republicans should be a cinch.
But the Democrats watch in horror as Hillary continues to scratch up the once silvery sheen on Obama, and as John McCain not only consolidates his own party but encroaches on theirs by boldly venturing into Selma, Ala., on Monday to woo black voters.
They also cringe as Bill continues his honey-crusted-nut-bar meltdown. With his usual exquisite timing, just as Pennsylvanians were about to vote, Hillary’s husband became the first person ever to play the Caucasian Card. First, he blurted out to a radio interviewer that the Obama camp had played the race card against him after he compared Obama’s strength in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s. And then, with a Brobdingnagian finger-wagging on the screen, he denied it to an NBC News reporter.
“You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today,” he said, accusing the reporter of looking for “another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us.”
If there’s one person who knows about crass diversions, it’s Bill. But even for him, it was an embarrassing explosion, capped with some blue language to an aide that was caught on air.
The Democrats are eager to move on to an Obama-McCain race. But they can’t because no one seems to be able to show Hillary the door. Despite all his incandescent gifts, Obama has missed several opportunities to smash the ball over the net and end the game. Again and again, he has seemed stuck at deuce. He complains about the politics of scoring points, but to win, you’ve got to score points.
He knew he tanked in the Philadelphia debate, but he was so irritated by the moderators — and by having to stand next to Hillary again — that he couldn’t summon a single merry dart.
Is he skittish around her because he knows that she detests him and he’s used to charming everyone? Or does he feel guilty that he cut in line ahead of her? As the husband of Michelle, does he know better than to defy the will of a strong woman? Or is he simply scared of Hillary because she’s scary?
He is frantic to get away from her because he can’t keep carbo-loading to relate to the common people.
In the final days in Pennsylvania, he dutifully logged time at diners and force-fed himself waffles, pancakes, sausage and a Philly cheese steak. He split the pancakes with Michelle, left some of the waffle and sausage behind, and gave away the French fries that came with the cheese steak.
But this is clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites. That was made plain with his cri de coeur at the Glider Diner in Scranton when a reporter asked him about Jimmy Carter and Hamas.
“Why” he pleaded, sounding a bit, dare we say, bitter, “can’t I just eat my waffle?”
His subtext was obvious: Why can’t I just be president? Why do I have to keep eating these gooey waffles and answering these gotcha questions and debating this gonzo woman?
Before they devour themselves once more, perhaps the Democrats will take a cue from Dr. Seuss’s “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” (The writer once mischievously redid it for his friend Art Buchwald as “Richard M. Nixon Will You Please Go Now!”) They could sing:
“The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. ... I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Hillary R. Clinton, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. ... You can go in an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!”
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I was for the first time in a long time listening to Rush Limbaugh today and he is hystericaly lughingl at the likes of Dowd who are running around asking "why can't *he* put *her* away?"
This when he was asking why can't Hillary put BO away. Why she *was* the front runner who could put him away till recently.
He believes her campaign (which of course listens to his program) simply had her get up after the Pa. election and ask the question turning it around on BO. And thus, planted it into the minds of the press who of course picked it up hook line and sinker and are all running around like chickens asking the same question.
And of course Dowd, the feminazi she is, has to make this into some sort of castration issue, and he is not masculine enough to fight back, and billary is a much better fighter able to lead this nation and on and on and on. What psycho babble!
Feminazi = penis envy angry broad.
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Like Karl Rove below, I'm not sure I agree that it is a lock, but the point about the implications of Nunn and Boren is worth noting.
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The Democrats Have a Nominee
April 24, 2008; Page A11
So what?
Other than ensuring the Greatest Show on Earth will continue, does it matter that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama Tuesday in Pennsylvania by nine-plus points? Barack Obama is the nominee.
No matter how many kicks the rest of us find in such famously fun primary states as Indiana and South Dakota, it's going to be McCain versus Obama in 2008.
I believe the cement set around the Clinton coffin last Friday. The Obama campaign announced it had received the support of former Sens. Sam Nunn of North Carolina and David Boren of Oklahoma.
Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger says despite her primary win in Pennsylvania, it's over for Hillary. (April 23)
Both are what some of us nostalgically call Serious Democrats. They represent what the party was, but is no more: sensible on national security, spending and middle-class values. Obama receiving their imprimatur is like hands reaching out from the graves of FDR, JFK and LBJ to announce: "Enough is enough. This man is your nominee. Go forth and fight with the Republicans." Make no mistake: Superdelegates with sway took notice.
Former Sen. Nunn is sometimes mentioned as a possible running mate for Sen. Obama. In a better world, Sam Nunn (or a David Boren) would have been the party's candidate for president. Such candidacies remain impossible under the iron law of Democratic primary politics: No centrist can secure the party's nomination in a primary system dominated by left-liberal activists. The iron law produces candidacies such as McGovern (1972), Mondale ('84), Dukakis ('88), Gore ('00) or Kerry ('04), who pay so many left-liberal obeisances to win in the primaries that they cannot attract sufficient moderates at the margins to win the general election.
Bill Clinton, who broke that law twice, knows all this. His 1996 triangulation campaign dangled welfare reform and spending restraint. It worked.
Hillary Clinton knows all this. In 2005, just after George W. Bush won re-election buoyed by "moral values" voters, Sen. Clinton reached out to them in a January speech: "the primary reason that teenage girls abstain [from sex] is because of their religious and moral values. We should embrace this." By "we" she meant that voters still wedded to middle-class respectability, say in Ohio, should embrace her.
AP
Thanks for the memories. Democrats will opt for a new magician.
She has worked hard as a member of the Armed Services Committee to establish her bona fides with general officers, and some have endorsed her. As well, her hedged, equivocal vote "for" the Iraq War was mainly a centrist investment to cash in fall 2008. (The left won't allow it; see iron law above.)
The 2008 nomination was hers. There was no competition. She was a lock to run for the roses against the Republican nominee. Republicans must have had this conversation a hundred times back then: "It's Hillary. She's got it. Get over it."
Sam Nunn and David Boren by political temperament should be in her camp. Instead, they threw in with Obama, who calls his campaign "post-partisan," a ludicrous phrase. The blowback at ABC's debate makes clear that Obama is the left's man. So what did Messrs. Nunn and Boren see?
The biggest event was the Clinton Abandonment. In a campaign of surprises, none has been more breathtaking than the falling away of Clinton supporters, loyalists . . . and friends. Why?
Money. Barack Obama's mystical pull on people is nice, but nice in modern politics comes after money. Once Barack proved conclusively that he could raise big-time cash, the Clintons' strongest tie to their machine began to unravel. Today he's got $42 million banked. She's got a few million north of nothing.
But it's more than that. Barack Obama's Web-based fund-raising apparatus is, if one may say so, respectable. The Clintons' "donor base" has been something else.
It is hard to overstate how fatigued Democratic donors in Manhattan and L.A. got during the Clinton presidency to have Bill and Hillary fly in, repeatedly, to sweep checking accounts. The Lincoln Bedroom rental was cheesy. Bill's 60th birthday gala (tickets $60,000 to 500K) was a Clinton fund-raiser. The 1996 John Huang-Lippo-China fund-raising scandal pushed Clinton contributors toward a milieu most didn't need in their lives. Hillary's 2007 Norman Hsu fund-raising scandal was an unsettling rerun of what the donor base could expect from another Clinton presidency.
It was all kind of gross, but the Clintons never seemed to see that. When Obama proved he could perform this most basic function in politics, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card for many Democrats. For some, this may be personal. For others, it is likely a belief that the party's interests lie with finding an alternative to the Clinton saga. One guesses this is what Sam Nunn and David Boren concluded.
Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania prove it won't be easy. Barack Obama himself said Tuesday night, "I'm not perfect." He heads to the nomination freighted with all the familiar Democratic tensions that keep a Sam Nunn off the ballot: race and gender obsessions, semipacifism and you bet, bitter white voters. So be it. For modern Democrats, winning the White House always requires some sort of magic to get near 50%. For the Clintons, that bag is empty. The Democrats have a new magician. It's Obama.
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Is Obama Ready for Prime Time?
By KARL ROVE
April 24, 2008; Page A13
After being pummeled 55% to 45% in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was at a loss for explanations. The best he could do was to compliment his supporters in an email saying, "you helped close the gap to a slimmer margin than most thought possible." Then he asked for money.
With $42 million in the bank, money is the least of Sen. Obama's problems. He needs a credible message that convinces Democrats he should be president. In recent days, he's spent too much time proclaiming his inevitable nomination. But they already know he's won more states, votes and delegates.
Chad Crowe
His words wear especially thin when he was dealt a defeat like Tuesday's. Mr. Obama was routed despite outspending Hillary Clinton on television by almost 3-1. While polls in the final days showed a possible 4% or 5% Clinton win, she apparently took late-deciders by a big margin to clinch the landslide.
Where she cobbled together her victory should cause concern in the Obama HQ. She did better – and he worse – than expected in Philadelphia's suburbs. Mrs. Clinton won two of these four affluent suburban counties, home of the white-wine crowd Mr. Obama has depended on for victories before.
In the small town and rural "bitter" precincts, she clobbered him. Mr. Obama's state chair was Sen. Bob Casey, who hails from Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania. She carried that county 74%-25%. In the state's 61 less-populous counties, she won 63% – and by 278,266 votes. Her margin of victory statewide was 208,024 votes.
Mrs. Clinton's problem remains that she's behind in the delegate count, with 1,589 to Mr. Obama's 1,714. Neither candidate will get to the 2,025 needed for nomination with elected delegates. But the Democratic Party's rules of proportionality mean it will be hard to close that margin among the 733 delegates yet to be elected or declared. Mrs. Clinton will need to take 58% of the remaining delegates. Thus far, she's been able to get that or better in just four of the 46 contests.
Her path gets rougher. While Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico are good territory for her, Oregon and Montana may not be. And Mrs. Clinton will be outspent badly. She entered April with $9.3 million in cash, but debts of $10.3 million. Mr. Obama had $42.5 million but only $663,000 in unpaid bills.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama's money could only wipe out half a purported 20% deficit, but the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows Mr. Obama behind by 2% in Indiana and ahead in North Carolina by 16%. Those states will vote in two weeks. The financial throw weight he will have in the Hoosier State could more than erase Mrs. Clinton's lead there, while keeping North Carolina solidly in his column. His money could give him a double knockout on May 6, which would effectively end her bid for the presidency.
If she wins Indiana, however, she will surely go forward – and Democrats run the risk of a split decision in June. Mr. Obama could have more delegates, but she could have more popular votes. In fact, on Tuesday night she actually grabbed the popular vote lead: If you include the Michigan and Florida primary results, Mrs. Clinton now leads the popular vote by a slim 113,000 votes out of 29,914,356 cast.
Mr. Obama will argue he wasn't on the ballot in Michigan and didn't campaign in Florida. But don't Democrats want to count all the votes in all the contests? After all, Mr. Obama took his name off the Michigan ballot; it isn't something he was forced to do. And while he didn't campaign in Florida, neither did she.
And what about the Michigan and Florida delegates? By my calculations, she should pick up about 54 delegates on Mr. Obama if they are seated (this assumes the Michigan "uncommitted" delegates go for Mr. Obama). If he is ahead in June by a number similar to his lead today of 125, does he let the two delegations in and make the convention vote even closer? Or does he continue to act as if two states with 41 of the 270 electoral votes needed for the White House don't exist?
The Democratic Party has two weakened candidates. Mrs. Clinton started as a deeply flawed candidate: the palpable and unpleasant sense of entitlement, the absence of a clear and optimistic message, the grating personality impatient to be done with the little people and overly eager for a return to power, real power, the phoniness and the exaggerations. These problems have not diminished over the long months of the contest. They have grown. She started out with the highest negatives of any major candidate in an open race for the presidency and things have only gotten worse.
And what of the reborn Adlai Stevenson? Mr. Obama is befuddled and angry about the national reaction to what are clearly accepted, even commonplace truths in San Francisco and Hyde Park. How could anyone take offense at the observation that people in small-town and rural American are "bitter" and therefore "cling" to their guns and their faith, as well as their xenophobia? Why would anyone raise questions about a public figure who, for only 20 years, attended a church and developed a close personal relationship with its preacher who says AIDS was created by our government as a genocidal tool to be used against people of color, who declared America's chickens came home to roost on 9/11, and wants God to damn America? Mr. Obama has a weakness among blue-collar working class voters for a reason.
His inspiring rhetoric is a potent tool for energizing college students and previously uninvolved African-American voters. But his appeals are based on two aspirational pledges he is increasingly less credible in making.
Mr. Obama's call for postpartisanship looks unconvincing, when he is unable to point to a single important instance in his Senate career when he demonstrated bipartisanship. And his repeated calls to remember Dr. Martin Luther King's "fierce urgency of now" in tackling big issues falls flat as voters discover that he has not provided leadership on any major legislative battle.
Mr. Obama has not been a leader on big causes in Congress. He has been manifestly unwilling to expend his political capital on urgent issues. He has been only an observer, watching the action from a distance, thinking wry and sardonic and cynical thoughts to himself about his colleagues, mildly amused at their too-ing and fro-ing. He has held his energy and talent in reserve for the more important task of advancing his own political career, which means running for president.
But something happened along the way. Voters saw in the Philadelphia debate the responses of a vitamin-deficient Stevenson act-a-like. And in the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary, they saw him alternate between whining about his treatment by Mrs. Clinton and the press, and attacking Sen. John McCain by exaggerating and twisting his words. No one likes a whiner, and his old-style attacks undermine his appeals for postpartisanship.
Mr. Obama is near victory in the Democratic contest, but it is time for him to reset, freshen his message and say something new. His conduct in the last several weeks raises questions about whether, for all his talents, he is ready to be president.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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I would agree that Nunn probably feels like other Democrats.
There are probably many democrats who would like to rid the world of the Clintons and until now there was no alternative.
I would also agree more with Rove than Dick Morris in that this "race" is not over. One just never knows.
The character issue keeps coming up for BO.
To me it is now clear. BO is a liberal way left of Dukakis wearing "post partisan" clothes.
Naive young voters 18 to 24 will fall for this. Older voters will not. Listening to talk radio for the first time in a long time yesterday while driving around to hospitals gave me a glimpse into the rights present strategy to handle BO. The are biggining a nuclear war with this while TV and cable news is still using sticks and stones.
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McCain and Taxes
April 25, 2008
John McCain, the Republican nominee for President, has proposed extending the Bush tax cuts. So as morning follows night this week, Democratic news analysis has been pouring forth to proclaim that his tax ideas are a threat to the republic because they'll explode the budget deficit. The Senator needs to understand that he can't win this election by playing on this economic turf.
The subtext of the criticism of the McCain tax plan is that it would somehow "starve" the government of revenue. The figures being tossed around for the "cost" of the McCain tax plan have been estimated at $2 trillion by the liberal Center for American Progress, while the Brookings Institution estimates $5.7 trillion.
If this were really true, the lower Bush rates of 2003 already would be draining money away from Uncle Sam. Instead, even amid an economic slowdown, tax revenue stands at nearly 19% of GDP. That's above the modern historical average, and there is no precedent in recent history for raising and maintaining the tax take significantly higher than that.
If all the tax cuts expire, however, we would see the largest tax increase in U.S. history and that percentage of national income going to the Treasury would climb steeply higher. In which economics text is it written that the cure for a slowing economy is an unprecedented tax increase?
Senator McCain has also proposed moving the U.S. corporate tax rate, currently the second highest in the world after Japan, to a rate closer to the international norm. The point here is to stop driving investment and jobs overseas. Even House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel has recognized this. Once-sleepy Ireland cut its corporate tax rate to 12.5% from 48%, and tax receipts have soared because of its revived economy. Incentives work.
We've made no secret of our disagreement with the Bush Administration's willingness to accept a weak dollar. Yet that's what we've got. As such, a low tax rate on capital-gains and dividends is even more crucial if we are to attract capital into the U.S. economy.
The criticism of the McCain plan by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, echoed in the media analysis, is that his reductions merely direct benefits to "the wealthiest." But these people already pay nearly all the income tax burden. Meanwhile, the politicians make sure the middle class gets socked by payroll and state taxes.
This said, it isn't going to be sufficient for Senator McCain to simply tout these tax cuts without offering a strong rationale. The standard trap the left sets whenever tax cuts are mooted is to wave the "deficit" that will result. Absent a counterargument, Mr. McCain will spend the campaign playing on this liberal ground. In particular, he has to make the case that tax cuts do not lose as much revenue as the static, dollar-for-dollar revenuers claim. He has tax-cut history on his side. The threats of revenue catastrophe did not happen in the 1960s (the Kennedy tax cuts), the 1980s (Reagan) or after 2003 (Bush). See the nearby table.
Senator McCain has to find a way to make the case that his economic plan and its attendant tax cuts are intended to spur economic growth. So much the better if he doesn't feel personally comfortable making that argument in the sort of dry terms his economic advisers might favor.
Growth is the product of work performed by a huge nation of individuals seeking to support families, small businesses and communities. Virtually everyone understands that the nation only thrives if people are able to invest their money and labor and then reinvest it in more of the same. They will only do that, at every income level, if the government consents to allowing most of the fruits of this effort to remain with individuals in the private economy.
Senator McCain doesn't need a doctorate in economics to understand this debate. As a Member of Congress and Presidential candidate, he has listened endlessly to Democrats mau-mau their opponents with rhetoric about "fairness" and the "deficit" and, best of all, the "investment needs" of the government, aka, spending.
The past week's criticisms are intended to bait Mr. McCain into debating his tax cuts on these liberal terms. He can only win this debate, and the election, by breaking free of that mindset and making his own personal case for lower taxes and the prosperity they help to create.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary,
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Danish citizen evaluates our candidates.....
From an observer in Denmark.........
"We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.
On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer.
And a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.
On the other side, you have a true war hero, married to a woman with a huge chest, who owns a beer distributorship.
Is there a contest here?"
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Slow to post, but thanks CCP for kind words asking my opinion on John McCain's tax plan. McCain presented it on April 15 when I was up to my neck in guess what - tax compliance tasks. There are both tax system and political considerations to take into account when viewing the campaign proposals. The plan is far better than I expected from McCain. Here are my random thoughts, mostly positive, followed by negative coverage from the MSM.
1. Not raise taxes like his opponents both want to do plus a proposal to require 3/5 majorities to raise taxes. I don't see that one explained but sounds to me like a constitutional amendment which is always unlikely.
2. Get our Corporate Tax in line with other countries, Cut from 35 down to 25%. This needs to be explained and sold or it certainly will be demogogued to sound like tax cuts for the wealthy - people living paycheck to paycheck don't own profitable corporations. The federal corporate tax is double taxation (at least, and really triple and quadruple taxation when all things are considered). You can't just take your money after the corporate tax, federal and state, is paid. You must declare the personal income and be taxed again at the federal and state levels. The rate correction will bring in more money to the treasury. Having a rate higher than our economic competitors pulls companies, jobs and profits away. Excessive rates keep money diverted away from profits and taxes.
3. Introduce an alternative tax system. I thought this was the big one but I don't see it on his site as I look now. Near as I can tell this was the Fred Thompson plan that received the highest marks from conservative pundits such as the WSJ editorial page. Not a true flat tax which would never be implemented in this liberal dominated political time we are in, but a 2-step 'flat tax' of 10 and 25% combined with a generous standard deduction. Making this plan optional is clever. It eliminates the gripe of those who lose deductions and fare worse under the new, simpler system.
4. Estate tax: Exempt the first $10 million and reduce the rate to 15%. - That is FAR better than the current schedule to go to zero in 2010 and then back to 55% in 2011 which is completely nuts! 15% is probably a reasonable rate that people would pay without turning their lives upside down to avoid. Estate is generally after-tax money but I don't think this electorate is going to repeal the tax entirely. Also, the argument that we collect more money at lower rates doesn't work at zero.
5. Gas Tax Holiday. No federal gas taxes for this summer. To me, that falls in a gimicky category with the rebates. We don't need up and down tax rates. We need a tax system that pays our bills without stomping down productive activities. One piece of logic supporting a summer holiday is that gas prices go up partly because of summer formulation rules. One might say this break would offset that.
6. Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. This is BIG, affects more and more taxpayers every year.
7. Other: allowing businesses to write off the cost of new equipment and technology, banning Internet and new cellphone taxes, and permanently extending the business tax credit for research and development.
8. Hard line on spending. McCain originally opposed the Bush cuts based on budget balance concerns. In fact, revenues SURGED under the rate cuts and the economy only started to stall as impending tax rate hikes looked likely. We know the deficits came from excessive spending because the revenue increase were far above expectations. McCain will be attacked (and already has been) for fiscal irresponsibility for cutting any tax rate or even for any instance of not raising taxes. McCain has to make the case that tax rates that are "low, simple and fair" are good the economy and good for revenues to the treasury and that fiscal responsibility must come from entitlement reform and spending disciplline. Good luck with that.
Other than perhaps the final point about spending discipline, I would find his tax proposal to be the right plan, wrong messenger. Bush passed some impressive cuts of the best kind - to marginal tax rates, but he failed to articulate how they worked, why they worked or even that they did work. Most people are far more aware of the past couple of months of slow growth than they are about 51 months of robust growth. McCain has a history of being a tax cut skeptic and that will make selling his program difficult.
In 1996, Bob Dole's lackluster campaign picked Jack Kemp to be his running mate and Dole adopted a serious tax cut proposal from Kemp. On the stump and in press questioning Dole couldn't explain his own support for this new, bold proposal and Kemp couldn't explain Dole's past positions opposing these types of rate cuts.
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Here is a negative story on the McCain tax plan from CBS / Washington Post just yesterday:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/25/politics/washingtonpost/main4044195.shtml
McCain Changes Tune On Tax Cuts
Washington Post: GOP Candidates Offers Tax Policies He Once Opposed
April 25, 2008
On May 26, 2001, after then-Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.) cast his vote against President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut, he trudged back to his office, convinced, he recalled, that he had been the lone Republican to oppose the largest tax cut in two decades.
But Chafee's staff told him that one other Republican, who had largely avoided the grueling efforts at compromise, had joined him in dissent. That senator, John McCain, was marching to his own beat, Chafee said, impervious to pressure from either side.
Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush's tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked.
McCain's concerns -- about budget deficits, unanticipated defense costs, an Iraq war that would be longer and more costly than advertised -- have proved eerily prescient, usually a plus for politicians who are quick to say they were right when others were wrong. Yet McCain appears determined to leave such predictions behind.
"He's looking forward, not back," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's senior policy adviser.
To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands the power that business tax relief has to spur economic growth and innovation. Said J.D. Foster, a former Bush White House and Treasury tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience."
To critics, it is political pandering. "It's just part of the new John McCain that's taking on the conventional wisdom that in tight races, you have to energize the base and win by 50.000001 percent," Chafee said. "I was frankly surprised that he's kept it up after securing the nomination. I thought he'd move to the center, and I haven't seen it."
Holtz-Eakin urged skeptics to "wind the clock way back," saying McCain has supported lower taxes and a smaller federal government throughout his political career.
But McCain's conflicts with fellow Republicans over taxes date back well before his differences with Bush. In December 1994, after his party swept to control of Congress on tax-cut promises, he challenged Ronald Reagan's legacy when he warned, "I think we would be making a terrible mistake to go back to the '80s, where we cut all of those taxes and all of a sudden now we've got a debt that we've got to pay on an annual basis that is bigger than the amount that we spend on defense."
In 1998, Republican leaders and their tobacco industry allies lambasted McCain's $516 billion tobacco regulation bill as the "McCain tax," painting it as big-government overreach and a $1.10 tax increase on every pack of cigarettes.
"This bill is not about taxes," he pleaded, just before the measure fell to a Republican filibuster. "It's about whether we're going to allow the death march of 418,000 Americans a year who die early from tobacco-related disease and do nothing."
In 2001, just days before Bush's first tax cut passed, McCain lamented on ABC's "This Week" that, "I'd like to see much more of this tax cut shared by working Americans. . . . I think it still devotes too much of it to the wealthiest Americans."
Almost exactly two years later, Bush was back for more: $350 billion in tax cuts, which accelerated the first round and added deep cuts to the tax rates on dividends and capital gains.
"Most of the economists view this as primarily benefiting wealthier Americans," McCain said on CNBC at the time. "There's a theory, I think, that's prevalent -- it was true in the 2001 tax cuts -- that if you give it to the wealthy people, then they will then, you know, create jobs, et cetera. The interesting thing to me is that most economists will tell you that it's the middle-income Americans that have been keeping the economy afloat."
Indeed, many of his warnings from those years have come to pass. Numerous expiration dates on those tax cuts, designed to hold down the cost to the Treasury, proved to be just the "gimmicks" he said they were, as Congress extended them repeatedly. The budget deficits he warned about in 2001 reemerged in dramatic fashion, as did defense spending increases not accounted for when Bush said the tax cuts were affordable. And the war in Iraq proved to be far longer and more expensive than lawmakers had expected when they approved the 2003 cuts.
"We have enormous defense expenditures. We don't know the cost of the war. We don't know the cost of reconstruction. We know it's in the tens of billions, at least, if not more," McCain said before the 2003 cuts were approved. "Obviously, we're going to be in Iraq a lot longer than many had anticipated."
Yet in Pittsburgh last week, in the face of a projected budget deficit of $400 billion and a sixth year of war, McCain proposed extending Bush's tax cuts, including the dividends and capital gains tax cuts, lowering the corporate income tax, allowing businesses to write off the cost of new equipment and technology, banning Internet and new cellphone taxes, and permanently extending the business tax credit for research and development.
By McCain's accounting, his tax proposals would cost the Treasury $200 billion a year.
"Philosophically, John McCain believes Americans pay too much in taxes, not too little," said Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's senior strategists. "The economy is in distress. Senator McCain wants to grow the economy."
Conservative tax policy analysts noted that some things McCain predicted in his earlier days did not happen. In 2003, he doubted that a capital gains and dividends tax cut would have any economic effect, and said that whatever gains were to be had would be swamped by rising deficits and interest rates. Foster said, however, that the economy took off with the passage of the 2003 tax cut, and although budget deficits have remained, interest rates have stayed low.
Holtz-Eakin said McCain did campaign for president in 2000 on a tax cut plan, albeit one significantly smaller than Bush's. But it was always meant as a first step toward a simple flat-tax system, Holtz-Eakin said. His latest tax proposal is merely the next step in that process, building on the past eight years of tax changes.
No doubt, conservatives say, McCain is now on the right political side of the tax issue.
"He's put himself in a position where a conversation about the economy is a conversation about Democratic tax increases and Republican lower taxes, and that's where any Republican wants to be," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has clashed fiercely with McCain in the past.
But a change of position can always be used by the opposition, and Democrats have already begun.
"He's promising . . . tax cuts that he once voted against because he said they offended his conscience," Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) said Tuesday night. "Well, they may have stopped offending John McCain's conscience somewhere along the road to the White House, but George Bush's economic policies still offend ours."
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"McCain has a history of being a tax cut skeptic and that will make selling his program difficult. In 1996, Bob Dole's lackluster campaign picked Jack Kemp to be his running mate and Dole adopted a serious tax cut proposal from Kemp. On the stump and in press questioning Dole couldn't explain his own support for this new, bold proposal and Kemp couldn't explain Dole's past positions opposing these types of rate cuts."
Pithy and its truth here is quite the pity.
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WSJ
Where Were Obama's Friends?
May 1, 2008
It's tough being Everyman.
Way back when, before the angry and antic prophet Jeremiah rose to smite him, Barack Obama appeared before us as an open presidential vessel, into which many poured their political dreams.
Foremost were black Americans. Bill Clinton famously diminished the Obama candidacy during the South Carolina primary as just one more Jesse Jackson fling. But across the black community, support for this candidate clearly had deeper roots. Head to head against Hillary, he has been getting huge majorities of the black vote. This was their moment.
Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger notes that no prominent Democrats stood with Barack Obama during the candidate's recent dark hour. (May 1)
Upscale white voters signed on and were belittled as liberals exorcising white guilt. Maybe, but for many Obama was also the un-Bush and un-Hillary.
Independents worn down by 16 years of Red-Blue trench warfare bought the "change" promise. Obama sounded like he could pull it off. Indies like to dream.
Brand-name Democrats, such as various members of the Kennedy aristocracy, went over, calculating it might be easier to push the party forward with Obama's lightness of being than the Clintons' boxcars of baggage.
The periodic ideals of young America we know about.
Even as they watched Barack win, pundits and reporters were agog that a one-term, black-American senator from Illinois could have such an effect. This pickup-team coalition of idealists and pols, led by a virtual Luke Skywalker, was on the brink of pushing the Clinton empire over the cliff. It made the Clintons crazy.
This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.
No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright's notion of the "black church" is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.
Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama's oh-so-famous endorsers: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow?
Where were all the big-city mayors who went over to the Obama camp: Chicago's Richard Daley, Cleveland's Frank Reynolds, Atlanta's Shirley Franklin, Washington's Adrian Fenty, Newark's Cory Booker, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon?
It isn't hard for big names to get on talk TV to make a point. Any major op-ed page would have stopped the presses to print a statement of support from Ted Kennedy or such for the senator. None appeared. Call it profiles in gopher-holing.
Blogs and Web sites are overflowing with how this meltdown is largely of Barack Obama's own making. What difference does that make? He is not running for class president; he's running for the presidency of the United States. Even at the crudest level of political calculation and cowardice, there's a point in a presidential race when a candidate's supporters are all in. We passed that point weeks ago. It's him or her.
Analysts and historians will spend years sorting through the lessons of this most bizarre of all presidential campaigns. The Obama desertion points in a few directions.
The nature of modern media coverage and the length of the campaign (two years!) has made these presidential candidates truly larger than life; indeed, they've become almost cartoon-like. Their personas dwarf and overwhelm the parties to which they nominally belong.
As entities, the parties continue to recede. The Democratic superdelegates, created to represent the party's interests, look like deer frozen in the headlights of the two candidates' roaring tractor trailers.
As for the supersized candidates, what strikes one most about them is their "aloneness." They look so solitary. Indeed, it is possible that the old and honorable notion of "standing with" a candidate like Obama simply didn't occur to his famous supporters this week. Everyone has become used to watching celebrity stars and athletes take it in the neck on their own. Even someone running for the nation's presidency looks like just another personal crack-up.
What about the voters – the average Joes and Janes showing up in record numbers in formerly obscure primary states? It's wonderful to learn so much about the politics of Rhode Island, eastern Indiana or swaths of central Pennsylvania, and the candidates themselves are pressing more retail political flesh than ever. The result, though, is pretty clinical – data flowing into exit-poll categories whose fluctuating post-primary percentages are somehow more exciting than, well, real people.
The list is long this week of supporters who let Barack Obama hang out to dry. More than a few were last seen running out on Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the solution here is for the two soloists to meet, flip a coin, and spend the next six months as a pair running against John McCain. It looks like they're the only friends they've got.
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Windfall Profits for Dummies
May 3, 2008; Page A10
This is one strange debate the candidates are having on energy policy. With gas prices close to $4 a gallon, Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they'll bring relief with a moratorium on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax. Barack Obama opposes that but prefers a 1970s-style windfall profits tax (as does Mrs. Clinton).
Mr. Obama is right to oppose the gas-tax gimmick, but his idea is even worse. Neither proposal addresses the problem of energy supply, especially the lack of domestic oil and gas thanks to decades of Congressional restrictions on U.S. production. Mr. Obama supports most of those "no drilling" rules, but that hasn't stopped him from denouncing high gas prices on the campaign trail. He is running TV ads in North Carolina that show him walking through a gas station and declaring that he'll slap a tax on the $40 billion in "excess profits" of Exxon Mobil.
The idea is catching on. Last week Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski introduced a windfall profits tax as part of what he called the "Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008." So now we have Congress threatening to help itself to business profits even though Washington already takes 35% right off the top with the corporate income tax.
You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says "costs America $800 million a day." Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.
There's another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.
Exxon's profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry's earnings aren't as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was "less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy." These are hardly robber barons.
This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don't want more production to increase supply. They want oil "independence" but they've declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?
Late this week, a group of Senate Republicans led by Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the "American Energy Production Act of 2008" to expand oil production off the U.S. coasts and in Alaska. It has the potential to increase domestic production enough to keep America running for five years with no foreign imports. With the world price of oil at $116 a barrel, if not now, when? No word yet if Senators Clinton and Obama will take time off from denouncing oil profits to vote for that.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Divided for Obama
May 7, 2008; Page A18
With his victory in North Carolina on Tuesday, Barack Obama took a giant step toward the Democratic presidential nomination. The irony is that he is doing this just when Hillary Clinton has finally exposed his potential weaknesses as a general election candidate.
The Illinois Senator can certainly breathe easier having dodged a loss in North Carolina, where he once held a big lead. As usual, he swept the under-30 crowd as well as the educated, upscale liberals in the central part of the Tar Heel State. He also seems to have fought the economic issue to a draw, suggesting that his opposition to Mrs. Clinton's proposal for a moratorium on the 18.4 cent federal gas tax didn't hurt.
But his victory in North Carolina depended heavily on his overwhelming (91%) share of the black vote, which made up about a third of the primary electorate. Mrs. Clinton won 61% of white Democrats in North Carolina, according to the exit polls, and 65% of white Democrats in Indiana. Mrs. Clinton also broke even among independents. Clearly Mr. Obama's early promise of a transracial, postpartisan coalition has dimmed as the campaign has progressed and voters have learned more about him.
The controversy over his 20-year association with his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, seems to have hurt in particular. About half of North Carolina Democrats said the Wright issue mattered to them, and they voted decisively for Senator Clinton. The former First Lady won easily among late deciders, which also suggests that Mr. Obama's rocky recent performance has cost him. And the Chicagoan continued his poor showing with rural voters, especially in white Democratic counties in Indiana. These are the voters John McCain will have a chance to get in November.
These are also the data points the Clinton campaign will now press with the superdelegates who will ultimately decide this contest. But the bitter political fact for the New York Senator is that her late-game rally may not matter. To nominate Mrs. Clinton now, party insiders would have to deny the nomination to the first African-American with a serious chance to be President, risking a revolt among their most loyal voting bloc.
The truth is that most Democratic pros are so confident of their November prospects that they believe either Senator will defeat John McCain. Mrs. Clinton also showed her own screaming liability yesterday, with nearly half of all Democrats saying she isn't "honest or trustworthy." This is the residue of the Clinton scandals, and it is one reason so many superdelegates have already begun to break their long co-dependence with Bill and Hillary by declaring for Mr. Obama.
Judging by his victory speech last night, the Illinois rookie has already begun to pivot to a general election strategy. He tried to address his vulnerabilities on national security and cultural values. And he began to recast his personal story as an affirmation of the American dream – in contrast to the image presented by his much-delayed condemnation of Rev. Wright's anti-American conspiracy theories.
One habit of modern Democrats is that they tend to fall in love with candidates who are both unknown and untested. The superdelegates will now have to decide if Mr. Obama is more like the Jimmy Carter of 1976 – or Michael Dukakis.
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It's Obama, Warts and All
By KARL ROVE
May 8, 2008; Page A15
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each took a state Tuesday. But the result was a damaging loss for the woman who was once the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Here are some observations on the race:
- Mr. Obama is now the prohibitive favorite. Tuesday night, he took at least 94 delegates to Mrs. Clinton's 75 and leads the former First Lady by 176 delegates in the AP tabulation. He has 1,840 of the 2,025 delegates needed to win. Mr. Obama needs only 185 – or 38% – of the 486 outstanding delegates (217 to be elected in the six remaining contests, and 269 superdelegates yet to endorse a candidate). Mrs. Clinton needs 341, or 70% of those left to be awarded.
AP
Barack Obama arrives at a primary election night rally in North Carolina, May 6, 2008.
Mr. Obama understands this. On Tuesday night, he added a big dollop of general election themes and pre-emptive defenses against coming attacks to his stump speech.
- Mrs. Clinton may battle until June and possibly until the convention in August. There's nothing Mr. Obama can or should do about it. After a long, bitter struggle, losing candidates often look for reasons to feel aggrieved. There is no reason to give her one. No pressure from Mr. Obama or party Chairman Howard Dean is better than pushing her out of the race.
- The Democrats' refusal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at their convention is an unresolved problem. If they insist on not seating these delegations, Democrats risk alienating voters in states with 44 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. And here Mr. Obama is at greater risk than Mrs. Clinton, especially in Florida. He trails John McCain badly in Sunshine State polls today, while Mrs. Clinton leads Mr. McCain there.
- The length of the Democratic contest has been – in some ways – a plus for the party. The AP estimates that more than 3.5 million new voters registered during the competitive primary season. And the hundreds of millions of dollars spent energizing Democratic turnout will leave organization and energy in place for November. Mr. Obama is a better candidate for having been battle tested. And Mr. McCain has to fight hard for attention. He's mentioned in less than 20% of the coverage in recent months, while Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are talked about in 60% to 70% of the coverage.
- The length of the Democratic contest has been – in some ways – a minus. It has revealed weaknesses in Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton came across as calculating, contrived, stiff and self-concerned. Mr. Obama is increasingly seen not as the Second Coming, but as a typical liberal Chicago pol with a thin record, little experience, an array of troubling relationships and, to top it off, elitist sensibilities. Nominating him will now test the thesis that only a Democrat running as a moderate can win the White House.
The primary has created a deep fissure in Democratic ranks: blue collar, less affluent, less educated voters versus the white wine crowd of academics and upscale professionals (along with blacks and young people). Mr. Obama runs behind Mrs. Clinton's numbers when matched against Mr. McCain in key industrial battleground states. Less than half of Mrs. Clinton's backers in Indiana and North Carolina say they would support Mr. Obama if he were the nominee. In the most recent Fox News poll, two-and-a-half times as many Democrats break for Mr. McCain (15%) as Republicans defect to Mrs. Clinton (6%) and nearly twice as many Democrats support Mr. McCain (22%) as Republicans back Mr. Obama (13%). These "McCainocrat" defections could hurt badly.
State and local Democrats are realizing the toxicity of their probable national ticket. Democrats running in special congressional races recently in Louisiana and Mississippi positioned themselves as pro-life, pro-gun social conservatives and disavowed Mr. Obama. The Louisiana Democrat won his race on Saturday and said he "has not endorsed any national politician." The Mississippi Democrat is facing a runoff on May 13 and specifically denied that Mr. Obama had endorsed his campaign. Not exactly profiles in unity.
- As much as Mr. Obama's cheerleaders in the media hate it, Rev. Jeremiah Wright remains a large general-election challenge for Mr. Obama. Not only did Mr. Obama admit on "Fox News Sunday" that Mr. Wright was a legitimate issue, voters agree. Mr. Obama's favorable ratings have dropped since Mr. Wright emerged as an issue. More than half of Mrs. Clinton's supporters say it is a meaningful reflection on Mr. Obama's character and judgment.
- This will be a very difficult year for Republicans. The economy's shaky state, an unpopular war, and the natural desire for partisan change after eight years of one party in the White House have helped tilt the balance to the Democrats.
Mr. Obama is significantly weaker today than he was three months ago, but Democrats have the upper hand in November. They're beatable. But it's nonsense to think this year is going to be a replay of George H.W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis or Richard Nixon versus George McGovern.
- Mr. McCain is very competitive. He is the best candidate Republicans could have picked in this environment. With the GOP brand low, his appeal to moderates and independents becomes even more crucial.
My analysis of individual state polls shows that today Mr. McCain would win 241 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama's 217, with 80 votes in toss-up states where neither candidate has more than a 3% lead. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton now leads Mr. McCain with 251 electoral votes to his 203 with 84 in toss-up states. This is the first time she's led Mr. McCain since I began tracking state-by-state results in early March.
Mr. McCain is realistic enough to know he will fall behind Mr. Obama once the Democratic nomination is settled. He's steeled himself and his team for that moment. And he's comforted by a belief that there will be plenty of time to recapture the lead. Mr. McCain saw Gerald Ford come from 30 points down to lose narrowly to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and watched George H.W. Bush overcome a 17-point deficit in the summer to hammer Michael Dukakis in the fall of 1988.
- The battlegrounds will look familiar. It will be the industrial heartland from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, minus Indiana (Republican) and Illinois (Democrat); the western edge of the Midwest from Minnesota south to Missouri; Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada in the Rocky Mountains; Florida; and New Hampshire.
Mr. Obama will argue he puts Virginia and North Carolina into play (doubtful), and may make an attempt at winning one or two of Nebraska's electoral votes (it awards its electoral votes by congressional district). Mr. McCain will say he can put New Jersey and Delaware and part of Maine (it splits its vote like Nebraska) in play. But it's doubtful he'll win in Oregon or Washington State, although he believes he can.
- Almost everything we think we know right now will be revised and even overturned during the next six months. This has been a race in which conventional wisdom has often been proven wrong. The improbable or thought-to-be impossible has happened with regularity. It has created a boom market for punditry and opinion offering, and one of the grandest possible spectacles for political junkies in decades. Hold on to your hat. It's going to be one heck of a ride through Nov. 4.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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***The Democrats' refusal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at their convention is an unresolved problem. If they insist on not seating these delegations, Democrats risk alienating voters in states with 44 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. And here Mr. Obama is at greater risk than Mrs. Clinton, especially in Florida. He trails John McCain badly in Sunshine State polls today, while Mrs. Clinton leads Mr. McCain there***
Obviously Rove is a master at political tactics but I still find statements like this hard to believe. I agree more with John Fund that in the end most Dems will vote and will vote the party line and will not be alienated enough to not vote or switch.
IMO forget about "alienating". It ain't gonna happen in the end.
***Mr. McCain is very competitive. He is the best candidate Republicans could have picked in this environment. With the GOP brand low, his appeal to moderates and independents becomes even more crucial.
My analysis of individual state polls shows that today Mr. McCain would win 241 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama's 217, with 80 votes in toss-up states where neither candidate has more than a 3% lead. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton now leads Mr. McCain with 251 electoral votes to his 203 with 84 in toss-up states. This is the first time she's led Mr. McCain since I began tracking state-by-state results in early March***
Wow. This is ironic. But that is why I didn't like Rush & Hannity & et al supporting Clinton in all this. I guess they figured she couldn't really win anyway and strategy would fuel the Democrat party turmoil but I still have concluded that whenever you can knock Clinton out you should. Never underestimate their ability to keep caying whatever it takes to win over some votes and change the political picture. Always beat them every chance you get.
I think she is still the much stornger candidate against McCain than BO. Why do you think Billary came out and tried to promote a McCain Hillary match up?
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Damsel of Distress
May 9, 2008
This is an amazing story. The Democratic Party has a winner. It has a nominee. You know this because he has the most votes and the most elected delegates, and there's no way, mathematically, his opponent can get past him. Even after the worst two weeks of his campaign, he blew past her by 14 in North Carolina and came within two in Indiana.
Martin Kozlowski
He's got this thing. And the Democratic Party, after this long and brutal slog, should be dancing in the streets. Party elders should be coming out on the balcony in full array, in full regalia, and telling the crowd, "Habemus nominatum": "We have a nominee." And the crowd below should be cheering, "Viva Obamus! Viva nominatum!"
Instead, you know where they are, the party elders. They are in a Democratic club on Capitol Hill, slump-shouldered at the bar, having a drink and then two, in a state of what might be called depressed horror. "What are they doing to the party?" they wail. "Why are they doing this?"
You know who they are talking about.
The Democratic Party can't celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.
Here's the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.
Mr. Begala more or less accused the Obama people of not caring about white voters: "[If] there's a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn't need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out." And: "We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans." That, he said, was the old, losing, Dukakis coalition.
"Paul, baby," Ms. Brazile, who is undeclared, began her response, "we need to not divide and polarize the Democratic Party. . . . So stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups, Paul, because you and I know . . . how Democrats win, and to simply suggest that Hillary's coalition is better than Obama's, Obama's is better than Hillary's -- no. We have a big party, Paul." And: "Just don't divide me and tell me I cannot stand in Hillary's camp because I'm black, and I can't stand in Obama's camp because I'm female. Because I'm both. . . . Don't start with me, baby." Finally: "It's our party, Paul. Don't say my party. It's our party. Because it's time that we bring the party back together, Paul."
In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
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A bit of deranged levity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Lstkiexhc
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/16/video-new-rnc-ad-hammers-obama-on-second-amendment/
Bittergate!
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http://www.ocregister.com/articles/president-obama-words-2044703-bush-talking#
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Mark Steyn: Obama an appeaser? How dare you
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
"That's enough. That – that's a show of disrespect to me."
That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was casting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the Powerline Web site called it) when it's a family dispute between you and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the 60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies.
President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was really about him, and he didn't care for it. He didn't put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: "That's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me." And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.
Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking onlyabout you.
Yes, there are plenty of Democrats who are in favor of negotiating with our enemies, and a few Republicans, too – President Bush's pal James Baker, whose Iraq Study Group was full of proposals to barter with Iran and Syria and everybody else. But that general line is also taken by at least three of Tony Blair's former Cabinet ministers and his senior policy adviser, and by the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party and by a whole bunch of bigshot Europeans. It's not a Democrat election policy, it's an entire worldview. Even Barack Obama can't be so vain as to think his fly-me-to-[insert name of enemy here]concept is an original idea.
Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.
And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister installed as president of the United States.
Mo Mowlam was Britain's Northern Ireland secretary and oversaw the process by which the IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. By 2004, she was calling for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table," having concluded he was no different from Adams: Stern fellow, lots of blood on his hands, but no sense getting on your high horse about all that; let's find out what he wants and give him part of it.
In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of grievances, from America's refusal to implement Sharia law to Jew-controlled usury to the lack of punishment for "President Clinton's immoral acts." Like Barack Obama's pastor, bin Laden shares the view that AIDS is a "Satanic American invention." Obviously, there are items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on – "President Clinton's immoral acts" – but who's to say most of the rest isn't worth chewing over?
This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian – in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:
"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously."
Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of Hezbollah:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too, are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.
President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pushing ahead with the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He spoke softly – after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No wonder he's so twitchy about it.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/17/barack-obama-neocon/
Barack "Neocon" Obama
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http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/003764print.html
Debbie Schlussel: The Company He Keeps: Obama Hangs With Hezbollah's Iranian Agent Imam
By Debbie Schlussel
Barack Obama claims he's against HAMAS and Hezbollah and is offended by President Bush's speech in Israel about Obama's ethos of "appeasement." So why is he meeting with one of Hezbollah's most important imams and agents in America, Imam Hassan Qazwini? And why is this open anti-Semite and supporter of Israel's annihilation getting to discuss "the Arab-Israeli conflict" in a private one-on-one meeting with Obama? What was said? I think we can do the math.
I've written about Qazwini and his mosque for almost a decade. He is tight with the Government of Iran, and he is an agent of the Iranian government, spreading its propaganda. He was sent to the U.S. by Iran to help radicalize his mosque, the Islamic Center of America, which--at the time--was becoming moderate with women not covering their hair and mixing with men. All that has changed, under Qazwini.
Extremist Imam Hassan Qazwini w/ Obama
AND w/ Hezbollah Spiritual Leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah
Qazwini is very open about his support for Palestinian homicide bombings, HAMAS, and Hezbollah. And he's a good friend of Hezbollah spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah--the man who issued the fatwa to Hezbollah terrorists to murder over 300 U.S. Marines and U.S. Embassy civilians in cold blood. Qazwini's mosque has held rallies and celebrations in support of Hezbollah, and many of Hezbollah's biggest money-launderers and agents in America are his congregants.
When I went undercover to his mosque in 1998, he and others welcomed Nation of Islam chief racist Louis Farrakhan as "our dear brother" and "a freedom fighter." Qazwini applauded Farrakhan's anti-Semitic statements saying that Jews were the "forces of Satan" and that there needed to be a "jihad" on the American people.
Above is a photo of Qazwini hanging out with Hezbollah's Fadlallah--who is on the State Department Terrorist List--in South Lebanon, where he went to visit him and pay tribute. Juxtapose that with the photo of Qazwini and Barack Obama. It says a lot about the company Obama keeps . . . and why he shouldn't be President:
A Muslim leader from Dearborn met privately with Sen. Barack Obama during his Wednesday visit to Michigan.
Imam Hassan Qazwini, head of the Islamic Center of America, said in an email that he met with Obama at Macomb Community College. A mosque spokesman, Eide Alawan, confirmed that the meeting took place. During the meeting, the two discussed the Presidential election, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Iraq war, according to Qazwini.
At the end of the meeting, Qazwini said he gave Obama a copy of new book, "American Crescent," and invited Obama to visit his center.
The meeting with Obama came about after Qazwini had asked David Bonior, the former U.S. Rep. from Michigan, if he could meet with Obama during his visit. Qazwini was not selected to be part of a group of 20 people who met with Obama, but Qazwini later got a private meeting with Obama, Alawan said.
"They gave him an opportunity for a one-on-one," Alawan said. . . .
Born in Iraq into a long line of Shi'ite clerics, Qazwini and his family left for Iran to escape persecution under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He later moved to the U.S. and become head of the Dearborn mosque, one of the largest Shi'ite Muslim centers in the U.S.
Um, Saddam wasn't off the mark regarding Qazwini and his family. They were agents of Iran who were trying to overthrow him on behalf of the Khomeini'ists. And the fundamentalist Islamic form of government Qazwini espouses is far worse Saddam Hussein's killing fields (though it's far less secular than Saddam was). The only other difference is that in his view those bloody fields should be dominated by victorious Shi'ites, not Saddam's Sunnis.
Well, Obama has the support of HAMAS . . . and now, Hezbollah. And we should send him to the White House because . . .?
Posted by Debbie on May 16, 2008 12:18 PM to Debbie Schlussel
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****So why is he meeting with one of Hezbollah's most important imams and agents in America, Imam Hassan Qazwini?****
At *best* its because he thinks some "genius argument" is going to convince our enemies they have been wrong all along.
At *worst* it is because he agrees with the Farrakan/Hymietown anti-Jewish wing of the Black "community" who he obviously adores, and that he also hates Jews.
At this point I am leaning closer to the *worst* hypothesis than I am the *best* hypothesis. He is just not that dumb. And he is a superior manipulator.
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'Nothing but Misogynists'
By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX
May 24, 2008
Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on."
So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale – who has earned millions in the private sector, won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and gathered many more votes than John Edwards, Bill Richardson and several other middle-aged white guys in their respective bids for the 2008 Democratic nomination – feels cheated because she's a woman.
Seems doubtful. But hey, I'm a guy and perhaps hopelessly insensitive. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that her campaign has indeed suffered because of sexism.
This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton's own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?
But here's another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.
It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election. Only if registered Republicans and independents are more open-minded than registered Democrats – only if people who lean GOP or who have no party affiliation are more willing than Democrats to overlook a candidate's sex and vote on the issues – could Mrs. Clinton be a stronger candidate.
I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But if I ever become convinced that Mrs. Clinton is correct that sexism played a role in her disappointing showing in the Democratic primaries – and that she truly is her party's strongest candidate to take on John McCain – I might finally join a party: the GOP. At least it's not infested with sexists.
Mr. Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University.
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Obama's Revisionist History
By KARL ROVE
May 29, 2008; Page A15
This week's minor controversy about Barack Obama's claim that an uncle liberated Auschwitz was quickly put to rest by his campaign. They conceded that it was a great uncle whose unit liberated Buchenwald, 500 miles away.
But other, much more troubling, episodes have provided a revealing glimpse into a candidate who instinctively resorts to parsing, evasions and misdirection. The saga over Rev. Jeremiah Wright is Exhibit A. In just 62 days, Americans were treated to eight different explanations.
First, on Feb. 25, Mr. Obama downplayed Rev. Wright's divisiveness, saying he was "like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with." A week later, Mr. Obama insisted, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," suggesting that Rev. Wright was criticized because "he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that."
The issue exploded on March 13, when ABC showed excerpts from Rev. Wright's sermons. Mr. Obama's spokesman said the senator "deeply disagrees" with Rev. Wright's statements, but "now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."
The next day, Mr. Obama offered a fourth defense: "The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation." Mr. Obama also told the Chicago Tribune, "In fairness to him, this was sort of a greatest hits. They basically culled five or six sermons out of 30 years of preaching."
Then, four days later, in Philadelphia, Mr. Obama finally repudiated Rev. Wright's comments, saying they "denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation." But Mr. Obama went on to say, "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother. . . ."
Ten days later, Mr. Obama said if Rev. Wright had not retired as Trinity's pastor, and "had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended . . . then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church." (Never mind that Rev. Wright had made no such acknowledgment.)
On April 28, at the National Press Club, Rev. Wright re-emerged – not to apologize but to repeat some of his most offensive lines. This provoked an eighth defense: "[W]hatever relationship I had with Rev. Wright has changed, as a consequence of this. I don't think that he showed much concern for me. More importantly, I don't think he showed much concern for what we are trying to do in this campaign . . . ." Self-interest is a powerful, but not noble, sentiment in politics.
The Rev. Wright affair is just one instance where the Illinois senator has said something wrong or offensive, and then offered shifting explanations for his views. Consider flag pins.
Mr. Obama told an Iowa radio station last October he didn't wear an American flag lapel pin because, after 9/11, it had "became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues . . . ." His campaign issued a statement that "Senator Obama believes that being a patriot is about more than a symbol." To highlight his own moral superiority, he denigrated the patriotism of those who wore a flag.
Yet by April, campaigning in culturally conservative Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama was blaming others for the controversy he'd created, claiming, "I have never said that I don't wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins. This is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and, once again, distracts us . . . ." A month later Mr. Obama was once again wearing a pin, saying "Sometimes I wear it, sometimes I don't."
The Obama revision tour has been seen elsewhere. Last July, Mr. Obama pledged to meet personally and without precondition, during his first year, the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Criticized afterwards, he made his pledge more explicitly, naming Iranian President Ahmadinejad and Venezuela strongman Hugo Chávez as leaders he would grace with first-year visits.
By October, Mr. Obama was backpedaling, talking about needing "some progress or some indication of good faith," and by April, "sufficient preparation." It got so bad his foreign policy advisers were (falsely) denying he'd ever said he'd meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad – even as he still defended his original pledge to have meetings without precondition.
The list goes on. Mr. Obama's problem is a campaign that's personality-driven rather than idea-driven. Thus incidents calling into question his persona and character can have especially devastating consequences.
Stripped of his mystique as a different kind of office seeker, he could become just another liberal politician – only one who parses, evades, dissembles and condescends. That narrative is beginning to take hold. If those impressions harden into firm judgments, Mr. Obama will have a very difficult time in November.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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McCain Should Run Against Congress
May 30, 2008
WSJ
When House Minority Leader John Boehner is asked whether his party needs to distance itself from George W. Bush, he likes to point out the president isn't on the ticket this fall. True. Several hundred incumbent GOP members of Congress are, however, and don't think John McCain hasn't noticed.
With Congress's approval rating at record lows, the time is ripe for a slam campaign. Barack Obama won't do it, since his Democratic colleagues are running the joint. But it's a huge opportunity for Mr. McCain, who could play Congress's failings off his promises for reform. Even as Republicans sagely warn their nominee to distance himself from the president, they're beginning to see that his more productive option might just be to throw them – and Congressional Democrats – under the Straight Talk bus.
AP
Mr. McCain could take encouragement from history. Harry Truman managed a 1948 victory by trashing the "Do Nothing Congress." Upstart Barry Goldwater in 1952 told Arizonans that Majority Leader Ernest McFarland represented the mess in Washington, and snatched the Democrat's seat. Tom Daschle followed McFarland, after being pilloried for turning the Senate into a dead zone.
Today's Congress is ripe for a shredding. The GOP kicked off an era of public disgust with its corruption and loss of principle, a reputation it has yet to shake. Democrats have, impressively, managed to alienate voters further with inaction and broken promises. Congress has come to represent the institutional malaise that so frustrates voters. That distaste explains this year's appetite for "change."
Mr. McCain could play off that hunger, and in the process provide his campaign with the theme it still sorely needs. Mr. Obama has his "change" slogan, but as of yet no innovative policies to hang on it. Mr. McCain's problem is opposite: He's laid out smart ideas – an optional flat tax, health-care tax credits, a veto of all earmarks – but has yet to find a narrative to bring them together. One solution: Latch on to a subject that today occupies only a part of his speeches – the promise of "political reform" – and turn it into a full-fledged philosophy. Theme: "Your government has failed you, and here's how I plan to fix it."
Congress is the embodiment of that failure, and Mr. McCain could use it to draw distinctions. He could swivel the focus away from the Bush comparison, and toward Mr. Obama's kinship with today's all-talk Democratic Congress. He could tell voters that the party they feel is today failing them in the Capitol will also fail them in the White House.
As for bad-mouthing the GOP as part of this process, it isn't likely Mr. McCain would offend his conservative base. Most of it is already offended by Congress. His criticism of today's diminished GOP brand, and a promise to revive it, might even help him with the rank-and-file, and would certainly draw independents.
Mr. McCain has so far only flirted with this idea. He wrote an op-ed criticizing the farm bill, but it was largely an abstract complaint about policy. He might have instead made its focus the skewering of a Congress that relentlessly shovels subsidies to agribusiness, and then directly tied that naked vote-buying to today's high prices. A proponent of entitlement reform, he could flay Congress for its decades of inaction on Social Security. His earmark criticism might name names, including those in his party, whose pork addiction has sullied politics. If he's looking for suggestions, he could start with the Alaska delegation.
Mild as Mr. McCain's criticism has been, it's already got Republicans spooked. Many in the party resisted falling in behind his reform message, and some worry that's already taking a toll – creating difficulties even in races that should have been easy.
Consider: As part of his condemnation of the farm bill, Mr. McCain singled out a $93 million earmark for racehorses. While Mr. McCain avoided naming the author, it happened to be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mr. McConnell has bragged in ads about the pork he brings home to Kentucky, even as his election opponents (taking their cue from Mr. McCain) use those earmarks to paint him as part of a Washington crony culture.
Republicans haven't been worried about Mr. McConnell's seat, and a recent Rasmussen poll has Mr. McCain with a whopping 25 percentage-point lead over Mr. Obama in the state. Yet that same poll had Mr. McConnell's opponent with a five percentage-point lead. And only 67% of declared McCain voters said they'd vote for their four-term Republican senator.
If Congressional Republicans were smart, they'd be figuring out now how to get some protection from a potential McCain onslaught. A unilateral earmark ban? A new resolve against the farm bill? They'd better think of something. If Mr. McCain does take aim at the big, fat Congressional target in front of him, right now it's the GOP, as much as Democrats, that he'll hit.
Write to kim@wsj.com
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WSJ
The Argument for Nominating Hillary
By LANNY J. DAVIS
May 31, 2008
After the votes are in from Puerto Rico tomorrow and South Dakota and Montana on Tuesday, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will be able to make a facts-based case that they represent a significant majority of grass-roots Democrats.
Chances are Sens. Obama and Clinton will virtually split the more than 4,400 delegates – including Florida and Michigan – elected by more than 34 million people over the past five months.
Sen. Clinton has already won the most votes, but there is controversy over including the over 300,000 votes from Michigan, since Sen. Obama was not on the ballot (by his own choice). But if Sen. Clinton wins a substantial victory in Puerto Rico tomorrow – with an expected record turnout exceeding two million voters – she could well end up with more popular votes than Sen. Obama, even if Michigan's primary votes are excluded.
Worst case, she could come out with a 2% deficit in elected pledged delegates. But that gap can be made up, if most of the remaining 200 or so unpledged superdelegates decide to support Sen. Clinton as the strongest candidate against John McCain – or if others committed to Sen. Obama decide to change their minds for the same reason. A number of superdelegates previously committed to Sen. Clinton later announced support for Sen. Obama, so it's certainly possible that, when confronted with growing evidence that Sen. Clinton is stronger than Sen. McCain, they might switch back.
The final argument for Hillary comes down to three points – with points one and two leading to the third.
First, Sen. Clinton is more experienced and qualified to be president than is Sen. Obama. This is not to say Sen. Obama cannot be a good, even great, president. I believe he can. But Sen. Clinton spent eight years in the White House. She was not a traditional first lady. She was involved in policy and debate on virtually every major domestic and foreign policy decision of the Clinton presidency, both "in" and "outside" the room with her husband. She has been a U.S. senator for eight years and has a record of legislative accomplishments, including as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
With no disrespect or criticism intended, Sen. Obama has been an Illinois state senator for eight years and a U.S. senator for just four years. He has, understandably, fewer legislative accomplishments than Sen. Clinton. That's just a fact. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that Sen. Clinton would be less vulnerable to criticism from Sen. McCain on the "experience" issue.
Second, Sen. Clinton's position on health care gives her an advantage over Sen. McCain. Her proposal for universally mandated health care based primarily on private insurance and individual choices is a stark contrast to Sen. McCain's total reliance on private market insurance, HMOs or emergency rooms for the 45 million or more uninsured. Sen. Obama's position, while laudable in its objective, does not mandate universal care and, arguably, won't challenge Sen. McCain as effectively as will Sen. Clinton's plan.
Despite the fact that Sen. Obama's campaign made the Iraq war a crucial issue in the Iowa caucuses and early primaries, there has never been a significant difference between his position and Sen. Clinton's. Sen. Obama deserves credit for opposing military intervention in Iraq while he was running for the state senate in early 2002.
But in 2004, Sen. Obama said he "did not know" how he would have voted on the war resolution had he been a senator at the time. That summer he told the Chicago Tribune: "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage" of the Iraq War. (This is a statement that Sen. Clinton would not have made.) While he served in the Senate, he voted 84 out of 85 times the same as Sen. Clinton on Iraq-war related votes. The only exception is when he supported President Bush's position on the promotion of a general that Sen. Clinton opposed.
Third and finally, there is recent hard data showing that, at least at the present time, Sen. Clinton is a significantly stronger candidate against Sen. McCain among the general electorate (as distinguished from the more liberal Democratic primary and caucus electorate).
According to Gallup's May 12-25 tracking polling of 11,000 registered voters in all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., Sen. Clinton is running stronger against Sen. McCain in the 20 states where she can claim popular-vote victory in the primaries and caucuses. In contrast, Sen. Obama runs no better against Sen. McCain than does Sen. Clinton in the 28 states plus D.C. where he has prevailed. "On this basis," Gallup concludes: "Clinton appears to have the stronger chance of capitalizing on her primary strengths in the general election."
The 20 states, Gallup points out, not only encompass more than 60% of the nation's voters, but "represent more than 300 Electoral College votes while Obama's 28 states and the District of Columbia represent only 224 Electoral College votes." Sen. Clinton leads Sen. McCain in these 20 states by seven points (50%-43%), while Sens. Obama and McCain are pretty much tied. But in the 26 states plus D.C. that Sen. Obama carried in the primaries/caucuses, he and Sen. Clinton are both statistically tied with Sen. McCain (Clinton 45%-McCain 47%; Obama 45%-McCain 46%).
Gallup's state-by-state polling in seven key battleground "purple" states also shows Sen. Clinton winning cumulatively in these states by a six-point margin (49%-43%) over Sen. McCain, while Sen. Obama loses to Sen. McCain by three points – a net advantage of 9% for Sen. Clinton. These key seven states – constituting 105 electoral votes – are Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Arkansas, Florida and Michigan.
Meanwhile, Sen. Obama holds about an equal advantage over Sen. McCain in six important swing states that he carried in the primaries and caucuses – Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri. But these constitute less than half – 54 – of the electoral votes of the larger states in which Sen. Clinton is leading.
The latest state-by-state battleground polls (published May 21-23) by other respected polling organizations verify Gallup's findings that Sen. Clinton is significantly stronger against Sen. McCain in the key states that a Democrat must win to gain the presidency. According to various poll data within the last 10 days:
- Pennsylvania: Sen. Clinton leads McCain 50%-39%; Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain are effectively tied.
- Ohio: Sen. Clinton leads Sen. McCain 48%-41%, Sen. Obama is down 44%-40%.
- Florida: Sen. Clinton leads Sen. McCain 47%-41%; Sen. McCain leads Sen. Obama 50%-40%. (Sen. Clinton has a net advantage of 16 points!)
- North Carolina: Despite a substantial primary victory, Sen. Obama is down 8% vs. Sen. McCain, (51%-43%), while Sen. Clinton leads by 6% (49%-43%).
- Nevada: Sen. Clinton up 5%, Sen. Obama down 6%.
Even the theory that Sen. Obama can open up significant numbers of "red" states has not been borne out by recent polling. For example: in Virginia, which Sen. Obama won substantially in the Feb. 12 Democratic primary, he is currently down in at least one recent, respected poll by a significant 9% margin – one point greater than the 8% margin Sen. Clinton is behind Sen. McCain.
Finally, one unfortunate argument is making the rounds lately to convince superdelegates to go for Sen. Obama. That is the prediction that if Sen. Obama is not the nominee, African-American and other passionate Obama supporters will conclude that the nomination had been "stolen" and will walk out of the convention or stay at home. On the other side are the many women and others strongly committed to Sen. Clinton promising that if she is denied the nomination, they will refuse to vote for Sen. Obama.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are progressive, pro-civil rights, pro-affirmative action, pro-choice Democrats. Neither Obama supporters nor Clinton supporters who care about the issues, the Supreme Court, and the need to begin withdrawing from Iraq can truly mean they will actively or passively help Sen. McCain get elected. Threats of walkouts or stay-at-homes by good Democrats are not the answer, nor should they be a factor in superdelegate decisions.
But there is one possible scenario that avoids disappointment and frustration by passionate supporters of both candidates, that combines the strengths of one with the strengths of the other, and that virtually guarantees the election of a Democratic president in 2008:
A Clinton-Obama or an Obama-Clinton ticket.
Stay tuned.
Mr. Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton in 1996-98, is a longtime friend and supporter of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/31/one-potatoe-two-potatoe-three-potatoe-four/
One potatoe, two potatoe, three potatoe, four
POSTED AT 11:45 AM ON MAY 31, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
How many “potatoe” moments does it take for the media to start a doofus narrative on a candidate? Barack Obama provided yet another during his visit to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota yesterday:
Democrat Barack Obama paid an unscheduled late-night visit to Mount Rushmore Friday, visiting the national memorial at closing time and joking that his ears were too big to ever be included in such a display. …
He did express curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in “North by Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore’s presidential faces.
“How did they get up there in the first place?” he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.
“They didn’t. It was a movie set,” Jensen told him.
“Pretty spiffy, isn’t it,” said the Illinois senator, summing up his overall impressions.
Well, maybe the Young Gaffer’s friends in Hollywood can explain how movies get made, at least before they actually keep their promises and bug out for Italy.
How many times did Quayle misspell potato before the American media and popular culture proclaimed him an idiot? We can add this to Obama’s existing list of gaffes and blunders:
The Selma March in 1965 did not contribute to his birth in 1961.
Kansas tornadoes in May 2007 killed 12 people, not “ten thousand”.
Afghans do not speak Arabic.
Misunderstanding Memorial Day, and then claiming to see “fallen heroes” in the Memorial Day audience.
Same day: putting Auschwitz in western Germany, not Poland.
“57 states”.
Again … how many times did Quayle misspell potato? (via The Corner)
Update: I wonder if he asked to see the Team America headquarters, too ….
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Lincoln's Rule: Organization Matters
By KARL ROVE
June 5, 2008
Politics has become hi-tech with sophisticated databases, the Internet, TV ads, focus groups and polls.
But a lanky Sangamon County, Ill., lawyer described the essential task of politics in 1840 in a letter to his Whig campaign committee. Make a list of the voters, he wrote, ascertain for whom they will vote, have undecided voters talked to by someone they hold in confidence, and, on Election Day, get all Whig voters to the polls.
AP
Barack Obama feeds his volunteers.
Abraham Lincoln was a great president, but he was also a very practical politician. And Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama would be wise to take his advice. In a close election, organization matters a lot.
Mr. Obama's background as a community organizer makes him comfortable with organizing. His supporters are demonstrating great energy and enthusiasm. Many are Internet savvy, making communicating with them inexpensive and fast. The long primary season has given Mr. Obama's team time to grow, test and learn. Left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) and unions are already actively registering new Democrats in battleground states. And Democrats now have a single national voter database, albeit more than a decade after the GOP built its own database.
However, Mr. Obama could repeat a big mistake Howard Dean made in 2004 when he had college students call on voters with whom they shared little. This violated Lincoln's rule.
Mr. Obama has a serious problem with some traditional Democratic voters. He consistently lost blue-collar households in the primaries. A recent Pew poll shows him slipping among white women (down eight points over the past month) and voters without a college degree (down seven points). Mr. Obama's support among Latino voters was a tepid 34% in the 13 primary contests with an appreciable number of Hispanics. He carried a majority of the Hispanic vote in only one state – his home state of Illinois, which he won by the slim margin of 50%-49%.
Mr. Obama also can't count on his voter-registration strength. His allies Acorn and the NAACP pay a bounty for each new voter registered, so their workers often register people who don't exist or who are already registered.
Mr. McCain's strengths start with him doing better among Independents and Democrats than any other Republican. Three times as many Democrats say they will cross party lines to vote for him than Republicans who say they will support Mr. Obama, a recent Newsweek poll found. Mr. McCain is also winning 41% of Hispanic voters, according to a recent Gallup poll. And while he still needs to win over working class voters (especially Catholics) and older white women, the openings are there.
Mr. McCain has a superior tool available to him – the GOP's Victory Committee, with its 72-Hour program that uses sophisticated targeting and vast numbers of volunteers to focus on Lincoln's four tasks.
In 2004, the Victory Committee proved its value when the Democrats far outspent the GOP, but still failed to beat Republican turnout. Fueled by George Soros's money, Democratic 527s (independent political groups) along with the Democratic National Committee and John Kerry's campaign spent a combined $121 million more than Republicans. Yet the GOP registered more voters and identified persuadable households better than Democrats, and got 12 million more Bush voters to the polls than in 2000. Democratic dollars were no match for the Victory Program's "microtargeted" database and detailed planning.
On the debit side, Mr. McCain hasn't historically valued organization, dismissing its tedious requirements as unnecessary. Mr. McCain also has an "enthusiasm deficit" with grassroots GOP activists who work the phones, walk the neighborhoods and register the voters. And he has no grassroots groups to match the Democrats, outside of the National Rifle Association and Right to Life. Mr. McCain will have to build coalitions of veterans, Catholics, Latinos, small business people, evangelicals and women in key states to close the enthusiasm gap.
There's time, but not much time, for both candidates to build effective organizations. Public interest is likely to wane in the coming months and then pick up with a bang at the end of August. The candidates will need to have their structures in place before then.
So how are the candidates doing in building their organizations? I had a colleague call the parties' headquarters in 12 battleground states to ask who the Obama and McCain state chairmen were. Mr. Obama has four states with a chairman and eight without. Mr. McCain has nine states with chairmen and three without. Having a state chairman doesn't automatically translate into an effective organization, but having one is an essential early step.
Mr. McCain has many obstacles to overcome this year, including a political environment that favors Democrats. Mr. Obama is stumbling across the primary finish line barely ahead of Hillary Clinton, and faces big problems in uniting his party. Organization could provide the winning margin in the fall.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus
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Obama and McCain
Thomas Sowell
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober-- if not grim-- assessment of where we are.
Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.
This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran-- is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.
The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb-- and they can make 9/11 look like child's play.
All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand-- however outrageous those demands might be-- or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.
All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.
Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us.
They have already telegraphed their punches with their sadistic beheadings of innocent civilians, and with the popularity of videotapes of those beheadings in the Middle East.
They have already telegraphed their intention to dictate to us with such things as Osama bin Laden's threats to target those places in America that did not vote the way he prescribed in the 2004 elections. He could not back up those threats then but he may be able to in a very few years.
The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s-- and our "leaders" and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the "leaders" and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.
We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again.
What does this have to do with today's presidential candidates? It has everything to do with them.
One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear-- or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.
There is one big difference between now and the 1930s. Although the West's lack of military preparedness and its political irresolution led to three solid years of devastating losses to Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, nevertheless when all the West's industrial and military forces were finally mobilized, the democracies were able to turn the tide and win decisively.
But you cannot lose a nuclear war for three years and then come back. You cannot even sustain the will to resist for three years when you are first broken down morally by threats and then devastated by nuclear bombs.
Our one window of opportunity to prevent this will occur within the term of whoever becomes President of the United States next January.
At a time like this, we do not have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for some third party candidate to show our displeasure-- at the cost of putting someone in the White House who is not up to the job.
Senator John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, Senator McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America.
On the contrary, he has paid a huge price for resisting our enemies, even when they held him prisoner and tortured him. The choice between him and Barack Obama should be a no-brainer.
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Pivoting to Victory
By JAMES TARANTO
June 18, 2008
A Washington Post editorial reports on a meeting between the Post's editors and Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, in which Zebari describes a conversation he had with Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee:
The foreign minister said "my message" to Mr. Obama "was very clear. . . . Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress." He said he was reassured by the candidate's response, which caused him to think that Mr. Obama might not differ all that much from Mr. McCain. Mr. Zebari said that in addition to promising a visit, Mr. Obama said that "if there would be a Democratic administration, it will not take any irresponsible, reckless, sudden decisions or action to endanger your gains, your achievements, your stability or security. Whatever decision he will reach will be made through close consultation with the Iraqi government and U.S. military commanders in the field."
This confirms the reporting of Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, which we noted Friday. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also reports that Obama, who last set foot in Iraq in 2006, before the surge, "is considering going to Iraq soon to visit with troops and commanders," even though snarly Susan Rice, a top Obama foreign-policy adviser, says that the GOP argument that he should do so is "complete garbage."
Could it be that Obama is planning to pivot? That is, what if he goes to Iraq and declares upon his return that he has been persuaded that the surge has made a difference, that things are going much better, and that he is now convinced victory is both possible and crucial?
On the downside, he would risk alienating those among his supporters who crave defeat in Iraq, either for ideological reasons or out of sheer hatred for George W. Bush.
But on the upside, it would show political courage and open-mindedness, two qualities his supporters are eager to ascribe to him but so far on the basis of evidence that is somewhere between scant and nonexistent. Those who do want America to win in Iraq would no longer have to vote against Obama for that reason. As for those who want defeat, where would they go? By their lights, John McCain is even worse; he voted for the war to begin with. So, oddly enough, did the Libertarian nominee. Unless you count Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader, Obama would still be the best "antiwar" candidate on the ballot.
We've long been skeptical of the Obama hype, but if he is smart and bold enough to adopt a sensible position on Iraq, we will have to admit there is more to him that we've given him credit for.
Back to the Future
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Woof All:
I'm following with interest this business about allowing the States to permit offshore drilling. It may be that BO has made a major political blunder with this one and JM may finally have an opportunity which he is willing to take to go for blood.
Also, the good news out of Iraq continues-- see the Iraq thread today wherein even the NYTimes has to admit how well things are going. Without missing a beat BO has tried using this to say "See, we can leave now" :roll: :roll: :roll: There are heavy political points to be scored by JM here.
TAC,
Marc
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/06/21/another-one-hits-the-bus-obama-reverses-on-fisa/
Another one hits the bus: Obama reverses on FISA
POSTED AT 9:11 AM ON JUNE 21, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
Barack Obama reversed his position on FISA reform yesterday, giving the Left a taste of the real Obama for the second time this week. After Obama abandoned public financing, most of his supporters in the hard-Left base seemed willing to write that off as good politics. This latest reversal has received a different reaction, as Paul Kane at the Washington Post notes:
In his most substantive break with the Democratic Party’s base since becoming the presumptive nominee, Obama declared he will support the bill when it comes to a Senate vote, likely next week, despite misgivings about legal provisions for telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program of suspected terrorists. ….
This marks something of a reversal of Obama’s position from an earlier version of the bill, which was approved by the Senate Feb. 12, when Obama was locked in a fight for the Democratic nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
Obama missed the February vote on that FISA bill as he campaigned in the “Potomac Primaries,” but issued a statement that day declaring “I am proud to stand with Senator Dodd, Senator Feingold and a grassroots movement of Americans who are refusing to let President Bush put protections for special interests ahead of our security and our liberty.”
The wheels of the bus went round and round over Senators Dodd, Feingold, and that same grassroots movement of Americans. Why? John McCain has spent the last few weeks hammering Obama on his national-security weaknesses, and Obama’s repeated clinging to the Nuremberg military tribunals as an example of why he opposes military tribunals didn’t help. He needed to show that he can take a nuanced approach to the effort on the war, and he apparently chose FISA as the moment. It’s sheer political calculus, much the same as Obama’s position on public financing, the death penalty, the Iraq war, and just about every position Obama has taken in this campaign.
It’s becoming clear even to the Left that Obama has no real firm principles, only ambition. This FISA package doesn’t differ much from the compromise Senate bill in February — one supported by a significant number of Democrats then — except that it requires a court to certify that telecoms meet the prerequisites for immunity that the first bill granted outright. As Feingold notes, the bill drafts those requirements to ensure that the applications will be approved, as they should be, since the government assured the telecoms that the activities were legal. Obama’s stated reason for switching — that it restores FISA and wiretap statutes — was true of the previous version as well.
What changed? Obama doesn’t need the hard Left to get past Hillary Clinton. In fact, Code Pink, International ANSWER, and that “grassroots movement” will become liabilities in a general-election campaign against a nationally-known war hero. He tossed them under the bus with as much consideration as he did Jeremiah Wright and Jim Johnson.
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The Daily Mail
The wife US Republican John McCain callously left behind
By Sharon Churcher
Last updated at 1:45 AM on 08th June 2008
Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.
While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream: a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future, McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation's tarnished reputation.
Forgotten woman: But despite all her problems Carol McCain says she still adores he ex-husband
McCain likes to illustrate his moral fiber by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.
But there is another Mrs. McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator's presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.
And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.
She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnams infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.
When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of lifesaving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons
had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.
Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam , she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.
Today, she stands at just 5ft 4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.
For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.
Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. “I have no bitterness.”
She says. “My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn't the reason for my divorce.
“My marriage ended because John McCain didn't want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.”
Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to “play the field”. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.
McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multimillionaire who had impeccable political connections.
He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of Americas most distinguished military dynasties ? his father and grandfather were both admirals.
But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group of young officers who called themselves the “Bad Bunch”.
His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding floozy nicknamed “Marie, the Flame of Florida“ to a tobacco heiress.
Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children -- Douglas and Andrew -- before renewing what one acquaintance calls “an old flirtation” with McCain.
It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.
“He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol's children”, recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale's Song, a best-selling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.
The couple married and McCain adopted Carol's sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning
to bore McCain. The couple were regarded as “fixtures on the party circuit” before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.
He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin .
What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.
War hero: McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US in 1973 after his five years as a POW in North Vietnam
Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.
It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday -- her third without McCain -- at her parents home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend's house.
It wasn't until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.
After her first series of lifesaving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: “He's got enough problems, I don't want to tell him”.
H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.
When McCain -- his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton -- was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.
But friends say privately he was “appalled” by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: “I don't look so good myself. It's fine.”
He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former POW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.
“I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after” says Carol. But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.
Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.
But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. “John started carousing and running around with women”, said Robert Timberg.
McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.
He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.
In 1979 -- while still married to Carol -- he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii . Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.
Carol and her children were devastated. “It was a complete surprise”, says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.
“They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.”
Another friend added: “Carol didn't fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say,'He just wants to make up for lost time’”
Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the breakup was Carol's decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.
Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all his campaigns. “He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy”, one observed.
McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He also agreed to pay her alimony and child support.
A former neighbor says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach . He said: “My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking”.
Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.
And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won't forget his treatment of his first wife.
Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: “I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is: deceit.
“When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.
“Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.
“This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.”
One old friend of the McCains said: “Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that's a defense mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life”.
Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicize her support for the man who abandoned her.
Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. “He's a good guy”, she assured us. “We are still good friends. He is the best man for president”.
But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel -- even by the standards of modern politics.
“McCain is the classic opportunist. He's always reaching for attention and glory”, he said.
“After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona . And the rest is history.”
Additional reporting by Paul Henderson in Virginia Beach and William Lowther in Washington
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SB,
You'll note I posted a piece criticizing McCain on this topic a while ago. Having said that, I doubt "Barry-O" wins in comparing character flaws to McCain.
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I agree.
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I didn't know this story. Kind of reminds me of Gingrich abandoning his wife with cancer.
***McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centered womanizer who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to “play the field”.***
Ironically the Right can go after him on this if they choose. Then again there are all those Republicans with the same baggage -Livingstone, Craig, Foley, and several others.
The left cannot go after him with all they did to defend their guy Clinton for years. In fact they consider all this kind of stuff a badge of honor. Lanni Davis, Carville, Begala should be screeching to can this story - "its just about sex - so what".
Maybe McCain can get a few Dem votes out of this.
At least there are no accusations McCain raped anyone.
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In the mix of all this is this:
"She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children -- Douglas and Andrew -- before renewing what one acquaintance calls “an old flirtation” with McCain."
If I read this correctly, she (and McC) cheated on her husband and broke up a family with two sons to get started with McC.
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The Flip-Flop Brothers
Both McCain and Obama wobbled. Who will pay the price?
By John Dickerson
This was the week for public backtracking. John McCain announced his support for offshore drilling, which he opposed as recently as January. Barack Obama reversed his pledge to accept federal financing for his presidential campaign by rejecting public funds. My first inclination was that both men wouldn't suffer much from their reversals. With gas moving toward $5 at the pump, voters seeking relief aren't likely to penalize McCain for his flip-flop. (True, drilling may offer too little help too long from now, but never mind, at least he's trying.) Obama's flop, at first blush, would appear to matter to only the handful of voters who care enough about public financing to get exercised about Obama's decision to forgo the system. After all, his campaign is fueled by hundreds of thousands of regular people giving small donations. That's a good thing and doesn't seem like a threat to Democracy.
But the two changes of heart this week illustrate that there's a difference between changing your policy position and breaking a promise. McCain's altered stance on drilling (and the windfall profits tax) opens him up to charges that he's pandering and has no core principles. The damage his drilling plan might do to the environment recedes as a secondary critique. When Obama first reacted to McCain's proposal, he never mentioned the environment, but framed it as a weakness of leadership: "It's another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil."
But if these flip-flops reflect character attributes, then it's Obama who emerges more vulnerable. Breaking a promise is a problem of a higher order than changing a policy position. Our mothers told us not to break promises; they were silent on the question of drilling.
Obama's change of heart was more closely tied to his self-interest than McCain's. If he entered the public financing system, he would have denied himself hundreds of millions of dollars. Money is the mother's milk of politics. More of it allows Obama to better get out his message, organize, and send himself across the country. (He can even cook up a jazzy presidential seal for himself. Next: cuff links.) The self-interest that may motivate McCain's drilling proposal, by contrast, is more indirect. For McCain to benefit from his flop, voters have to believe in his drilling idea and then vote for him at least partly because of it.
Obama's is also exposed because he initially pledged to work against his self-interest on this very point. His promise to take taxpayer funds was always conditional—he'd do it if McCain did, too—but he and his aides said he would "aggressively pursue" negotiations with McCain to work something out. He even said he'd sit down with McCain to find a way. When it came down to it, though, the negotiations that took place don't qualify as aggressive. Obama's lawyer met with McCain's lawyer for a single 40-minute session. That was it. The Obama camp says they quit because it was clear McCain wasn't interested in a deal. But the evidence for this seems to rely in large part on interpreting McCain's position rather than probing and testing it through serious negotiations. Giving up after one meeting seems a little weak, particularly for a candidate who, in the foreign-policy context, says that he will never fear to negotiate.
The final problem for Obama is that he didn't spin his decision very well. He claimed that he had to refuse public funding because McCain was being supported by unregulated 527 groups while his campaign wasn't. That's not so. Right now, Democratic-leaning groups funded by unregulated donations are helping Obama more than Republican groups are helping McCain. Obama also claimed that McCain and the Republican National Committee were fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. Factcheck.org labeled his claim a "large exaggeration and a lame excuse" for opting out of public funding.
If Barack Obama outdid McCain on this week's flip-flop competition, in another time, McCain has matched him. In 2000, during the South Carolina primary, McCain supported flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol because he though it would help him win. He offered implausible spin to defend himself instead of the "straight talk" he'd promised. After he lost, he returned to South Carolina to admit he'd compromised his principles and broken his promise to tell voters the truth. If McCain weren't Barack Obama's opponent, he might be the perfect one to counsel the Democratic nominee on how to deal with his current dilemma.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/29/ftn/printable4217516.shtml
Lieberman: U.S. May Be Attacked In 2009
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2008
(CBS) In describing the reasons he believes the Republicans' presumptive nominee for president would be better prepared than the Democrats' to lead the nation next January, Sen. Joe Lieberman said that history shows the United States would likely face a terrorist attack in 2009.
"Our enemies will test the new president early," Lieberman, I-Conn., told Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer. "Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration."
Lieberman nonetheless distanced himself from remarks by McCain chief strategist Charlie Black, who came under criticism for suggesting in an interview that McCain's election chances would be improved if a terrorist attack occurred before November.
"Sometimes even the best of them say things that are not what they intended to say," Lieberman said. "Certainly the implications there I know were not what Charlie intended. And he apologized for it. Senator McCain said he didn't agree. And, of course, I feel the same way.
"But here's the point. We're in a war against Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11. They've been trying to attack us in many, many ways since then."
A former Democratic nominee for vice president, Lieberman endorsed McCain for president because, he says, the Democratic Party he joined in the early 1960s is not reflected by the party's current leadership.
He also said that he feels McCain is better prepared to be commander in chief than Barack Obama. "[McCain] knows the world," Lieberman said. "He's been tested. He's ready to protect the security of the American people."
Lieberman also assailed Obama and fellow Senators who called for a timetable of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and opposed the "surge" of additional U.S. forces pushed forth by President Bush.
"It's now working," Lieberman told Schieffer. "If we had done what Senator Obama asked us to do for the last couple of years, today Iran and al Qaeda would be in control of Iraq. It would be a terrible defeat for us and our allies in the Middle East and throughout the world. Instead, we've got a country that's defending itself, that's growing economically, where there's been genuine political reconciliation, and where Iran and al Qaeda are on the run. And that's the way it ought to be."
However, McCain's readiness was disputed by retired General Wesley Clark, who is backing Obama for president, despite McCain's storied military experience in Vietnam. "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," he said.
(CBS)
"I think Joe has it exactly backwards here," Clark told Schieffer. "I think being president is about having good judgment. It's about the ability to communicate. And what Barack Obama brings is incredible communication skills, proven judgment. You look at his meteoric rise in politics and you see a guy who deals with people well, who understands issues, who brings people together, and who has good judgment in moving forward.
"And I think what we need to do, Bob, is we need to stop talking about the old politics of left and right, and we need to pull together and move the country forward. And I think that's what Barack Obama will do.
“Because in the matters of national security policymaking, it's a matter of understanding risk. It's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable. John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service … But he hasn't held executive responsibility."
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/06/30/how-stupid-is-wesley-clark/
How stupid is Wesley Clark?
POSTED AT 8:31 AM ON JUNE 30, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:
Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, `I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?
At which point, Schieffer — after a stunned moment — pointed this out to Clark:
SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…
Let’s point out a few things about Barack Obama:
In “the matter of national security policy making.” Barack Obama hasn’t ever done anything.
In the matter of gauging your “opponents”, Obama wants to meet with them without preconditions despite having no national-security, military, or diplomatic experience.
Barack Obama hasn’t been on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Barack Obama hasn’t had any executive experience.
Barack Obama hasn’t commanded anything, in wartime or not.
Barack Obama hasn’t dealt with diplomats in any capacity at all.
Barack Obama hasn’t ordered the bombs to fall, although to be fair, he has associated himself with someone who has — William Ayers.
Not only can every argument Clark made get applied more to Obama than to McCain, he has now made it clear that the Obama strategy is to demean and belittle McCain’s military service — and by extension, military service in general. This will undoubtedly play very well among Obama’s nutcase fringe supporters as well as idiotic fired commanders of NATO, but that’s a mighty thin list of voters. The rest of the nation will hear these attacks and stand aghast at the dishonorable and outrageously stupid disparagement of a lifetime of service to this nation and understand with crystal clarity the radical nature of Barack Obama and his team.
Nor is this the first such attack on McCain’s service. Democrats have belittled it on several occasions now. In May, it was Bill Gillespie, another Obama backer in Georgia and a candidate for the House. In the same month, Senator Tom Harkin questioned McCain’s mental state for having willingly served in the military. In April, Jay Rockefeller accused McCain of being more or less a coward for being a military pilot, and again in May the New York Times quoted unnamed Senate colleagues of McCain suggesting that he didn’t understand the Vietnam War because he didn’t fight on the ground and spent most of it lounging around Hanoi in a POW camp.
John McCain put his life on the line for his country. Barack Obama has not. While I have never thought that military service was a prerequisite to public office, it certainly gives one a lot more experience and is an asset for the presidency. And as a bottom line, a candidate whose campaign denigrates military service shows himself as unfit for the role of Commander in Chief.
Wes Clark has done Barack Obama no favors, and as the record shows, it’s not just Wes Clark. The Democrats plan on attacking the military throughout this campaign. Obama cannot expect anyone to buy his claims of “a new kind of politics”, unless Obama means that he plans to plumb new lows in class and intelligence in 2008.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901478_pf.html
Obama's Dodge on Handguns
By Robert D. Novak
Monday, June 30, 2008; A11
After months of claiming he had insufficient information to express an opinion on the District of Columbia's gun law, Barack Obama noted with apparent approval Thursday that the Supreme Court ruled that the 32-year ban on handguns "went too far." But what would he have said had the high court's 5 to 4 majority gone the other way and affirmed the law? Obama's strategists can only thank swing Justice Anthony Kennedy for enabling Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion to take the Democratic presidential candidate off the hook.
Such relief is typified by a vigorous supporter of Obama who advised Al Gore in his 2000 presidential campaign. Believing that Gore's gun control advocacy lost him West Virginia and the presidency, this prominent Democrat told me: "I don't want that to happen with Obama -- to be defeated on an issue that is not important to us and is not a political winner for us." He would not be quoted by name because he did not want abuse heaped on him by gun control activists.
This political reality explains the minuet on the D.C. gun issue that Obama has danced all year. Liberal Democrats who publicly deride the National Rifle Association privately fear the NRA as the most potent conservative interest group. Many white men with NRA decals on their vehicles are labor union members whose votes Obama needs in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. That is why Obama did not share the outrage of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, an Obama supporter, over the Supreme Court's decision.
What may be Obama's authentic position on gun rights was revealed in early April when he said at a closed-door Silicon Valley fundraiser that "bitter" small-town residents "cling" to the Bible and the Second Amendment. That ran against his public assertion, as a former professor of constitutional law, that the Constitution guarantees rights for individual gun owners, not just collective rights for state militias. But his legal opinion forced Obama into a political corner.
Arguments before the Supreme Court defending the D.C. handgun ban were based entirely on the view that the Constitution's rights applied only to state militias. During oral argument March 18, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked whether the Second Amendment has "any effect today as a restraint on legislation," since such militias no longer exist. Walter Dellinger, a former solicitor general representing the District of Columbia, replied that "it doesn't," and added, "You don't make up a new use for an amendment whose prohibitions aren't being violated."
Obama's dilemma was that his reading of a Second Amendment that "means something" made it difficult for him to say the D.C. law was constitutional. His public pronouncements were so imprecise that the Associated Press mistakenly reported that he "voiced support" for the handgun ban at a February news conference in Milwaukee.
In March and April, I tried for weeks to get a simple yes or no from Obama on the D.C. law's constitutionality. When the question was put to him directly for the first time at ABC's presidential debate in Philadelphia on April 16, he answered, "I confess I obviously haven't listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence." On National Public Radio on April 21, the day before the Pennsylvania primary, Obama said, "I don't know all the details and specifics of the D.C. gun law." He had not been asked and had not volunteered his opinion before Thursday's decision.
The issue will return when Chicago's handgun ban, modeled after the Washington law, is challenged in the courts. As a Chicago lawyer, Obama can hardly plead ignorance as he did concerning the D.C. ban. But with the case wending its way back to the Supreme Court for the next year, Obama will not have to answer the question before November.
While Scalia's opinion for now saves Obama from defending a court that had emasculated gun rights, one inconvenient truth confronts the candidate. He has made clear that as president he would nominate Supreme Court justices who agree with the minority of four that the Second Amendment is meaningless. Would he want a reconstituted court to roll back the D.C. decision when the Chicago case gets there?
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Any thoughts on Bob Barr?
He could only hurt McCain.
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At least he isn't a nazi-hugger like Ron Paul.
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Can Barack Buy the Presidency?
By KARL ROVE
July 3, 2008
On the money front, how do Sens. Obama and McCain stack up? No contest, it seems. Since the campaign began, Mr. Obama has raised a staggering $295-plus million, versus Mr. McCain's almost $122 million. But that's misleading.
Mr. Obama spent a lot to win the nomination. So how much cash did he and his rival have when the general election effectively began in June? As of May 31, Mr. Obama had $43.1 million on hand while Mr. McCain had $31.6 million – a significant but not overwhelming advantage.
AP
Barack Obama
There is also the cash raised by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Each candidate depends on the party committees for certain expenditures – registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote drives, materials distributed by volunteers, even some advertising. Here, the Republicans had $53.5 million in hand on May 31, versus the Democrats' paltry $4 million. Thus Mr. McCain and the RNC have $38 million more than Mr. Obama and the DNC.
If Mr. Obama maintains his prodigious fund-raising pace, he could overtake Mr. McCain and the RNC. But that's not guaranteed. In May, Mr. Obama raised $23.3 million and the DNC $4.8 million; but Mr. McCain raised $21.5 million and the RNC $24.4 million. Mr. Obama's Internet-driven fund raising may require a renewed sense of urgency, crisis and energy that may be hard to gin up until the race heats up with the conventions in late August.
The savvy Obama team believes they can raise considerably more than the $84 million Mr. McCain will receive by taking public financing in September for the general election. They realize this is likely to be a close, hard-fought contest and they want every advantage – their candidate's previous pledges to take public funds and criticism of money in politics notwithstanding.
Then, too, unions will give Mr. Obama an edge. The AFL-CIO has committed $53.4 million for the Democratic nominee, up $6 million from 2004. Other unions will chip in. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employee has pledged $50 million.
There are other third-party groups. While the GOP may be seen as the party of Big Money, recent presidential contests have shown that – taking unions, George Soros's wealth, and organizations like MoveOn.Org into consideration – Democrats have a large financial advantage. In 2004, when each side's spending by candidates, national committees and third-party groups was totaled up, Democrats outspent Republicans in the presidential race by $119.4 million.
Mr. Obama has used his money advantage to launch the air war. Starting June 20, Mr. Obama spent $4.3 million for 10 days of a televised, biographical ad covering 18 states. Mr. McCain countered on Monday with roughly $2.1 million for a week of ads in 11 states. Mr. Obama has now volleyed back, expanding his buy to 21 states for two additional weeks at a cost of $15 million – half for his original bio ad and half for a new ad on welfare reform.
But early television may not be as smart as it appears. Is it wise for Mr. Obama to spend almost as much on ads in three weeks in July as he raised in May? His fund raising peaked in February. June's fund-raising numbers, due in mid-July, will show whether his current pace of spending can be sustained. And TV becomes less effective in a general election, since so much free media attention is focused on the presidential candidates, whose actions have a larger impact than ads.
Mr. Obama's ads show he's aware of his vulnerability on two fronts: his liberal values and his meager achievements. Yet he should be more cautious with these weaknesses. His bio ad says he was raised with "values straight from the Kansas heartland," though he grew up in Hawaii. He claims to have passed three bills, but fails to mention that two were in the Illinois state Senate and that he didn't vote on the third in the U.S. Senate. His new ad praises welfare reform, yet he opposed the legislation when a Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed it.
Mr. Obama may be overreaching by running ads in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota – states Republicans won by comfortable margins in recent years. It would require a shift of between one-sixth and over one-quarter of the vote to win any of them. Shifts that large rarely happen.
Big shifts do occur – witness West Virginia in 2000, which swung more than 20 points between 1996 (when Bill Clinton carried the state) and 2000 (when George W. Bush did) – but these require sharp contrasts on big issues, not just money. Money may be the mother's milk of politics, in Jesse Unruh's famous phrase, but when running for president, money alone can't buy a candidate love. Cash matters, but being a good candidate and right on the issues matters even more.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion
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It's Bob Dole all over again. If McCain can't mount a rapid fire response by now he won't. He obviously does not have world class campaign managers working for him.
He should hire Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich. His campaign is already obviously inadequate. He is already behind the curve and in trouble. Obama is kicking his ass all over the media mat.
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2008/07/07/obama-strikes-first/#more-374
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Sadly, I agree. :cry:
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I find myself noticing a tremendous disparity in media attention given to BO and McC., even on FOX. Even Sean Hannity, whose show I only watch when Newt Gingrich is on, can only talk about BO and how he's shifting positions.
WHERE THE FCUK IS McCAIN?
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It's weird.
Clinton would have had his army of attack dogs all over every single talk show that would take them pounding the table and talking the points over and over.
What concerns me most is that when we see this early in a campaign it tends to be the same for the rest of it. We sit and sit and sit and people keep saying he has to do this he has to do that and when is he going to get organized...
At least the Republican Convention is after the Dem convention. Didn't it used to be first?
Tony Blankley was on the radio the other night and was asked about Dick Morris. He basically said he didn't care for him and that he was not always so honest. But one cannot argue that Morris' strategy of the endless campaign when he advised Clinton to be in our faces every single day to promote new programs completely rejuvenated him in the polls. I cannot believe my ears when I hear the Bush haters screeching that Bush is in daily campaign mode. Why it is nothing compared to the Clintons who took it to a high art form. Remember when Clinton's poll numbers went from something like 45% to 60% overnight with one speech promising everything to everyone. Even Limbaugh couldn't believe how stupid the public was to suddenly forget everything he said before and suddenly love him because he went populist in literally one day.
That is why I believe that much of the public will just vote for whoever promises them the most that moment in time. Everything that came before is totally forgotten. It is that easy to bribe some people. Just my ranting opinion anyway.
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"That is why I believe that much of the public will just vote for whoever promises them the most that moment in time. Everything that came before is totally forgotten. It is that easy to bribe some people."
I could not agree more.
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Which is why the Founding Fathers founded us as a REPUBLIC, NOT a DEMOCRACY.
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I would add John Hinderacker of Powerlineblog.com to CCP's list of people McCain should hire for a war-room style answer to the mixed messages coming from the Obama campaign:
In this morning's New York Times, Barack Obama published an op-ed on Iraq that presumably previews his "major speech" on the subject tomorrow. Even by Obama's standards, the piece is breathtakingly dishonest.
Obama admits that he opposed the surge, and the attendant change in strategy and tactics, that have brought us close to victory. But he somehow manages to twist his being wrong about the surge--the major foreign policy issue that has arisen during his time in Congress--into vindication:
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
Actually, however, Obama opposed the surge not because of those "factors" but because he thought it would fail. He said, on January 10, 2007, on MSNBC:
I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.
On January 14, 2007, on Face the Nation, he said:
We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war. And until we acknowledge that reality -- we can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops, I don't know any expert on the region or any military officer that I've spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.
On March 19, 2007, on the Larry King show, he said:
[E]ven those who are supporting -- but here's the thing, Larry -- even those who support the escalation have acknowledged that 20,000, 30,000, even 40,000 more troops placed temporarily in places like Baghdad are not going to make a long-term difference.
On May 25, 2007, in a speech to the Coalition Of Black Trade Unionists Convention, Obama said:
And what I know is that what our troops deserve is not just rhetoric, they deserve a new plan. Governor Romney and Senator McCain clearly believe that the course that we're on in Iraq is working, I do not.
On July 18, 2007, on the Today show, he said:
My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now.
On November 11, 2007, two months after General David Petraeus told Congress that the surge was working, Obama doubled down, saying that the administration's new strategy was making the situation in Iraq worse:
Finally, in 2006-2007, we started to see that, even after an election, George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn't withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled them and initiated a surge and at that stage I said very clearly, not only have we not seen improvements, but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.
In short, Obama bet the farm on his prediction that General Petraeus and the American military would fail. He was as spectacularly wrong as John McCain was spectacularly right. But his op-ed somehow twists this history into vindication on the theory that Afghanistan has deteriorated, the Iraq war has been expensive, and Iraq's political leaders "have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge."
Let's start with the last point. Obama completely fails to acknowledge the remarkable political progress that has resulted from the surge, as manifested by the fact that the country's largest Sunni bloc has rejoined the government, and the U.S. Embassy reports that 15 of the 18 benchmarks of political progress that were set by Congress are now being met. Those benchmarks were set precisely for the purpose of measuring the "political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge," yet Obama fails even to mention them.
Still more dishonest is Obama's failure to acknowledge what would have happened if his policy prescription, precipitate withdrawal regardless of military conditions, had been followed: chaos, sectarian violence, possibly genocide, a resurgent al Qaeda in control of part of Iraq, with Iran possibly in control of other areas of the country. This would have been a foreign policy disaster, yet Obama, with vague references to cost and Afghanistan, claims vindication!
As to al Qaeda--the elephant in the room--Obama simply dissimulates:
Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.
That's not what Osama bin Laden (Iraq is where the "Third World War is raging”) or Ayman al-Zawahiri (Iraq is "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era”) say. Al Qaeda summoned jihadists from around the Muslim world to go to Iraq to fight American troops, declaring that this effort is the central front in their war against civilization. Those jihadists have been devastated by American armed forces, who have thereby scored what may, with hindsight, turn out to have been the decisive victory in the war against Muslim extremism. Obama denies all of this in a single sentence, without citing any evidence whatsoever.
Finally, Afghanistan: Obama would have us believe that he urged defeat in Iraq because he was so firmly committed to victory in Afghanistan. Once again, he misrepresents the record.
In fact, Obama has never supported our troops in Afghanistan. On the contrary, he said on August 14, 2007--less than a year ago--that our forces there are mostly committing war crimes:
We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.
Obama has been so uninterested in Afghanistan that when he went to Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with a Congressional delegation in January 2006, he skipped the opportunity to continue on to Afghanistan, which was taken by others who made the trip with him, including Kit Bond and Harold Ford. And, in an embarrassing gaffe, Obama claimed on May 13, 2008, that we don't have enough "Arabic interpreters, Arab language speakers" in Afghanistan because they are all being used in Iraq. Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don't speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world.
Worst of all, far from being committed to victory in Afghanistan, Obama voted to cut off all funding for all of our military efforts in Afghanistan on May 24, 2007 (H.R. 2206, CQ Vote #181), thereby seeking to bring about defeat there as well as in Iraq. His current effort to portray himself as a wolf in sheep's clothing on Afghanistan is a complete fraud.
It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can't offhand think of such a miscreant.
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Doug,
This guy is good. I particularly got a kick out of, "Obama thereby demonstrated the intellectual laziness and incuriosity that characterizes his campaign: they don't speak Arabic in Afghanistan, and, anyway, interpreters are drawn from local populations, not shipped around the world".
Yet BO carries himself as though he is the most intellectual and wisest sole on the planet.
From Wikepedia:
***Main article: Languages of Afghanistan
The most common languages spoken in Afghanistan are Persian (Dari dialects) and Pashto. Both are Indo-European languages from the Iranian languages sub-family. Statistics from the CIA World Factbook are listed in the chart in the sidebar, below the map of languages by region. Persian (Dari dialects) 50% and Pashto 35%; both are Indo-European languages from the Iranian languages sub-family. Pashto and Persian are the official languages of the country. Hazaragi, spoken by the Hazara minority, is another dialect of Persian. Other languages spoken include Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 9%, as well as 30 minor languages 4% (primarily Balochi, Nuristani, Pashai, Brahui, Pamiri languages, Hindko, etc.). Bilingualism is common.
According to the Encyclopædia Iranica,[63] the Persian language is the mother tongue of roughly one-third of Afghanistan's population, while it is also the most widely used language of the country, spoken by around 80% of the population. It further states that Pashto is spoken by around 50% of the population.***
In any case I feel that McCain has got to start playing this way or he will lose the the war for the hearts and minds of Americans.
Surely, many others are seeing the same thing and wondering when? McCain recently compared himself to Teddy Roosevelt. The only problem is except for "speaking softly and carrying a big stick", and running up San Juan Hill chuckling with joy when he shot some Cuban in the belly, and going on a Safari in Africa, I can't remember much else about TR. Well, he is on Mt. Rushmore so I guess he's got to have been good right?
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Voters Want Economic Leadership
By KARL ROVE
July 17, 2008; Page A13
Elections are often reshaped by unexpected and fast-moving events, and when this happens a candidate who quickly takes the lead on the new issue can bolster his chances to win. There is such an opportunity now for Barack Obama and John McCain with the crisis facing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The mortgage giants touch tens of millions of people because their core business is to buy, insure and securitize home loans. But they act like huge hedge funds with their portfolios worth hundreds of billions. As government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), they have an implicit federal guarantee that allows them to borrow money more cheaply than competitors. They have used that advantage to make ever-larger bets in their portfolios, generating big profits when home prices were rising, but big losses when housing weakened.
Corbis
Congress ignored an early warning sign when Fannie and Freddie failed to produce accurate accounting statements in 2002. That should have spurred Congress to pass reforms proposed by the administration the next year to clean up the GSEs. It didn't.
Now with Fannie and Freddie at greater risk, Messrs. McCain and Obama need to think like would-be presidents instead of senators. That starts with ignoring former Fannie CEO Franklin Raines, who says reform isn't needed – this from a CEO who couldn't produce accurate accounting statements. The goal has to be to force the GSEs into a position where they can no longer put taxpayer dollars at risk.
Serious reforms must include immediate measures to prevent Fannie and Freddie from collapsing, and long-term changes to protect taxpayers. That means jettisoning the implied federal financial backstop and shrinking Fannie and Freddie.
The candidate who makes such proposals will likely gain on the issue of "who's better to handle the economy." Mr. Obama leads on this in the latest Time magazine poll, at 44%-37%. But Republicans often win if they are within six points on this issue. The economy is still a jump ball.
That makes reining in the cost of a bailout that much more important. Making the stockholders and creditors of the GSEs bear most of the financial burden will appeal to voters suspicious of government getting too cozy with business.
A wag once said that Fannie and Freddie were political organizations masquerading as mortgage providers. They donate heavily to politicians who can shield them from regulation. This election the GSEs have given more than $800,000 to congressmen and senators who oversee legislation that affects them. They have also snapped up dozens of retiring lawmakers and staff as lobbyists and pay them lucrative salaries. Not bad for part-time, indoor work.
Over the past decade, the GSEs spent at least $171 million on lobbying, which combined would make Fannie and Freddie the third-biggest lobby. This has fostered a network of co-conspirators, including the liberal low-income advocacy group Acorn, big-city mayors and some lenders. Any reform must avoid creating more slush funds for the GSEs to reward political allies at taxpayer expense, and prevent them from investing in "jumbo" mortgages on expensive houses. After all, these GSEs were created to help lower- and middle-income homebuyers, not the rich and famous.
Leading on the economy's biggest problems – housing and the credit crisis – would allow Messrs. McCain or Obama to run as an outside-the-Beltway reformer, willing to take on insider deals that Middle America hates and add to (or foster) a reputation for decisive action. It would also help in battleground states. Denver, Detroit, Cleveland, Las Vegas and Miami metro areas are all in the top 10 in foreclosure rates.
Both candidates have challenges in taking up this cause. Each has received money from Fannie and Freddie employees this election: $82,299 to Mr. Obama and $14,400 to Mr. McCain. Mr. McCain isn't as strong in talking about the economy as he is about national security. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, is steeped in the Fannie/Freddie culture. He briefly tapped a former Fannie CEO to head his vice presidential search and he once worked for Acorn. And his campaign depends on Acorn's activists for voter registration drives. He may be too obligated to act against their allies.
But both candidates should remember past elections. For example, Republican William McKinley won in 1896 in part by embracing hard money after William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic convention. And in 1992, Bill Clinton won in part by promising tax cuts for the middle class to deal with a slowing economy. In both elections, nimbleness helped bring victory. What worked before can work today. An opportunity awaits Messrs. McCain and Obama. Will either man seize it?
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Nice try BO.
I prefer a President who will protect this country not give it away.
I don't care if he can't do a few jump shots and he is older and with an arthritic spine. There is more to backbone then how straight one stands up:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/07/obama-hits-the.html
That said BO probably will win. It's a populist's year. And what we see from McCain's campaign is probably what we are going to get.
But I have some hope yet my prediction is wrong. On the other hand McCain did come back from the dead a year ago during the primaries.
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It is possible that at some point in American history there may have been a major politician as dishonest as Barack Obama, but I can't offhand think of such a miscreant.
That could quite possibly be the most hilarious thing I have ever read in my entire life...
Start here and work your way down the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_scandals_of_the_United_States#18th_century
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SB, I agree that Hinderacker's closing remark might have been offered at least partly in jest. Previous American scandals stipulated, do you have any comment on the points about Obama's Iraq and Afghanistan inconsistencies alleged in the piece? Back to scandals, who bought and who takes care of Obama's side yard? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0611010273nov01,0,6186743.story
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http://formerspook.blogspot.com/
Obama’s Nuclear Mission
On the same day that the Washington Post berated Barack Obama for his arbitrary deadline for getting out of Iraq, the Democratic presidential nominee again demonstrated why he’s unqualified to serve as commander-in-chief.
Participating in a round table discussion at Purdue University, Mr. Obama warned about the dangers of “fighting the last war,” and pledged to focus on emerging nuclear, biological and cyber threats, if he’s elected in November.
From Brietbart and the Associated Press:
Two goals of his administration would be to secure all loose nuclear material during his first term and to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Obama told an audience before the round table discussion at Purdue.
Obama said adhering to nonproliferation treaties would put pressure on nations such as North Korea and Iran. North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon and Iran has an energy program the Bush administration warns could be a precursor to nuclear weapon development.
"As long as nuclear weapons exist, we'll retain a strong deterrent. But we will make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy," Obama said.
He added, "The danger ... is that we are constantly fighting the last war, responding to the threats that have come to fruition, instead of staying one step ahead of the threats of the 21st century."
Like many of Obama’s ideas, this one certainly sounds reasonable. After all, how could any right-minded individual oppose the elimination of nuclear weapons, and efforts to secure material that could be used in an atomic bomb?
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s nuclear proposal is little more than pie-in-the-sky fantasy, for several reasons. First, there’s his reliance on nonproliferation treaties to “pressure” nations like North Korea and Iran into compliance on their nuclear programs. Perhaps Senator Obama hasn’t noticed, but that sort of “pressure tactic” hasn’t worked very well with Pyongyang and Tehran.
In fact, decades of compliance and direct diplomacy have resulted in…a nuclear-capable North Korea (emphasis mine), and an Iranian regime that is on track to get the bomb in as little as two years. Quite a victory for non-proliferation, wouldn’t you say?
Fact is, irrational players like the DPRK and Iran will follow non-proliferation agreements only its suits their needs. Consider the case of North Korea; in 1994, Pyongyang entered into the infamous “Agreed To” framework with the United States and South Korea, a move that was hailed as a triumph for non-proliferation and direct diplomacy. In exchange for fuel oil and other forms of economic aid, Kim Jong-il was supposed to give up his nuclear weapons program.
What happened? Food and fuel shipments began flowing to North Korea; cameras and U.N. inspectors were installed at the DPRK’s “declared” nuclear facility (Yongbyon), and the lack of activity was duly recorded. Meanwhile, work on Pyongyang’s nuclear program continued in secret, producing the technical breakthroughs that resulted in the detonation of a crude nuclear device in 2006.
Undeterred, the Bush Administration stuck with the diplomacy option, sponsoring “Six-Party” regional talks that yielded a new agreement last year. Never mind that North Korea’s record in such matters is abysmal; or that Pyongyang dragged its feet on issuing required declarations of its nuclear activities. Or, that Kim Jong-il provided nuclear technology to Syria while he was finalizing the Six Party accord. Or that the DPRK may yet retain a covert program, still capable of producing nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, Iran’s compliance record is no better than North Korea’s. Years of effort by the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have failed to produce a full accounting of Tehran’s nuclear program, or an agreement aimed at curbing those efforts.
But Mr. Obama believes that adhering to non-proliferation protocols will bring the Iranians and North Koreans in line; you can almost hear the laughter from Pyongyang and Tehran. So, why does the presumptive Democratic nominee believe that the failed policies of the past would be more successful under his administration? Obama has never explained, and (apparently) no one bothered to broach that subject during the Purdue forum.
There are other problems with Senator Obama’s proposal. He vows to retain a “strong” U.S. nuclear deterrent, while pursuing the elimination of those weapons. But what type of deterrent is Mr. Obama proposing? A flexible, robust arsenal, combining adequate numbers of strategic and tactical warheads, or a token nuclear force, along the lines of Great Britain and France?
Additionally, Mr. Obama has dodged another essential question related to the nuclear issue. Would he be willing to pursue unilateral cuts in our nuclear stockpile, as other Democrats have suggested in the past? If you follow that line of thinking, reductions in our inventory would (supposedly) prompt other nuclear powers to do the same. It’s a fool’s errand.
The Obama policy also ignores another, salient fact. Any reduction (or elimination) of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by significant increases in conventional forces, to provide the same deterrent value. One reason the U.S. invested so heavily in nuclear weapons during the 1950s was to offset the Soviet Union’s overwhelming advantage in conventional forces. As he reduces the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, how would Mr. Obama compensate for the decrease in our defensive posture?
Oh, that’s right. Since everyone would be part of that expanded non-proliferation regimen, there would be no need for an increase in our military forces, beyond those already outlined by the candidate. The naiveté of that “logic” is simply astounding.
That’s why we can’t resist taking a shot at Senator Obama’s thoughts on “fighting the last war.” Given the overwhelming success of the troop surge in Iraq, it would appear that our military has made the necessary adjustments for fighting a new type of enemy.
Beyond that, Pentagon planners have been working on future threats for generations—that’s why new weapons systems are developed, and strategy and tactics are continuously refined. Mr. Obama might be interested to know that the Air Force already has a cyber command, and its first, dedicated information warfare unit (which had an extensive cyber warfare mission) was established in 1992. Despite the military's legendary resistance to change, there are a few visionaries left in uniform and they were thinking about the "next war" long before Barack Obama.
***
To his credit, Senator Obama has worked on the nuclear non-proliferation issue in the past. Shortly after arriving in Washington, he signed on with the Senate expert in those matters—Indiana’s Richard Lugar—in sponsoring new legislation, aimed at dismantling a wider range of “leftover” weapons. The measure was based on the successful Nunn-Lugar bill of 1991, which provided money and expertise to help former Soviet republics dismantle their nuclear arsenals.
Along with role in authoring the bill, Obama also traveled with Mr. Lugar to Russia in 2005, inspecting “junkyards” of weapons that could be easily stolen or sold to terrorists. Mr. Lugar has been making these visits for more than a decade, but we can’t find any evidence that Senator Obama has been back to Russia since 2005. As with other Obama efforts, the initial flurry of activity suggests that the senator’s interest was aimed at filling a “foreign policy” square on his resume; once the bill became law (with his name prominently attached), Mr. Obama was ready to move on.
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DMcG,
My stance on pretty much all politicians is such that I don't see them as "flip-floppers". I call it business as usual. They'll say whatever it takes to get them elected, and in the process end up making fools of themselves/alienating part of their base/shooting themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, we have a short attention span and a media who is not willing to call them out unless its going to help their ratings.
I view both candidates with equal amounts of disdain. Obama is the great talker with zero experience and a shady background, and McCain is the experienced politician who doesn't seem to realize that the world has moved on. I find neither to be particularly compelling as a presidential choice.
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http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1530
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Woof CCP:
At the very least, please post a description of the contents of the URL along with the URL. Better yet, post the contents too :lol:
Released: July 18, 2008
Zogby Poll: Obama/Powell Ticket Could Bode Well for Democrats
Survey finds Clinton VP pick favored by nearly half of Dems; Huckabee, Romney viewed as best running mates for McCain
UTICA, New York - As the Presidential candidates ponder potential running mates, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows many voters would be more inclined to vote for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama if he were to select retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell as his running-mate.
If Obama were to choose Powell, 42% of likely voters nationwide said it would make them more likely to support the Democratic candidate - as did 42% of Democrats and 43% of political independents. The Zogby International telephone poll of 1,039 likely voters nationwide was conducted July 9-13, 2008, and asked respondents how the selection of certain vice presidential candidates would affect their likelihood to vote for the two leading presidential candidates. It carries a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.
Likelihood to vote for Barack Obama if he chooses ... as his Vice President
Likely Voters
Democrats
Independents
More Likely
Less Likely
More Likely
Less Likely
More Likely
Less Likely
Colin Powell
42%
10%
42%
12%
43%
9%
Hillary Clinton
30%
25%
47%
15%
33%
26%
Bill Richardson
15%
10%
9%
13%
12%
9%
Joe Biden
11%
16%
6%
22%
11%
13%
Kathleen Sebelius
7%
11%
10%
11%
7%
9%
Tim Kaine
7%
11%
8%
10%
8%
8%
Evan Bayh
6%
12%
9%
9%
7%
9%
While just 10% of likely voters said the selection of Powell would make them less likely to vote for Obama - giving him a net positive of 32% - Obama's former challenger for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, fared less positively overall. Even though 30% of likely voters would be more likely to support Obama with Clinton on the ticket, 25% would be less likely - giving Clinton just a 5% net positive rating among likely voters. Clinton fares much better with fellow Democrats, as 47% said they would be more likely to vote for Obama if Clinton were his running mate, for a net positive of 32% among Democrats.
Former Republican rivals Huckabee and Romney could give McCain a boost
Among McCain's potential vice presidential picks, former Republican nomination challengers Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney earned the strongest support from likely voters overall, as well as from Republicans and political independents. Among likely voters, 27% would be more likely to support McCain with Huckabee on the ticket, and 26% said the same if Romney were selected. A Huckabee pick would cause 13% of likely voters to be less likely to support McCain, while 11% would be less supportive of the presumptive Republican nominee if he were to choose Romney as his running mate. Among Republicans, 40% would be more likely to support a McCain/Huckabee ticket, while 11% would be less likely - a 29% net positive for the choice of Huckabee. If Romney were to be chosen, 41% of Republicans would be more inclined to vote for McCain, compared to 8% who would be less likely, for a net positive of 33%. Both fare well among political independents, with a 15% net positive for Huckabee and a 17% net positive for Romney if chosen as a running mate by McCain.
Likelihood to vote for John McCain if he chooses ... as his Vice President
Likely Voters
Republicans
Independents
More Likely
Less Likely
More Likely
Less Likely
More Likely
Less Likely
Mike Huckabee
27%
13%
40%
11%
29%
14%
Mitt Romney
26%
11%
41%
8%
30%
13%
Joe Lieberman
20%
17%
26%
16%
20%
22%
Charlie Crist
5%
10%
8%
12%
5%
9%
Bobby Jindal
5%
9%
7%
9%
6%
9%
Tim Pawlenty
3%
8%
3%
5%
1%
7%
Mark Sanford
3%
9%
3%
9%
2%
10%
McCain's selection of Sen. Joe Lieberman would create a 3% net positive among likely voters and a 10% net positive among Republicans. Choosing Lieberman would create a 2% net negative on their likelihood to vote for McCain among independents. Florida's Republican Gov. Charlie Crist - often mentioned as a potential McCain running mate - shows net negatives among likely voters, Republicans and political independents, as does Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
For a detailed methodological statement on this survey, please visit:
http://www.zogby.com/methodology/readmeth.dbm?ID=1322
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This is VERY good for BO and bad for McCain IMHO :cry: :cry: :cry:
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/07/19/maliki-i-support-obamas-withdrawal-timetable/
Maliki: I Support Obama’s Withdrawal Timetable
by FOXNews.com
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told a German magazine that he supports Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months,” al-Maliki told Der Spiegel. He said he wants U.S. troops to leave “as soon as possible.”
The apparent endorsement of a cornerstone of Obama’s foreign policy is a big boost for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee ahead of his scheduled meeting with al-Maliki. Obama, who is touring both Afghanistan and Iraq for the first time since becoming a presidential candidate, arrived Saturday in Afghanistan, where he is meeting with U.S. troops.
Al-Maliki said for the first time earlier this month that the U.S. military should work toward a timetable for withdrawal — something President Bush and Obama’s rival John McCain oppose. The White House also reported Friday that Iraq and the United States are discussing a “general time horizon” for reductions in troop levels.
Both developments gave Obama fuel in his argument that U.S. involvement in Iraq soon must draw to a close. But al-Maliki’s comments to Der Spiegel seemingly were the deepest the foreign leader has waded into the tense foreign policy debate between the two major presidential candidates.
Al-Maliki told the magazine that his comments were “by no means an election endorsement.”
But he seemed to refer disparagingly to McCain when he said “short time periods” in Iraq are more “realistic,” while “artificially prolonging the tenure of U.S. troops in Iraq would cause problems.”
McCain went after Obama in his radio address Saturday for announcing his proposed strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq before even departing.
“Apparently, he’s confident enough that he won’t find any facts that might change his opinion or alter his strategy. Remarkable,” McCain said, criticizing his rival for initially opposing the troop surge in Iraq.
“Today we know that he was wrong,” he said.
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Crafty,
Don't believe tha' hype: http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/19/maliki-obamas-16-month-timetable-sounds-good/
In addition, Barry-O has had so many different positions on Iraq, sooner or later he might be correct having covered the entire spectrum of options.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVy5REoiDJo
Edited by Marc to add the content:
Maliki: Obama’s 16-month timetable sounds good; Update: Spiegel changes quoteposted at 12:15 pm on July 19, 2008 by Allahpundit
Send to a Friend | printer-friendly Here’s the exchange from Spiegel’s English translation, duly hyped by Reuters as tacit evidence of Liberal Jesus’s foreign-policy sagacity.
SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?
Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. US presidential candidate Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months. Assuming that positive developments continue, this is about the same time period that corresponds to our wishes.
The unasked follow-up question: How about the 14-month timetable that Obama wanted to set in January 2007 to start pulling troops out before those positive developments could occur? How keen does that look in hindsight? To repeat a point made yesterday, the only reason a timetable or “time horizon” is arguably a responsible strategy now is because it was properly rejected as being irresponsible then. Maliki hints at that in another part of the interview:
So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat. But that isn’t the case at all. If we come to an agreement, it is not evidence of a defeat, but of a victory, of a severe blow we have inflicted on al-Qaida and the militias.
Exactly, which at least partly explains why Bush is more willing to compromise now on some sort of informal schedule. Compare Maliki’s justification for the timetable to Obama’s justification in his big Iraq speech. The pacification of the country is almost incidental, something to congratulate Petraeus on and then quickly move past. To the extent conditions in Iraq seem to affect his rationale at all, he offers this: “In the 18 months since the surge began, as I warned at the outset – Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the purpose of the surge. They have not invested tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues to rebuild their country. They have not resolved their differences or shaped a new political compact.” I.e. it didn’t work, so let’s get out. Back to Maliki for a rebuttal:
SPIEGEL: In your opinion, which factor has contributed most to bringing calm to the situation in the country?
Maliki: There are many factors, but I see them in the following order. First, there is the political rapprochement we have managed to achieve in central Iraq. This has enabled us, above all, to pull the plug on al-Qaida. Second, there is the progress being made by our security forces. Third, there is the deep sense of abhorrence with which the population has reacted to the atrocities of al-Qaida and the militias. Finally, of course, there is the economic recovery.
He’s exaggerating the extent of the reconciliation, but not entirely.
One more quote from the interview which I dare say won’t be making it into the inevitable Team Barry press release. The fact that Maliki thinks the war was good for Iraqis doesn’t mean it was good for America, needless to say, but Obama fans eager to exploit the timetable bit may want to mull this before baptizing his judgments with Absolute Moral Authority:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, the war and its consequences have cost more than 100,000 lives and caused great suffering in your country. Saddam Hussein and his regime are now part of the past. Was all of this worth the price?
Maliki: The casualties have been and continue to be enormous. But anyone who was familiar with the dictator’s nature and his intentions knows what could have been in store for us instead of this war. Saddam waged wars against Iran and Kuwait, and against Iraqis in the north and south of his own country, wars in which hundreds of thousands died. And he was capable of instigating even more wars. Yes, the casualties are great, but I see our struggle as an enormous effort to avoid other such wars in the future.
For context, here’s Petraeus on MSNBC yesterday afternoon (before the Spiegel interview was published) responding to reports that Maliki wants a timetable. He fudges a bit with the “time horizon” terminology, but note well the point about domestic politics and assertions of sovereignty. Another “positive development.” Exit question: What do we do now with that NYT piece from the other day about Iraqis who love Obama for bringing Hope but pray that the U.S. security presence doesn’t Change?
Update: Spend some time with this AP story about U.S. troops — who would have been reduced to a small Baker/Hamilton token force by now if Obama had had his way last year — helping Iraqi villagers rebuild after purging Al Qaeda. Quote: “It reveals how drastically American troops have shifted their focus from combat to helping Iraqis build on a newfound, if fragile, peace. And it reflects a continuing concern among U.S. commanders that the security gains could slip.” Not just among U.S. commanders, per the NYT piece.
Update: A commenter notes that Spiegel has rewritten the translation of the exchange about withdrawal to read as follows. There’s nothing in the article calling attention to the change; they’re trying to put one over on their readers, it seems.
SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?
Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.
They’ve dropped the contingency about positive developments continuing, although it’s still implied by the part about potentially changing the plan. Did Maliki contact Spiegel and ask them to drop that part so that the quote would sound more assertive back home? Hard to believe the original translation would have been so off as to include a bit about “positive developments” that he never said.
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I don't recall till W was President that the opposing party would use overseas sentiments to influence how Americans should vote.
Before I comment on the Maliki statements,
First an associated and much more general related point,
Why should we vote for a candidate because people in another country want him to win?
This doesn't make much sense. In fact I would be more inclined to do the opposite.
I want leaders who are going to stick up for us, and if at the same time that helps are true allies, great. But the Democrats are happy to point out that their candidate would be loved so much more than the Republcian candidate.
That said, why are we not exploring why some in these other countries are so enthused about a Democrat. They *have* to perceive it helps them more then they care about whether it helps America. Of course if we have a major candidate running around saying we should stop being snobs about English, and we should take up Spanish and French the Latinos and the French will love him. But who is he representing them or us?
Second back to the point at hand with regards to Maliki,
Now with regard to Maliki - he now claims his remarks were taken out of context. I believe it. The news media will take a small phrase, or quote of the overall context and it can have the complete "opposite" meaning from its intent. I've had that happen to myself. I gave an interview years ago and remarks that I said were true but *incomplete*. The result was the meaning was completely lost and from what was published totally misrepresented.
***Iraqi PM disputes report on withdrawal plan
* NEW: Der Spiegel says Nuri al-Maliki backs plan to withdraw troops within 16 months
* NEW: Al-Maliki's spokesman says his remarks were "misunderstood"
* Comments follow White House announcement of "time horizon" for withdrawal
(CNN) -- A German magazine quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as saying that he backed a proposal by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months.
Nuri al-Maliki told Der Spiegel that he favors a "limited" tenure for coalition troops in Iraq.
Nuri al-Maliki told Der Spiegel that he favors a "limited" tenure for coalition troops in Iraq.
"U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months," he said in an interview with Der Spiegel that was released Saturday.
"That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," he said.
But a spokesman for al-Maliki said his remarks "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately."
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the possibility of troop withdrawal was based on the continuance of security improvements, echoing statements that the White House made Friday after a meeting between al-Maliki and U.S. President Bush.
In the magazine interview, Al-Maliki said his remarks did not indicate that he was endorsing Obama over presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain.
"Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited," he said.
"Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic," al-Maliki said.
The interview's publication came one day after the White House said President Bush and al-Maliki had agreed to include a "general time horizon" in talks about reducing American combat forces and transferring Iraqi security control across the country. iReport.com: What should the next president know about Iraq?
The Bush administration has steadfastly refused to consider a "timetable" for withdrawing troops from Iraq.
In a statement issued Friday after a conversation between Bush and al-Maliki by closed-circuit television, the White House said that conditions in Iraq would dictate the pace of the negotiations and not "an arbitrary date for withdrawal."
Don't Miss
The two men "agreed that the goals would be based on continued improving conditions on the ground and not an arbitrary date for withdrawal," the White House said.
In an interview to air Sunday on "Late Edition," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "those goals are being achieved now, as we speak. And so, it's not at all unusual to start to think that there is a horizon out there, in the not too distant future, in which the roles and responsibilities of the U.S. forces are going to change dramatically and those of the Iraqi forces are going to become dominant."
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said al-Maliki had made it clear that such decisions will be based on continuing positive developments.
"It is our shared view that should the recent security gains continue, we will be able to meet our joint aspirational time horizons," he said.
The prime minister's remarks emerged as Obama visited Kuwait and Afghanistan before embarking on a tour of the Middle East and Europe to boost his foreign policy credentials. He also plans to visit Iraq.
The Democratic candidate says he supports a phased withdrawal of troops, promising to remove all combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of taking office if he becomes president.
McCain does not think American troops should return to the United States until Iraqi forces are capable of maintaining a safe, democratic state.
He has been a strong advocate of the 2007 "surge" to escalate U.S. troop levels and says troops should stay in Iraq as long as needed.
McCain says Obama is wrong for opposing the increased troop presence, and Obama says McCain's judgment is flawed.
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http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=14665033
McCain to Israeli TV: Sanctions might stop Iran, but US will not allow 2nd Holocaust
The Associated Press
Monday, July 21, 2008
JERUSALEM: American presidential candidate John McCain told an Israeli TV station that stiffer sanctions might stop Iran's threats against Israel. In an interview broadcast Monday, the Republican candidate said that in any event, the U.S. would not allow Iran to try to destroy Israel.
McCain's interview with Israel's Channel 2 TV aired just before Democratic candidate Barack Obama is due to arrive in Israel.
Asked about Israel feeling the need to attack Iran, McCain replied, "I would hope that would never happen, I would hope that Israel would not feel that threatened, " saying the U.S. and Europe could impose "significant, very painful sanctions on Iran which I think could modify their behavior."
He added, "But I have to look you in the eye and tell you that the United States of America can never allow a second Holocaust."
Israel considers Iran a strategic threat, discounting reports that Iran has dropped efforts to build nuclear weapons. Iran is developing long-range rockets and has called often for Israel's destruction.
Asked about possible military actions against Iran, McCain said, "I think we have a lot of options to explored before we seriously explore the military option, and I don't think we have exercised those enough.
McCain said he favors low-level contacts with Iranian officials, but not a meeting of presidents without preconditions. He said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would take advantage of such a meeting and its media coverage to call for the destruction of Israel.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/21/medal-of-honor-recipient-and-fellow-pow-endorses-mccain/
I wonder if Barry-O will be getting any MOH winner's endorsement.....
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A Tale of Two Flip-Floppers
By KARL ROVE
July 24, 2008
John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls.
But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating?
Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn't explain why prices at the pump haven't also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?
Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.
At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.
Then there is Iraq. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops, even voting to immediately cut off funds for the troops while they were in combat. Then, in July 2007, he started talking about leaving a residual U.S. force, in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, able to go back into Iraq if needed.
By October, he shifted again, pledging to station the residual U.S. troops inside Iraq with two "limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda."
Last week, writing in the New York Times, Mr. Obama changed again. He increased the missions his residual force would perform to three: "going after any remnants of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces." That's not all that different from what U.S. troops are doing now.
And just how many U.S. troops would Mr. Obama leave in Iraq? Colin Kahl, an Obama adviser on Iraq, has said the senator wants to have "perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces" in Iraq by December 2010. So much for withdrawing all combat troops.
It's dizzying. Yet, Mr. Obama acts as if he is a paradigm of consistency. He told a Georgia rally this month that "the people who say [I've been changing] apparently haven't been listening to me." In a PBS interview last week he said, "this notion that somehow we've had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate."
Compounding all this is Mr. Obama's stubborn refusal to admit the surge was right and that he was wrong to oppose it. On MSNBC in January 2007, he said more U.S. troops would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Later that month he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." In fact, the surge has done far more than its advocates hoped in a much shorter period.
Yet Mr. Obama told ABC's Terry Moran this week that even in retrospect, he would oppose the surge. He also told CBS's Katie Couric that he had "no idea what would have happened" without the new strategy. And he still declares, in the New York Times last week, "The same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true." Given all that has happened, it's hard to understand how Mr. Obama can say, as he did Tuesday in a story on NBC Nightly News, that "I don't have doubts about my ability to apply sound judgment to the major national security problems that we face."
Americans have seen both candidates flip-flop. Mr. McCain at least has a record of being a gutsy leader willing to take unpopular stands who admits his shifts and explains the new information that caused them.
Mr. Obama has detached himself from past positions at record speed. And in doing so he runs the risk of being seen as a cynical politician, not an inspiring leader. If this happens, voters in large numbers may ask -- despite his rhetorical acrobatics -- if he is the change they've been waiting for.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/07/24/mccain-closing-the-gap/
Not inevitable.
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The Greatest Scandal
July 28, 2008
The profound failure of inner-city public schools to teach children may be the nation's greatest scandal. The differences between the two Presidential candidates on this could hardly be more stark. John McCain is calling for alternatives to the system; Barack Obama wants the kids to stay within that system. We think the facts support Senator McCain.
"Parents ask only for schools that are safe, teachers who are competent and diplomas that open doors of opportunity," said Mr. McCain in remarks recently to the NAACP. "When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children." Some parents may opt for a better public school or a charter school; others for a private school. The point, said the Senator, is that "no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity."
Mr. McCain cited the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federally financed school-choice program for disadvantaged kids signed into law by President Bush in 2004. Qualifying families in the District of Columbia receive up to $7,500 a year to attend private K-12 schools. To qualify, a child must live in a family with a household income below 185% of the poverty level. Some 1,900 children participate; 99% are black or Hispanic. Average annual income is just over $22,000 for a family of four.
A recent Department of Education report found nearly 90% of participants in the D.C. program have higher reading scores than peers who didn't receive a scholarship. There are five applicants for every opening.
Mr. McCain could have mentioned EdisonLearning, a private company that took over 20 of Philadelphia's 45 lowest performing district schools in 2002 to create a new management model for public schools. The most recent state test-score data show that student performance at Philadelphia public schools managed by Edison and other outside providers has improved by nearly twice the amount as the schools run by the district.
The number of students performing at grade level or higher in reading at the schools managed by private providers increased by 6.1% overall compared to 3.3% in district-managed schools. In math, the results for Edison and other outside managers was 4.6% and 6.0%, respectively, compared to 3.1% in the district-run schools.
The state of California just announced that one in three students in the Los Angeles public school system drops out before graduating. Among black and Latino students in L.A. district schools, the numbers are 42% and 30%. In the past five years, the number of dropouts has grown by more than 80%. The number of high school graduates has gone up only 9%.
The silver linings in these dismal clouds are L.A.'s charter high schools. Writing in the Los Angeles Daily News last week, Caprice Young, who heads the California Charter Schools Association, noted that "every charter high school in Los Angeles Unified last year reported a dropout rate significantly lower than not only the school district's average, but the state's as well."
On recent evidence, the Democrat Party's policy on these alternatives is simply massive opposition.
Congressional Democrats have refused to reauthorize the D.C. voucher program and are threatening to kill it. Last month, Philadelphia's school reform commission voted to seize six schools from outside managers, including four from Edison. In L.A., local school board members oppose the expansion of charters even though seven in 10 charters in the district outperform their neighborhood peers.
It's well known that the force calling the Democratic tune here is the teachers unions. Earlier this month, Senator Obama accepted the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. Speaking recently before the American Federation of Teachers, he described the alternative efforts as "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."
Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward. Those at the top don't need voucher programs and they already exercise school choice. They can afford exclusive private schools, or they can afford to live in a neighborhood with decent public schools. The point of providing educational options is to extend this freedom to the "kids at the bottom."
A visitor to Mr. Obama's Web site finds plenty of information about his plans to fix public education in this country. Everyone knows this is a long, hard slog, but Mr. Obama and his wife aren't waiting. Their daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.
When the day arrives that these two candidates face off, we hope Senator McCain comes prepared to press his opponent hard on change, hope and choice in the schools.
WSJ
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Obama Should Stand Up to Russia's Regime
By GARRY KASPAROV
July 29, 2008; Page A17
Berlin is an ideal place for an American president, even a would-be president, to speak to the world about freedom and shared values. Barack Obama's recent visit evoked the famous speeches of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan that defended the U.S. stance against the Soviet Union and tyranny in Eastern Europe. Both the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union are now gone, but dangerous, nuclear-armed dictatorships are not. Sadly, Mr. Obama declined to mention this in Berlin.
The stage for his disappointing performance was set several weeks ago, when the Illinois senator rejected John McCain's proposal to eject Russia and exclude China from the Group of Eight (G-8). Mr. Obama's response during a July 13 interview on CNN -- "We have to engage and get them involved" -- suggests that it is impossible to work with Russia and China on economic and nuclear nonproliferation issues while also standing up for democracy and human rights.
It has repeatedly been shown that the exact opposite is true.
The U.S. does not cede leverage with authoritarian governments when it confronts them about their crimes. Instead, the U.S. increases its credibility and influence with foes and friends alike. Placating regimes like those in Russia and China today only entrenches hostile, antidemocratic forces.
Commercial agreements, arms control and other mutually beneficial projects can be pursued without endorsing dictatorship. During the same interview, Sen. Obama spoke of enlisting China to help write the "international rules of the road." This is the same logic that led the United Nations to place China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia on its current Human Rights Council. Do we really want to live under rules created with the approval of such regimes?
While Mr. Obama talked about the importance of receiving Russia's help in containing Iran's nuclear ambitions, Reuters reported that Tehran is acquiring advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles from the Kremlin. This is the cooperation the West has earned by including Russia in the G-8.
In Berlin, Mr. Obama repeatedly mentioned the 1948 Berlin airlift. On CNN, he said he would like to "bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan." A strange statement, since President Harry Truman fought against giving up an inch to the communists on any front around the world. Not only did Truman save West Berlin; South Korea, Taiwan and Western Europe also have much to thank him for. By contrast, in their July 9 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Obama advisers Madeleine Albright and William Perry, secretaries of state and defense under Bill Clinton, criticized Sen. McCain's proposal to respond to major powers' human-rights abuses with more than lip service.
Mr. Obama also asked if the West would stand up for "the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe." Commendable, but what about the political prisoner in China and the recently convicted blogger in Russia? Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Russia's Dmitri Medvedev both came to power in blatantly fraudulent elections. The hypocrisy of condemning one while embracing the other destroys American and European credibility, and undermines any attempt at global leadership. Those of us living behind the Iron Curtain at the time were grateful Ronald Reagan did not go to Berlin in 1987 to denounce the lack of freedom in, say, Angola.
In short, the candidate of change sounds like he would perpetuate the destructive double standards of the current administration. Meanwhile, the supposedly hidebound Mr. McCain is imaginative enough to suggest that if something is broken you should try to fix it. Giving Russia and China a free pass on human rights to keep them "at the table" has helped lead to more arms and nuclear aid to Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and interference from both nations in solving the tragedies in Darfur and Zimbabwe.
Would all of this have occurred had the U.S. and Europe threatened meaningful reprisals? At least Mr. McCain wants to find out.
Reagan's Berlin speech is remembered for his command: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" But he also made a critical point about negotiating from strength, a point Mr. Obama seems to be missing. Reagan knew that if the U.S. backed down on the Strategic Defense Initiative, his speech would just be pretty words the Soviets would ignore.
Reagan avoided the mistake John F. Kennedy made when he met with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy was weak in Khrushchev's eyes and keen to make a deal, and the Soviet premier bullied him mercilessly in Vienna. The Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis were soon to follow.
Today, instead of communists there are deal-making capitalists and nationalists running the Kremlin and China's National People's Congress. They, and blowhards like Hugo Chávez, hardly represent the existential threats faced by Truman, Kennedy and Reagan. Yet Mr. Obama still is reticent to confront them, saying in Berlin that "we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must." But the Cold War ended and democracy became the global standard not because Western leaders merely defended their values, but because they projected them aggressively.
On Sept. 11, 150 years ago, another Illinois politician to run for president, Abraham Lincoln, said: "Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere." Not where it's convenient. Not in countries lacking large energy reserves. Everywhere, Mr. Obama, everywhere.
Mr. Kasparov, leader of The Other Russia coalition, is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
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McCain's Tax Blunder
July 30, 2008; Page A14
WSJ
One of the miracles of this Presidential election campaign is that John McCain still has a chance to win, notwithstanding his best attempts to kick it away. In his latest random policy improvisation, the Arizona Senator tried to give up the tax issue.
On ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Mr. McCain was asked to draw distinctions between his and the current Administration's economic policy. Given an easy opening, the Senator came back with his usual hodgepodge of new child-tax credits, promises to "veto every single pork barrel bill" and close wasteful government agencies, cut dependence on foreign oil and introduce a gas-tax holiday.
Then host George Stephanopoulos raised Social Security. "You're a longtime supporter of the private accounts, as President Bush called for them." Wishing to further distance himself from President Bush, when he could have drawn an equally useful contrast with Barack Obama, Mr. McCain didn't even own up to his support for private retirement accounts, simply saying, "I am a supporter of sitting down together and putting everything on the table and coming up with an answer."
Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed, "So that means payroll tax increases are on the table, as well?" Here came the words that have caused the McCain campaign well deserved grief: "There is nothing that's off the table. I have my positions, and I'll articulate them. But nothing's off the table."
So given a chance to reiterate his opposition to tax increases -- and underscore a main contrast with his opponent -- Mr. McCain punted. Democrats were quick to pounce, with the Democratic National Committee issuing a press release headlined, "McCain Tax Pledge? Not so much." It provided citations of the presumptive GOP nominee asserting that "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't." Expect the "nothing's off the table" line to show up in Democratic TV spots this fall.
The wandering candidate also put his chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, in an uncomfortable spot. Back in June, the McCain campaign went after Mr. Obama's proposal for a Social Security payroll tax increase on income above $250,000. A President McCain, his adviser then said, wouldn't consider a payroll tax increase "under any imaginable circumstances." So much for that.
Economics has never been Mr. McCain's strong suit, but with Iraq receding as a crisis the economy is the ground where the Senator will have to fight and win. And the tax issue provides him with a potent opening, given Mr. Obama's pledge to raise taxes on incomes, dividends and capital gains. In proposing to raise the payroll tax cap, the Democrat is to the left even of Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain's Sunday blunder will make that issue that much harder to exploit.
Such mistakes also help explain the continued lack of enthusiasm for Mr. McCain among many conservatives. Meeting with us last December, before the primaries, he declared that "I will not agree to any tax increase," repeating the phrase for emphasis. He did not say any tax increase with the exception of Social Security. If Mr. McCain can't convince voters that he's better on taxes than is a Democrat who says matter-of-factly that he wants to raise taxes, the Republican is going to lose in a rout.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary
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Political Diary
August 3, 2008
Paging Charlie Crist
Up until last month, John McCain led Barack Obama in every poll taken in Florida this year -- eleven in all. Since the middle of June, Mr. Obama has moved ahead in three of the last four surveys in the Sunshine State. The RealClearPolitics Average for Florida last Wednesday showed Messrs. McCain and Obama tied at 45.8% each, although a new poll on Thursday moved the average in Mr. McCain's favor by a slim 46% to 45.5%.
Mr. Obama's surge in Florida is explained by an analysis of advertising spending released last week by the University of Wisconsin. Between June 3 (the effective end of the Democratic primary) and July 26, Team Obama spent a whopping $5,028,000 on television ads in Florida -- at least $1 million more than Team Obama spent in any other state. Mr. McCain's spending during that same period? Zero.
Earlier this week the Obama campaign announced an unprecedented $20 million push for Latino voters that will focus on Florida and three other states. That effort, coupled with an expected surge in African-American turnout and an aggressive outreach to Jewish voters, has the Obama camp believing they have a legitimate shot at winning Florida in November.
Six weeks ago, with Mr. McCain leading in all the Florida polls, it looked as if adding Governor Charlie Crist to the ticket was not only unnecessary but might further alienate some conservatives. Now, with Mr. Obama pouring resources into Florida, things look considerably different. Speculation about a McCain VP selection lately has raged around Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, but Mr. McCain may want to give Mr. Crist another look -- because it's impossible to see how Mr. McCain wins the White House without Florida's 27 electoral votes.
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http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/only_22_say_mccain_ad_racist_but_over_half_53_see_obama_dollar_bill_comment_that_way
Only 22% Say McCain Ad Racist, But Over Half (53%) See Obama Dollar-bill Comment That Way
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.
However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.
Both campaigns expressed a desire to move beyond the recent flap. On Saturday Obama backed off the racism charge and accused McCain's campaign of cynicism instead. He also rejected McCain's charge that the Democrat himself had brought race into the campaign with his dollar bill comment.
Two months after Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential Nomination, the race for the White House remains amazingly close in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Not surprisingly, the McCain ad generates significantly different perceptions along racial and ethnic lines. Most African-American voters—58%--saw the McCain ad as racist. Just 18% of white voters and 14% of all other voters shared that view. To watch the ad, click HERE.
As for Obama’s comment, 53% of white voters saw it as racist, as did 44% of African-Americans and 61% of all other voters.
There were also significant partisan divides. Democrats were evenly divided as to whether the McCain commercial was racist, and they were also evenly divided on the Obama comment. Republicans, by an 87% to 4% margin, rejected the notion that the McCain campaign ad was racist. But, by a 67% to 26% margin, GOP voters believe that Obama’s comment was racist.
Unaffiliated voters, by a five-to-one margin, said the McCain ad was not racist. By a much narrower 50% to 38% margin, unaffiliateds viewed Obama’s comment as racist.
Overall, just 22% of voters believe that most Americans are racist. That view is shared by 32% of Democrats, 20% of unaffiliated voters and 12% of Republicans. African-American voters are evenly divided on the question.
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Obama's Drill Bit
August 4, 2008
Even as he proposes to arbitrarily soak the profits from oil exploration (see here), Barack Obama is finally beginning to bend on offshore drilling. Late last week he said he could perhaps support more U.S. energy exploration, so long as it was part of a larger "bipartisan" deal that presumably includes more rules for conservation, subsidies for noncarbon fuels, and other favorites of his green backers.
Leave aside the economic contradiction in allowing more drilling to find more oil only to strip the profits from companies that succeed in finding it. The real news here is political, as Mr. Obama and his advisers have begun to see the polls move against them on energy. With gas at $4 a gallon, voters even in such drilling-averse states as Florida increasingly see the need for more domestic oil supplies. So Mr. Obama is now doing a modified, limited switcheroo to block any John McCain traction on the issue.
Only last week, Mr. Obama couldn't have been more opposed, calling more drilling a "scheme" that wouldn't reduce gas prices. He's also been telling voters that we don't need to open more areas to drilling because the oil companies weren't drilling enough on the leases they already have. That is nonsense, since not every lease yields oil in amounts worth developing and drilling permits aren't automatic even on leased land.
The question for Mr. Obama is whether this latest switch is merely a rhetorical move for campaign purposes. If he's serious, he'll start to publicly lobby Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to allow a vote on drilling when they return from their August recess. The McCain campaign should keep the pressure on until he does, and until Congress moves.
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The sources of the following are, IMHO, quite capable of hyper-ventilating. Lets see where this goes , , ,
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Obama Receives Illegal Funds From Gaza
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Obama receives illegal funds from 'terrorist hotbed' Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 8/6/2008 6:00:00 AMvar addthis_pub = 'onenewsnow';
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Barack Obama has received illegal donations from Palestinians living in Gaza, a hotbed of Hamas terrorists.
Obama received more than $24,000 in campaign contributions over a period of two months last fall from three Palestinian brothers from the "Edwan" family in Rafah, Gaza, which is a Hamas stronghold along the border with Egypt. The story was uncovered by Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog. (see Federal Election Commission report)
Attorney and conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel notes foreign nationals are barred from making contributions in connection with any election -- federal, state, or local -- and an individual is allowed to give only $2,300 per election to a federal candidate or the candidate's campaign committee.
"The donations are basically through and through illegal -- that's number one. And number two is how the Obama campaign tried to conceal it," Schlussel chides. "They listed the campaign contributions as coming from Rafah, Georgia. They used the 'GA' from Gaza so it makes it look like it's legal; and then for the zip code it says '972,' which is actually the area code to dial over to Gaza," she contends.
The attorney comments that if the Obama campaign is willing to "accept thousands of dollars beyond the legal limit and they're also going to flout [Federal Election Commission] restrictions...that's very indicative of what kind of president [Obama] is going to be."
"They're not going to be worried about the details and they won't mind if they break the law to get to the final result that they want," adds Schlussel. She believes it is a "major news story when a presidential candidate receives money from 'a bastion of Islamic terrorism.' And Schlussel argues that the media is "bending over backwards to help Barack Obama and cover up any negative news about him."
Schlussel says Pamela Geller will likely file a Federal Election Commission complaint against the Obama campaign for violating restrictions and limits on campaign contributions.
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**Obama needs a bigger bus....** :roll:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/05/another-obama-advisor-under-the-bus-shady-muslim-outreach-director-stepsdown/
Another Obama advisor under the bus: Shady Muslim outreach director steps down
By Michelle Malkin • August 5, 2008 11:25 PM
Well, that was quick. A little over a week ago, the Obama campaign proudly touted the appointment of a new Muslim outreach director. Now, he’s out following questions about his ties to a radical Muslim imam and the Muslim brotherhood. Doesn’t anyone do background checks for The One after all this time?
From a July 31 Obama campaign website blog post:
All -
Assalamu-Aleikum. My name is Mazen Asbahi and I’ve been blessed and privileged to be serving the Obama for America Campaign as the National Coordinator for Muslim American Affairs. I’m also coordinating Arab American matters. I’m treating the two roles separately as these are two separate constituencies, though of course there is some overlap.
In order to get Senator Obama elected, the Campaign needs all of you to continue your support and if possible to take it to another level. It’s a race for every vote in the key battleground states, such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. We need Muslim Americans to get excited about the Campaign, and there’s a lot to get excited about!
Sure, there have been mis-steps. And of course there are added sensitivities with our faith given the “smear” campaign trying to paint the Senator as too exotic and too un-American to be President.
If you have not plugged into the Campaign, please do. The Campaign makes it very easy to do. Visit your local Obama offices and register voters, raise money, get the word out, and pull in your friends and family to also participate.
Please feel free to contact me with ideas, critiques and suggestions for improvements on our outreach strategies. (Please keep in mind that I’ve just signed on :)).
Peace,
Mazen Asbahi
No peace from the WSJ, which reports tonight:
The Muslim-outreach coordinator to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama has resigned amid questions about his involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups.
Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbahi, who was appointed volunteer national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign on July 26, stepped down Monday after an Internet newsletter wrote about his brief stint on the fund’s board, which also included a fundamentalist imam.
“Mr. Asbahi has informed the campaign that he no longer wishes to serve in his volunteer position, and we are in the process of searching for a new national Arab American and Muslim American outreach coordinator,” spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement.
A corporate lawyer at the firm of Schiff Hardin LLP, Mr. Asbahi tendered his resignation after he and the Obama campaign received emailed inquiries about his background from The Wall Street Journal. He did not respond to the email or a message left at his law office; the campaign released a letter in which Mr. Asbahi said he did not want to be a distraction.
The imam is Jamal Said. Background on his jihad-friendly mosque here.
And more details the Obama vetters neglected to vet:
The eight-year-old connection between Mr. Asbahi and Mr. Said was raised last week by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, which is published by a Washington think tank and chronicles the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood, a world-wide fundamentalist group based in Egypt. Other Web sites, some pro-Republican and others critical of fundamentalist Islam, also have reported on the background of Mr. Asbahi. He is a frequent speaker before several groups in the U.S. that scholars have associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Justice Department named Mr. Said an unindicted co-conspirator in the racketeering trial last year of several alleged Hamas fund-raisers, which ended in a mistrial. He has also been identified as a leading member of the group in news reports going back to 1993.
Mr. Said is the imam at the Bridgeview Mosque in Bridge-view, Ill., outside Chicago. He left the board of the Islamic fund in 2005, Securities and Exchange Commission filings state. A message left for Mr. Said at the mosque was not returned.
Allied Asset Advisors is a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust. The trust, which is supported financially by the government of Saudi Arabia, holds title to many mosques in the U.S. and promotes a conservative brand of Islam compatible with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and also akin to the fundamentalist style predominant in Saudi Arabia. Allied executives did not respond to inquiries.
Countdown until CAIR screams Islamophobia and Obama minions scream racist?
3…2…1…
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August 07, 2008
Hillary's Growing Shadow
By Victor Davis Hanson
Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck.
Impossible?
It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal.
Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal.
So, everyone is puzzled why the Democratic candidate isn't at least 10 points ahead. It seems the more Americans get used to Barack Obama, the less they want him as president -- and the more Democrats will soon regret not nominating Hillary Clinton.
First, Obama was billed as a post-racial healer. His half-African ancestry, exotic background and soothing rhetoric were supposed to have been novel and to have reassured the public he was no race-monger like Al Sharpton. On the other hand, his 20-year career in the cauldron of Chicago racial politics also guaranteed to his liberal base that he wasn't just a moderate Colin Powell, either.
Yet within weeks of the first primary, the outraged Clintons were accusing Obama of playing "the race card" -- and vice-versa. Blacks soon were voting heavily against Hillary Clinton. In turn, Hillary, the elite Ivy League progressive, turned into a blue-denim working gal -- and won nearly all the final big-state Democratic primaries on the strength of working-class whites.
Americans also learned to their regret how exactly a Hawaiian-born Barack Obama -- raised, in part, by his white grandparents and without African-American heritage -- had managed to win credibility in what would become his legislative district in Chicago. That discovery of racial chauvinism wasn't hard once his former associate, his pastor for over 20 years, the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, spewed his venom.
Obama himself didn't help things as he taught the nation that his dutiful grandmother was at times a small-minded bigot -- no different from a "typical white person." And in an impromptu riff, Obama ridiculed small-town working-class Pennsylvanians' supposed racial insularity.
The primary season ended with a narrow Obama victory -- and a wounded, but supposedly wiser, Democratic candidate.
Not quite. Without evidence, he unwisely has claimed his opponents ("they") will play the race card against poor him. In contrast, on the hot-button issue of racial reparations, he recently played to cheering minority audiences by cryptically suggesting that the government must "not just . . . offer words, but offer deeds." He later clarified that he didn't mean cash grants, but his initial words were awfully vague.
Second, many are beginning to notice how a Saint Obama talks down to them. We American yokels can't speak French or Spanish. We eat too much. Our cars are too big, our houses either overheated or overcooled. And we don't even put enough air in our car tires. In contrast, a lean, hip Obama promises to still the rising seas and cool down the planet, assuring adoring Germans that he is a citizen of the world.
Third, Obama knows that all doctrinaire liberals must tack rightward in the general election. But due to his inexperience, he's doing it in far clumsier fashion than any triangulating candidate in memory. Do we know -- does Obama even know? -- what he really feels about drilling off our coasts, tapping the strategic petroleum reserve, NAFTA, faith-based initiatives, campaign financing, the FISA surveillance laws, town-hall debates with McCain, Iran, the surge, timetables for Iraq pullouts, gun control or capital punishment?
Fourth, Obama is proving as inept an extemporaneous speaker as he is gifted with the Teleprompter. Like most rookie senators, in news conferences and interviews, he stumbles and then makes serial gaffes -- from the insignificant, like getting the number of states wrong, to the downright worrisome, such as calling for a shadow civilian aid bureaucracy to be funded like the Pentagon (which would mean $500 billion per annum).
If the polls are right, a public tired of Republicans is beginning to think an increasingly bothersome Obama would be no better -- and maybe a lot worse. It is one thing to suggest to voters that they should shed their prejudices, eat less and be more cosmopolitan. But it is quite another when the sermonizer himself too easily evokes race, weekly changes his mind and often sounds like he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
In a tough year like this, Democrats could probably have defeated Republican John McCain with a flawed, but seasoned candidate like Hillary Clinton. But long-suffering liberals convinced their party to go with a messiah rather than a dependable nominee -- and thereby they probably will get neither.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
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August 08, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
On Energy, Do Everything
Democrats are killing themselves trying to prevent Americans from using proven fuels.
By Charles Krauthammer
Let’s see: housing meltdown, credit crunch, oil shock not seen since the 1970s. The economy is slowing, unemployment growing and inflation increasing. It’s the sixth year of a highly unpopular war and the president’s approval rating is at 30 percent.
The Italian Communist party could win this election. The American Democratic party is trying its best to lose it.
Democrats have the advantage on just about every domestic issue from health care to education. However, Americans’ greatest concern is the economy, and their greatest economic concern is energy (by a significant margin: 37 percent to 21 percent for inflation). Yet Democrats have gratuitously forfeited the issue of increased drilling for domestic oil and gas. By an overwhelming margin of two to one, Americans want to lift the moratorium preventing drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the last 27 years.
Democrats have been adamantly opposed. They say that we cannot drill our way out of the oil crisis. Of course not. But it is equally obvious that we cannot solar or wind or biomass our way out. Does this mean that because any one measure cannot solve a problem, it needs to be rejected?
Barack Obama remains opposed to new offshore drilling (although he now says he would accept a highly restricted version as part of a comprehensive package). Just last week, he claimed that if only Americans would inflate their tires properly and get regular tune-ups, “we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.”
This is bizarre. By any reasonable calculation of annual tire-inflation and tune-up savings, the Outer Continental Shelf holds nearly a hundred times as much oil. As for oil shale, also under federal moratorium, after a thousand years of driving with Obama-inflated tires and Obama-tuned engines, we would still have saved only one-fifth the oil shale available in the United States.
But forget the math. Why is this issue either/or? Who’s against properly inflated tires? Let’s start a national campaign, Cuban-style, with giant venceremos posters lining the highways. (“Inflate your tires. Victory or death!”) Why must there be a choice between encouraging conservation and increasing supply? The logical answer is obvious: Do both.
Do everything. Wind and solar. A tire gauge in every mailbox. Hell, a team of oxen for every family (to pull their gasoline-drained SUVs). The consensus in the country, logically unassailable and politically unbeatable, is to do everything possible to both increase supply and reduce demand, because we have a problem that’s been killing our economy and threatening our national security. And no one measure is sufficient.
The green fuels the Democrats insist we should be investing in are as yet uneconomical, speculative technologies, still far more expensive than extracted oil and natural gas. We could be decades away. And our economy is teetering. Why would you not drill to provide a steady supply of proven fuels for the next few decades as we make the huge technological and economic transition to renewable energy?
Congressional Democrats demand instead a clampdown on “speculators.” The Democrats proposed this a month ago. In the meantime, “speculators” have driven the price down by $25 a barrel. Still want to stop them? In what universe do traders only bet on the price going up?
On Monday, Obama outlined a major plan with mandates and immense government investment in such things as electric cars and renewables. Fine, let’s throw a few tens of billions at this and see what sticks. But success will not just require huge amounts of money. It will require equally huge amounts of time and luck.
On the other hand, drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes, and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.
The problem for the Democrats is that the argument for “do everything” is not rocket science. It is common sense. Which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, surveying the political rubble resulting from her insistence on not even permitting drilling to come to a floor vote, has quietly told her members that they can save their skins and vote for drilling when the pre-election Congress convenes next month. Pelosi says she wants to save the planet. Apparently saving her speakership comes first.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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Campaign watch: Lots of nonsense
Barack Obama, as expected, has declined John McCain’s offer to participate in a series of 10 town hall meetings this fall. Obama, no doubt wondering how he would coherently expound upon “change we can believe in” when put on the spot by audience members, has committed only to the three debates scheduled by the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Obama also angered some black groups this week by “clarifying” his earlier position on slavery reparations. Earlier, when asked about the possibility of an apology and reparations for slavery and the Jim Crow era, he spoke about backing up words with deeds. He now says that an apology would not necessarily benefit black Americans, and that reparations might be a “distraction,” presumably from real change. No wonder he doesn’t want to participate in McCain’s town hall meetings—he doesn’t dare to walk this particular tightrope, or others, without his trusty teleprompter.
On the lighter side of things, the McCain campaign has been hitting Obama on all sides with humor. For example, Obama offered last week this money-saving tip: Americans should make sure their tires are properly inflated. While this maintenance practice does indeed improve gas mileage, it is hardly the sort of substantive suggestion we should be hearing from a presidential candidate. McCain senior aid Mark Slater soon began handing out tire gauges that read “Obama’s Energy Plan.” Who said the energy crisis isn’t funny?
The big buzz, of course, is that in a new ad, McCain compared Obama to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ad called Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world” and asked if he was ready to lead. Hilton’s mother jumped to her defense, criticizing the ad. Oddly enough, she and her husband have donated $4,600 to McCain’s campaign. We think astute political analyst Jay Leno got this one right: “Of all the videos Paris Hilton has been in, this is the one mom’s upset about?”
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Mega liberal Maureen Dowd of the NY Times:
Yes, She Can
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 12, 2008
WASHINGTON
While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.
You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.
Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!
Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.
Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.
Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.
She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”
In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.
She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.
Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.
The way the Clintons see it, there’s nothing wrong with a couple making plans for their future, is there? That’s the American way and, as their pal Mark Penn pointed out, they have American roots while Obama “is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic behavior is “disgusting.” But they’re too filled with delicious schadenfreude at the wave of buyer’s remorse that has swept the Democratic Party; many Democrats are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain, and many are wondering, given his inability to open up a lead in a country fed up with Republicans, if race will be an insurmountable factor.
Some Democrats wish that Obama had told the Clintons to “get in the box” or get lost if they can’t show more loyalty, rather than giving them back-to-back, prime-time speaking gigs at the convention on Tuesday and Wednesday. Al Gore clipped their wings in 2000, triggering their wrath by squeezing both the president and New York Senate candidate into speaking slots the first night and then ushering them out of L.A.
Wednesday will be all Bill. The networks will rerun his churlish comments from Africa about Obama’s readiness to lead and his South Carolina meltdowns. TV will have more interest in a volcanic ex-president than a genteel veep choice.
Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women ... dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.
Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”
It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”
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I See Four
Key Battleground States
By KARL ROVE
August 14, 2008; Page A11
Presidential campaigns ultimately come down to who can win 270 Electoral College votes. With most states favoring one candidate or the other, this year's contest could come down to a few battleground states.
Based on visits this past week with party leaders and old pros, it's clear that Barack Obama will focus on Colorado and Virginia. Both have large concentrations of white, college-educated voters with whom Mr. Obama is popular. And both have seen Democrats surge recently.
Of the two, Mr. Obama is best positioned to pick up Colorado's nine electoral votes. Denver hosts the Democratic convention at the end of this month. And a quartet of local millionaires (mini-George Soroses) have spent lavishly to boost Democrats. They have succeeded at shrinking the Republican advantage among registered voters. The GOP now has just 68,507 more voters on the rolls in Colorado than Democrats, down from a 176,572 edge four years ago.
Democrats win the state when they hold down GOP margins in rural districts, and appeal to swing women voters in Larimer County and the Denver suburbs. Mr. Obama lacks rural credentials, but he might make inroads in the suburbs.
Sen. McCain's independence will help him in Colorado. Also, there will be two anti-union initiatives on the ballot this fall that could energize conservatives. But he needs to run up votes in the GOP strongholds of El Paso (Colorado Springs), Douglas (south of Denver), Weld (Eastern Plains) and Mesa (Western Slope) counties, while appealing to Democratic and independent Hispanics and Catholics.
The last time Virginia (13 electoral votes) went for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1964. In 2004, the GOP's margin was eight points. That makes Virginia an uphill climb for Mr. Obama, but not out of reach. He's focused on increasing African-American voters in Hampton Roads (in the southeastern corner of the state), Richmond and Petersburg, and on deepening his strength in Northern Virginia, where Fairfax was one of only 60 counties in America to flip from Republican in '00 to Democrat in '04.
But Mr. McCain's maverick image allows him to compete in Northern Virginia, where he's buying expensive D.C. TV ads. He also needs to do well in rural Virginia and the Richmond suburbs. Hampton Roads is home to nearly twice as many veterans as the national average, so Mr. McCain should be able to do well there.
If Mr. McCain lost Colorado and Virginia, he would likely have 264 electoral votes (assuming he carried the other states President Bush won in 2004). To win, he would have to pick up a state Democrats are counting on winning, such as Michigan.
With 17 electoral votes, Michigan is an attractive target. But it is also a complicated state. The Democratic machine is in near meltdown in Detroit, where the city's mayor is fighting felony charges stemming from an alleged cover-up of a sex scandal (he recently spent a night in jail). The party is also hurt by adverse reactions to Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm's $1.5 billion tax increase last year, which dampened economic growth.
Mr. McCain needs Reagan Democrats and independents in eastern Michigan. These working class, culturally conservative, mostly Catholic voters are how the GOP elected an attorney general, a secretary of state and a state Senate majority. These voters care about jobs and know manufacturing runs on affordable energy. They will respond to Mr. McCain's call for domestic drilling and expanded nuclear power.
Mr. McCain also needs to focus on "soft" Republicans, particularly in the Detroit suburbs. His renegade reputation will help him with socially liberal independents and Republicans. But Mr. Obama's change message will help him in western Michigan where the socially conscious, historically Republican Dutch voters have antiwar tendencies.
Then there is Ohio. Ground zero in '04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State.
How can Mr. McCain take Ohio? He can appeal to swing voters in the northeastern part of the state. Cuyahoga, Summit and Lucas counties and the Mahoning Valley are full of culturally conservative, working-class voters. In addition, Mr. Obama was wiped out in the primary among the blue-collar Reagan Democrats of southeastern Ohio. Outside of the university town of Athens, he won less than 30% of the vote in southeastern Ohio. This Appalachian region remains bad turf for him.
Mr. McCain will need to do well with suburban independents in the counties surrounding Columbus to balance heavy African-American turnout. He will also need to run strong in the Cincinnati suburbs in the southwest, and in rural and small-town counties.
Other states will see serious competition, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire, Missouri and Wisconsin. But Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and Ohio are likely to be the center of the action. To win, Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama's Electoral College math very difficult. And if Mr. McCain can limit GOP losses to one or two small states from those won by the GOP in 2004, he'll be America's 44th president.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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THE CLINTON CONVENTION
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on August 15, 2008.
Hillary and Bill have hijacked the Denver convention, making it into a carbon copy of what it would have looked like had she won until the last possible moment. By the time Obama gets up to speak and put his stamp on the convention, Hillary will have had one prime time night all to herself. Bill will have pre-empted a second night. Hillary will have had all the nominating and seconding speeches she wants. And the roll call of the states would record, in graphic detail, how the voters of state after state rejected Obama’s candidacy in the primaries. Only then, after three and a half days of all Clinton all the time will the convention then, finally, turn to its nominee and allow him to have an hour in the sun!
And what leverage did the Clintons have to achieve all of this? None. Hillary could not have taken the convention by storm and any show of party disunity would marginalize her forever in the Democratic Party. Had she or her supporters tried to pull off distracting demonstrations or to recreate Lafayette Park in Chicago in 1968, she would have paid a permanent price among the party faithful for sabotaging Obama’s candidacy.
This Clintonian tour de force raises a key question about Barack Obama: Is he strong enough to be president or can he be pushed around? His failure to stand up to the Clintons makes one wonder how effective he will be against bin Laden, Iran, Chavez, or Putin.
And now word emerges from the Obama camp that Indiana Senator Evan Bayh is on the short list for vice president. To select Bayh would bring Obama’s nemesis, Mark Penn, in through the campaign’s back door. Penn and Bayh are an item. Mark’s second (and current) wife, Nancy Jacobson was the key fund raiser for the Senator during his Senate campaigns. Penn has always been Bayh’s consultant and chief advisor. Penn played the key role in 1996 in getting Bayh a slot as the convention keynote speaker. Bayh has always marched to Mark Penn’s tune.
This, of course, the same Mark Penn who structured the vilification of Barack Obama as a marginal American and orchestrated the campaign to summon the white working class in opposition to his candidacy.
How much will Obama take?
His weakness if the face of the Clinton demands coupled with his refusal to debate McCain in the town forum meetings raise the question of whether he is tough when the teleprompter is turned off. Why is he afraid or unwilling to do tough interviews? It is not enough for him to say that he is the front runner and ask why he should risk such confrontations. In case he hasn’t noticed, he’s not the front runner. The tracking polls all suggest a tied race where taking certain risks would be reasonable, unless his handlers worry about his vulnerability in difficult or extemporaneous situations.
Is an unscripted Obama a pushover? Will foreign leaders conclude that he is not up to the job, just as Khrushchev did with JFK at his 1961 Vienna summit that presaged the Cuban Missile crisis? If he does so poorly in negotiating with the Clintons, how will he do with the Russians?
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I had forgotten about this event until I saw this column this morning:
====================
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
Published: August 17, 2008
NY Times
While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.
McCain and Obama Agree to Attend Megachurch Forum (July 21, 2008) First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.
Warren’s queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for “gotcha” questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.
So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer — the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators — one of them should step aside for Warren.
Second, it was McCain’s night.
Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn’t particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.
Now I’m not entirely unbiased (!), so I don’t quite trust my initial judgment in such matters. But it was confirmed the next morning. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they’re putting out privately is that McCain ... may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage. But the fact that Obama’s people made this suggestion means they know McCain outperformed him.
Third, Obama and McCain really do have different “worldviews,” to use Rick Warren’s term.
Perhaps the most revealing moment was the two candidates’ response to a question about evil. Yes, evil — that negation of the good that, Friedrich Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, we seem not to have moved beyond.
Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, “do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”
Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn’t be ignored. But then their answers diverged.
Obama said that “we see evil all the time” — in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be “confronted squarely.” And while we can’t “erase evil from the world,” we can be “soldiers” in the task of confronting it when we see it.
But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”
It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?
John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that “of course evil must be defeated,” and he put “radical Islamic extremism,” Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning “the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform.”
So while Obama talked of confronting evil, McCain spoke of defeating it. Obama took the view that evil is generally abroad in the world; McCain focused on radical Islam and 9/11. Obama claimed that all of us must be metaphorical “soldiers” against evil; McCain paid tribute to actual American soldiers. And McCain couldn’t resist saying again Saturday night that if he has to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to get him and bring him to justice, he’ll do so.
Rick Warren remarked Saturday night that he wanted to help us understand Obama’s and McCain’s different worldviews. He accomplished his purpose.
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"Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. ... What they’re putting out privately is that McCain ... may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
Kristol doesn't mention that Andrea Mitchell felt compelled to point out that McCain was speaking to his base while BO was not. To me this displayed her bias and apparent need to temper BO's unequal performance compared to McCain with another excuse.
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"Biased"; I don't think so. McCain WAS speaking to his base or at least he hopes/wants it to be his base;
it's not "biased", it's simply true.
That does not negate that McCain may have done a better job.
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Note the bon mot, bolded below, where it's mentioned some of the protesters have received MMA training "for defensive purposes." Sounds like an Abbie Hoffman street theatre sort of claim, but if so, I wonder where they've trained.
Democratic Party Crashers Target Denver
They will do what they can to disrupt next week's convention.
August 19, 2008 - by Bridget Johnson
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A few newspapers ago, I once worked with a colleague who grumbled every time he saw a posting in the calendar advertising a meeting of the local anarchist group. He fumed over these meetings defying the very point of classic, every-Molotov-cocktail-for-himself anarchy. What’s next, he complained, electing a secretary to take meeting minutes and a treasurer to collect dues?
These days in Denver, anti-government groups have been meeting at local coffeehouses, in parks, online, and more to plot their disruption of the Democratic National Convention. They’ve organized “self-defense training” at a mixed martial arts gym, workouts supposedly intended for defense instead of offense. They’ve been hanging around the courts, lobbying for their right to block delegates and throw the city into general chaos. A federal judge’s recent decision to restrict their access to the Pepsi Center, they say, violates their free speech.
With names such as Recreate 68 (what, re-create Nixon’s election?) and Unconventional Denver, joined by anti-authority stalwarts such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and Code Pink (promising to inline skate through traffic to block the way), the DNC protesters have long been up in arms about how they won’t be given free reign of the Mile High City. They’re already accusing the city of essentially planning to combat them with paramilitary tactics. Denver, for instance, has set aside a warehouse to hold detainees in case the protests turn into another Battle of Seattle; protest groups have already christened the facility “Gitmo on the Platte” (though I doubt it serves the orange chicken on which al-Qaeda suspects dine).
When I arrived in Denver a month ago, the controversy was stewing over protesters’ claims that the police were going to employ ray guns that would stun demonstrators and make them poop their pants. Then the City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting people from carrying around buckets of pee or “feces bombs” with nefarious intentions. Excrement has really dominated the pre-protest conversation.
“The intent of this ordinance is to try to smear protesters and make them look as if they are somehow criminal or somehow going to engage in some kind of gross conduct,” Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer of Re-create 68, said at a hearing on the ordinance while accusing city officials of fear-mongering.
Another group called Tent State University wanted to camp out in City Park for four days; billed as “4 days of love and action,” the anti-war group wants to force the Democrats’ hand as they listen to punk music and Ralph Nader, as well as nominating their own “party-less youth ticket.” After running into several headaches with city officials and neighborhood residents, the group is relocating its protests to Cuernavaca Park near lower downtown. Residents are, of course, thrilled.
Unconventional Denver, meanwhile, is largely using the Internet so that “anarchists, witches, clowns, Iraq vets, artists, SDSers, radical queers, immigrants, Earth First!ers, rebel Democrats, parents, precarious workers and others” can make it known that “come August, the Democrats’ attempt at co-opting our energies and power will fall short as we make it clear that change will come from below not above, in the streets and not in their stadiums.”
With kerchiefs tied across their faces in true anarchist chic, the group offered to call off all DNC protests if Denver took its $50 million in federal security grants and gave it to the needy. Do real anarchists negotiate with the government? The irony was that they wanted the blackmail cash distributed through government programs to schools, health care, poverty programs, etc. Is there such a thing as anarchist welfare?
Poseurs, my anarchist onetime co-worker would grouse!
The DNC protesters are truly bipartisan, or anti-partisan: Similar plans are in the works for the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul the following week. But there seems to be a fresh sort of loathing for the Democrats who are seen as traitors to the anti-war cause. Whereas these types of demonstrators go to Republican events perpetually harboring hated for what the party platform, they’re massing in Denver to teach Democrats a lesson.
In what form, though, will that come? Proposals have ranged from blocking delegates’ hotels to “snake marches” impeding their entrance into the convention. Calls to action have ranged from guerrilla gardening and old-school anti-capitalist rallies to seeking “insurrectionary marching bands” (conversely, those with no musical skills are asked to bang on pots and pans like 3-year-olds). And I can’t wait to see what the insane clown posse will try.
Yet a recent YouTube video featured two puppets — “Cat with Bat” and “Beaver with Cleaver” — threatening the “disruption, subversion and total destruction” of the DNC (and, in a bat stroke of bipartisanship, the RNC), calling brethren to arms and breaking into violent protest shots that could have come from any number of G-8 or World Bank meetings.
By whatever name, the anti-government, anti-authority, anti-globalization protesters are always looking for that spotlight opportunity to get their rhetoric out, and riot gear and police barricades only add to their anti-authority euphoria.
It should be interesting to see what the Democratic Party Crashers will bring about — but one thing they shouldn’t bank on bringing about is “change.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/democratic-party-crashers-target-denver/2/
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The odd choices in Barack Obama's career
American Thinker
August 20, 2008 | J.R. Dunn
It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting the election results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all, one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen. Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake.
I'm using the term in its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energy", as the Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare".)
Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it. The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors of the poor dope who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck.
The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It's as if he's the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When given a choice between left and right, the flake goes up -- if not through the 8th dimension. And although there's plenty of rationalization, there's never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop asking.
Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by slow degrees to within arm's length of the presidency itself. That's all well and good -- we need national myths of exactly that type.
But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each step of Obama's journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions, actions bizarre enough to require some effort at explanation, through such efforts have rarely been offered. It's as if the new Horatio made it to the top by stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in his path. And we, the onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put this man in the White House, are supposed to take this as the normal career path for a successful chief executive.
What are these incidents? I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me, but let's go to the videotape.
Here's a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a choice of positions anywhere in the country. He comes from a state generally held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that can be characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the world, with harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks, but also Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it off, a state controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning Democratic machine. So where does he choose to go?
To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the country. One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is not. One that remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S. (Cicero, Al Capone's old stomping grounds, a suburb that is effectively part of the city, is completely segregated to this day.) It would be nice to learn which of these aspects most attracted young Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at the beginning of the campaign, you'd still be waiting.
And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church has been turned inside out since the videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it's claimed. But there are a plethora of black churches that would have provided him that without the taint of demented racism that Wright's church offered.
Obama apparently had to swear an oath of belief in "black liberation theology" when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that sort that make it a "cult", and not simply a "church".) Did the thought of his career ever cross his mind? Didn't he realize that church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down the line? That he'd be required to repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can ask -- but we won't get an answer.
Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind of thing that would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his life, as has been the case with Obama. But then... he writes nothing for the journal.
Now, let's get this straight: here we have one of the leading university law journals in the country, one widely cited and read. Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship have been founded on appearances in the Review, including some that have led to the highest courts in the country. Yet here's an individual who, as editor, could easily place his own work in the journal -- standard practice, nothing at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the explanation? There's none that I've heard. We can go even farther than that, to say that there is no explanation that makes the least rational sense.
We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he voted "present" over 120 times. What this means, as far as I've been able to discover, is that he voted "present" nearly as much as he voted "yes" or "no".
Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues and asks them them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not. Some ask, "Is it a good bill?" and some don't. Either way, they customarily, except in unusual circumstances, vote "yes' or "no". All except for Barack Obama. And how did get away with it? How did mollify his colleagues? How did he square himself with the party bosses? Echo answereth not.
(A good slogan could be made of this: "You can't vote present in the Oval Office." I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)
We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal, only to be disappointed. But it's not surprising, really. After all, he was only there for 143 days.
And there lies one of the keys to Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.
But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for president is under the microscope, and can't duck anything, as many a candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic mode, now is when it would come out. And has it?
The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going for it -- the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued president, the media in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the results have comprised little more than one fumble after another.
First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes -- and allowed the revelations to take on a life of their own before bothering to respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he hadn't been listening for twenty years) did little to settle the crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly crippling his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back up at any time. The latest word is that Wright -- now a deadly enemy of his onetime protégé -- has written a book. I can't wait.
Obama learned his lesson, and confronted the next threat immediately, tackling The New Yorker cover with the avidity of a man having discovered zombies in the basement. A development that could have been defused with a chuckle and a quip (the customary method is for the politician to ask the cartoonist for the original) was allowed to explode into a major issue. The campaign's relentless attacks on one of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely perplexed the country at large. After all, any Republican has had to endure far worse.
Almost simultaneously, the birth certificate saga was unfolding. On no reasonable grounds, the campaign blew off requests for a copy of the document, at last releasing it through one of the least reputable sites on the Internet, and so badly copied that literally anything could be read into it -- and was. I'm not one of those who believes that Obama was actually born in Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I still have plenty in the way of questions, almost all of them arising from how the matter was handled. Well played.
The latest pothole (or one of them, anyway) involves Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation. Corsi has been given the full New Yorker treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John Kerry's "error" in not challenging Corsi's 2004 book, Unfit for Command. What Obama missed was the fact that Kerry's major problem was not with Corsi but with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted with Kerry's hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran, and set out to take him down. Corsi's effort dovetailed with the veteran's campaign and to a large extent was swept up with it. No such campaign is in operation against Obama. The smart method of answering Corsi would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of drawing attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.
We could go on. The victory tour of Europe, and the speech in which Obama declared himself "citizen of the world", a trope guaranteed to focus the attention of Middle America. His inept handling of Hillary, in which he wound up appearing frightened of the opponent he'd just beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there, what's-his-name) a starring role in the Democratic convention is not a solution any sane individual would be comfortable with -- much less a roll-call vote. This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire affair into BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a footnote. But it's all of a piece with the campaign Obama has waged up until now.
We've never had a flake as president. We've had drunks, neurotics, cripples, louts, and fools, but never a career screwup. (I except Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere, misguided goodwill.) And I don't think we're going to get one now. Another three months of flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image will do little to assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil crunch, a gyrating economy, and a bellicose Russia. (Anyone doubting that Obama will go exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church fiasco, which unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently, the campaign goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into all but accusing John McCain of "cheating" by failing to take his place within the "cone of silence" during Obama's part of the program. The grotesque element here is that Obama's people and much of the liberal commentariat -- including Mitchell -- apparently believe that the "cone of silence", a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series, actually exists and was in use at Saddleback.)
Many of us have dealt with flakes at one time or another, often in settings involving jobs and careers, and not uncommonly in positions of some authority. We all know of the nephew, the fiancé, the boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose reputation must be protected, who must be constantly worked around if anything at all is to be accomplished, always at the cost of time, money, efficiency, and personal stress.
In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of national flakery occur only when there’s no real alternative. In this election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings, nobody ever called John McCain a flake.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/the_odd_choices_in_barack_obam.html
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In a similar vein:
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http://www.newsmax.com/morris/obama_new_jimmy_carter/2008/08/20/123638.html
Obama: the New Jimmy Carter
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:45 AM
By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann Article Font Size
Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia's invasion of Georgia.
This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter.
Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can?t win the nomination. She doesn?t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful.
If Obama lost ? after Hillary made a fuss at the convention ? they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter?s defeat). But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions.
Hillary will get to play a film extolling her virtues produced by Harry Bloodworth Thomason. Bill will speak on Wednesday night. Hillary?s name will be placed into nomination. She will get to have nominating and seconding speeches on her behalf. And, on Thursday night, the last night of the convention, the roll call will show how narrowly Obama prevailed.
So Obama gave away Tuesday night, Wednesday night and part of Thursday night to the Clintons. It will really be their convention. A stronger candidate would?ve called their bluff and confined the Clintons to one night on which both Hillary and Bill spoke (he would have outshone her). He would have blocked a roll call by allowing a voice vote to nominate by acclimation. He would have stood up to the Clintons and recaptured his own convention.
If Obama can?t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory? When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for ?restraint? on both sides.
He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. His performance was reminiscent of the worst of appeasement at Munich, where another dictator got away with seizing another breakaway province of another small neighboring country, leading to World War II.
After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.
We know so little about Obama. His experience is so thin that it?s hard to tell what kind of a president he?d be. While he nominally has been in the Senate for four years, he really only served the first two and consumed the rest of his tenure running for president and disregarding his Senate duties.
So we have no choice but to scrutinize his current transactions and statements for some clue as to who he is and what he?d do. In that context, his reaction to the first real-time foreign-policy crisis he faced as a nominee leaves his strength in doubt. So does his palsied response to the Clintons? attempt to make Denver a Clinton convention.
Is Obama an over-intellectualizing Hamlet who is incapable of decisive, strong action? With Iran on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and Russia resurgent, there isn?t much room for on-the-job learning.
© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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Crafty, you called Cafferty a "chattering twit". :-o
Perhaps...
So given his recent biased and vindictive books,
how would you categorize Dick Morris...?
In fairness, something much worse than a
mere "chattering twit?" I presume? :-D
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Well, he certainly hates those serial felons, the Hillbillary Clintons-- with good reason IMHO.
I think he is in well over his head when he comments on international affairs, but as a student of the American electoral process he has quite a bit to offer.
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Well, he certainly hates those serial felons, the Hillbillary Clintons-- with good reason IMHO.
"serial felons"??? A rather strong term. I don't remember either Bill or Hillary (don't know about the
rest of the family) ever being found guilty of any felony. Maybe I am wrong?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/20/obama-channels-uns-egeland-in-sneering-at-american-charity/
Obama channels UN’s Egeland in sneering at American charity
POSTED AT 5:25 PM ON AUGUST 20, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
As if Barack Obama didn’t do enough damage with his “above my pay grade” response on abortion at the Saddleback Church presidential forum on Saturday, Jay Ambrose finds another revealing nugget in a different answer Obama gave Rick Warren. When asked about his own shortcomings, Obama gave an initially touching response in identifying a “fundamental selfishness” in his youth that led to destructive behaviors. Unfortunately, Obama then expanded on his statement to accuse Americans of a lack of charity:
“Americans’ greatest moral failure in my lifetime,” he said, “has been that we still don’t abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”
Sorry, but he can hang that one up. Whatever the case is with his own selfishness, the evidence of an internationally superior American generosity is impressive, beginning with the numbers on our charitable giving. We give twice as much as the British per capita, and according to The American magazine, seven times as much as the Germans and 14 times as much as the Italians.
Even in inflation-adjusted dollars, the amount given each year just keeps getting larger, and meanwhile, we do far more volunteer work than in other industrialized countries.
Obama’s allegation echoes that of then-UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland in December 2004. In the immediate aftermath of the Asian tsunami disaster, Egeland commented that America was “stingy” (as well as other Western nations). He called on the US to take more money in taxes so that the funds could get redirected to the UN relief funds:
“It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really,” the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. “Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become.”
“There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy,” he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe “believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It’s not true. They want to give more.”
This makes sense if people count only that charity taken by threat of force by the government. Even then, the notion made no sense; the US sent a massive Navy presence to the islands devastated by the tsunamis to ensure the proper distribution of relief, at no small cost to our nation and military during a period when we were fighting two wars. Even apart from that, Americans raised over $2 billion privately for tsunami relief, more than doubling the $900 million spent by the US government.
In fact, no country even came close to our efforts in tsunami relief. Germany and Australia gave $1.3 billion, the UK almost $800 million, Canada $780 million, Japan $500 million, and France gave $300 million.
The American noted the difference between Americans and the rest of the world as givers:
No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans. These differences are not attributable to demographic characteristics such as education, income, age, sex, or marital status. On the contrary, if we look at two people who are identical in all these ways except that one is European and the other American, the probability is still far lower that the European will volunteer than the American.
In Spain, the government studied this question and found that the US more than doubled any Western nation in per-capita donations (in Euros):
COUNTRY…………….PER CAP. GIVING
Spain……………………..122
Belgium……………………120
U.K……………………….117
Netherlands………………..110
Ireland……………………100
France……………………..74
Finland…………………….70
Austria…………………….50
Germany…………………….39
Hungary…………………….32
Slovakia……………………25
Czech Republic………………25
Romania……………………..5
U.S……………………….278
So the notion that Americans somehow come up short on charitable giving is simply a myth. Moreover, it’s a myth with a purpose. The people who float this nonsense want to take more out in taxes so that the elites who run the government make the decisions on how the money gets spent, and not the people who originally earn the money.
Once again, we see Obama give a knee-jerk Blame America First response without knowing the facts. Americans give mightily, as a normal condition and especially in times of crisis. Does Obama think he can win the votes of Americans by slandering them?
Addendum: As Instapundit notes, perhaps Obama can stop lecturing Americans about how to care for their figurative brothers and set an example by taking care of his own real brother, living in destitution and squalor.
Update: And while we’re talking about charity, please visit Baldilocks’ site to help her support the school Obama forgot.
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""serial felons" A rather strong term. I don't remember either Bill or Hillary (don't know about the
rest of the family) ever being found guilty of any felony. Maybe I am wrong?"
Well apart from the perjury conviction, no. That said, I mean this accusation in complete seriousness. In my strongly held opinion these two are despicable criminals.
One small example: Hillary's $97,000 in commodity trading was a payoff from Tyson Foods, the largest employer in the state of AK to the wife of gubernatorial candidate Bill. I've read a serious article by the head of IRS commodity trading fraud division during the years in question and in my mind there is no doubt about this. Another small example: Selling presidential pardons. Another small example: Taking $345,000 from Loral Satellite's Bernie Schwartz to bury an investigation into Loral giving the Chinese secret rocket technology by moving it from State Dept review to Commerce Dept. Another small example: Hubster Webbell taking $700,000 from the Chinese fronts the Riady's of Indonesia in return for WH's silence on Hillary's law firm's billing crimes-- the records of which we mysteriously found in her office after the statute of limitations expired. Raising money from the Taiwainese in return for sending a US carrier through the straits between them and China.
There's plenty more. The Clinton's are dirty to the core.
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GM; I used to always like statistics in college; you can make them do almost anything. Rather than looking at the number of people, let's look at wealth. I mean don't you expect the rich American, the guy with the big house, the guy driving the new Benz to give more than the poor guy in the next town? Simply put, America (the richest nation on earth) does not give, at least in comparison to their peers. US aid in terms of percentage of their GNP has always been much lower than other industrialized nations. As a percentage (2005) of GNI again we rank low; Norway is .95, Spain .41, UK .36 Italy .19 and numerous other countries all rank above the US paltry .16.
Plus counted among US aid are the millions/billions given to Iraq and others to fight the war on terror; important of course, but if you are hungry or dying of disease that doesn't help. Take those dollars out and well, we rank even lower.
Yes, America gives privately, but that does not even come close to making up for the deficit of America being stingy as a nation. As Dr. James Obrinski said, "... private donations are feel good, short term interventions and no substituted for the vastly larger and essentially political task of bringing health care to more than a billion people."
I think, I don't know, that Obama's point might have been that America as a nation should give more to the poor and needy of the world. We should take a leadership position, not rank out of the top 10. Rather we should be number one i.e. giving the greatest amount as a percentage of GNP.
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Can you cite the source for your statistics?
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""serial felons" A rather strong term. I don't remember either Bill or Hillary (don't know about the
rest of the family) ever being found guilty of any felony. Maybe I am wrong?"
Well apart from the perjury conviction, no. That said, I mean this accusation in complete seriousness. In my strongly held opinion these two are despicable criminals.
Ahhh I have no interest turning this into a Bill and Hillary debate (or a Bush/Cheney debate), but for the record the fact is Bill and Hillary were NEVER convicted of perjury. Anotherwords, I stand by my comment that neither of them has ever been found guilty of ANY felony. I understand you have a low opinion of them as do I have a low opinion of the ethics of Bush and especially Cheney but they too have never been found guilty of any felony. It is all conjecture.
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Ahhh I have no interest turning this into a Bill and Hillary debate (or a Bush/Cheney debate), but for the record the fact is Bill and Hillary were NEVER convicted of perjury.
So if a tree falls in the forest, blue dress and "I didn't have sexual relations with that woman" and all, it doesn't make a sound? Trust the converse is true that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Petaeus, et al aren't war criminals, election stealers, tools of big oil, members of various cabals bent on world domination, felons, and all the other dreck and gibberish that many throw around about 'em?
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EXPLAINER
What Sort of Plea Did Clinton Cop?
Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, Jan. 19, 2001, at 7:09 PM ET
President Clinton and Independent Counsel Robert Ray agreed Friday to settle the seven-year Whitewater probe. The president admitted that he gave misleading testimony in the 1998 Paula Jones case about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, accepted a five-year suspension of his Arkansas law license, and promised to cover $25,000 in legal fees related to disbarment proceedings against him in Arkansas. In exchange, Ray agreed not to indict Clinton on perjury charges. What kind of agreement is this?
It's not your everyday legal agreement. It's not a declination, in which a prosecutor drops a criminal investigation because the case isn't solid enough to indict. Nor is it a plea bargain, in which a prosecutor accepts a guilty plea from the indicted in exchange for a lenient sentence (because, of course Clinton was never indicted). Nor is it a referral of a criminal case to civil authorities for resolution (such as when a criminal antitrust case is referred to civil prosecutors). The most unusual aspect of the deal is that Clinton reached a civil resolution with a criminal prosecutor.
The Clinton-Ray agreement occupies a legal space somewhere between a declination and a plea bargain. Ray declined to indict Clinton for criminal perjury (as in a declination), but he also struck a deal that requires Clinton to admit his evasions in the Jones proceedings and to pay a price (as in a plea bargain).
The deal brings in a third party, the Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Conduct, which was considering disbarment of Clinton--a civil action--over his alleged perjury. How exactly the deal was brokered is not clear. But here's what it offers the three parties: Ray goes home knowing that Clinton received some punishment for his behavior. The Supreme Court's committee gets the same satisfaction. And Clinton frees himself from the clutches of a criminal prosecutor and from a civil proceeding in which he could have been disbarred.
Next question?
Explainer thanks Paul Butler, professor of criminal law at George Washington University Law School, and Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University.
Chris Suellentrop, a former Slate staffer, writes "The Opinionator" for the New York Times.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/1006913/
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Ahhh I have no interest turning this into a Bill and Hillary debate (or a Bush/Cheney debate), but for the record the fact is Bill and Hillary were NEVER convicted of perjury.
So if a tree falls in the forest, blue dress and "I didn't have sexual relations with that woman" and all, it doesn't make a sound? Trust the converse is true that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Petaeus, et al aren't war criminals, election stealers, tools of big oil, members of various cabals bent on world domination, felons, and all the other dreck and gibberish that many throw around about 'em?
Yup! the converse is true that Bush Cheney Rove (I prefer to leave Petaeus out of this: I respect him) were never CONVICTED of being election stealers, tools of big oil, etc. Like Clinton, maybe there should be convicted, but they were not.
My only point is to clear the record; the FACT remains that Clinton was NEVER convicted of a felony. Whether he should have been, what you think he did or didn't do, agreements he made, etc. doesn't change the simple fact he was NEVER convicted therefore by definition he is not a felon. Marc had said he was; I am merely clarify the facts for the record that Clinton is not a felon; period.
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I am merely clarify the facts for the record that Clinton is not a felon; period.
Gotcha. If you commit a felony but are not convicted, you are not a felon. And Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Pol Pot are not mass murderers. . . .
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"Gotcha"??? Guinness lover; "felon" is a technical legal term; "felon; a person who has been CONVICTED of a felony". As for the group you mentioned, mass murderers they may be but they are not convicted felons. Nor is Clinton a convicted felon. Nor is Bush or Cheney. Got it?
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Sure I got it. Our Global Moderator was trying to make a simple point that you disallowed via narrow scrutiny. Maybe next we can discuss what the meaning of "is" is.
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Sure I got it. Our Global Moderator was trying to make a simple point that you disallowed via narrow scrutiny. Maybe next we can discuss what the meaning of "is" is.
???
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Biden? Biden? Bwahahahahahahahaha!
The only thing that could make this better is having Celine Dion sing "My heart will go on" to open the democratic convention.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/23/new-mccain-ad-biden/
Biden has a good point!
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LOL,
Biden is on record saying BO ain't ready and he would be honored to run against or *with* McCain.
This is unbelievable.
Wans't this the guy who cheated on his resume or some exam to get into law school. We already went through this guy?
Well just months back he said BO is "clean and articulate" which was widely condemned by the same crats as racist who will of course tell us why Biden is the greatest since Julius Ceasar (except of course the "gift from GOd" who is the BO)
ON another note:
Doesn't all this endless BS just make you want to move to Alaska and turn off the TV and radio and not read newpapers or get online sometimes?
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/23/its-smarmy-and-smirky-08/
Well, at least with Biden, Obama locks up all three of Delaware's electoral votes! :evil:
CCP,
I love watching the dems self-destruct. Wouldn't miss it.
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August 20, 2008, 6:45 a.m.
‘Just Words’ That Joe Biden Would Like To Forget
The curse of a loose mouth and Nexis.
By Jim Geraghty
The fun thing about an Obama-Biden ticket is that the McCain campaign can point to a new awkward comment by Joe Biden — either on the importance of experience, in praise of McCain, or in support of invading Iraq — that contradicts the stands and qualities of the Democratic nominee for every day from now until Election Day.
ON MCCAIN:
Biden, on a post-debate appearance on MSNBC, October 30, 2007: “The only guy on the other side who’s qualified is John McCain.”
Biden appearing on The Daily Show, August 2, 2005: “John McCain is a personal friend, a great friend, and I would be honored to run with or against John McCain, because I think the country would be better off, be well off no matter who...”
On Meet the Press, November 27, 2005: “I’ve been calling for more troops for over two years, along with John McCain and others subsequent to my saying that.”
ON OBAMA:
Reacting to an Obama speech on counterterrorism, August 1, 2007: “‘Look, the truth is the four major things he called for, well, hell that’s what I called for,’ Biden said today on MSNBC’s Hardball, echoing comments he made earlier in the day at an event promoting his book at the National Press Club. Biden added, ‘I’m glad he’s talking about these things.’”
Also that day, the Biden campaign issued a release that began, “The Biden for President Campaign today congratulated Sen. Barack Obama for arriving at a number of Sen. Biden’s long-held views on combating al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That release mocked Obama for asking about the “stunning level of mercury in fish” and asked about a proposal for the U.S. adopt a ban on mercury sales abroad at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Assessing Obama’s Iraq plan on September 13, 2007: “My impression is [Obama] thinks that if we leave, somehow the Iraqis are going to have an epiphany” of peaceful coexistence among warring sects. “I’ve seen zero evidence of that.”
Speaking to the New York Observer: Biden was equally skeptical — albeit in a slightly more backhanded way — about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Also from that Observer interview: “But — and the ‘but’ was clearly inevitable — he doubts whether American voters are going to elect ‘a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,’ and added: ‘I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.’”
Around that time, Biden in an interview with the Huffington Post, he assessed Obama and Hillary Clinton: “The more people learn about them (Obama and Hillary) and how they handle the pressure, the more their support will evaporate.”
December 11, 2007: “If Iowans believe campaign funds and celebrity will fix the debacle in Iraq, put the economy on track, and provide health care and education for America’s children, they should support another candidate,” said Biden for President Campaign Manager Luis Navarro. “But I’m confident that Iowans know what I know: our problems will require experience and leadership from Day One. Empty slogans will be no match for proven action on caucus night.”
Also that night, Biden said in a campaign ad, “When this campaign is over, political slogans like ‘experience’ and ‘change’ will mean absolutely nothing. The next president has to act.”
September 26, 2007: Biden for President Campaign Manager Luis Navarro said, “Sen. Obama said he would do everything possible to end the war in Iraq and emphasized the need for a political solution yet he failed to show up to vote for Sen. Biden’s critical amendment to provide a political solution in Iraq.
December 26, 2006: “Frankly, I think I’m more qualified than other candidates, and the issues facing the American public are all in my wheelbarrow.”
ON IRAQ:
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002, discussing Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security… “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2002: “Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”
Biden on Meet the Press in 2007, on Hussein’s WMDs: “Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them. The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued — they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued.”
Biden, on Obama’s Iraq plan in August 2007: “I don’t want [my son] going [to Iraq],” Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said from the campaign trail Wednesday, according to a report on Radio Iowa. “But I tell you what, I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years and so how we leave makes a big difference.” Biden criticized Democratic rivals such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama who have voted against Iraq funding bills to try to pressure President Bush to end the war. “There’s no political point worth my son’s life,” Biden said, according to Radio Iowa. “There’s no political point worth anybody’s life out there. None.”
Biden on Meet the Press, April 29, 2007: “The threat [Saddam Hussein] presented was that, if Saddam was left unfettered, which I said during that period, for the next five years with sanctions lifted and billions of dollars into his coffers, then I believed he had the ability to acquire a tactical nuclear weapon — not by building it, by purchasing it. I also believed he was a threat in that he was — every single solitary U.N. resolution which he agreed to abide by, which was the equivalent of a peace agreement at the United Nations, after he got out of — after we kicked him out of Kuwait, he was violating. Now, the rules of the road either mean something or they don’t. The international community says “We’re going to enforce the sanctions we placed” or not. And what was the international community doing? The international community was weakening. They were pulling away.”
Biden to the Brookings Institution in 2005: “We can call it quits and withdraw from Iraq. I think that would be a gigantic mistake. Or we can set a deadline for pulling out, which I fear will only encourage our enemies to wait us out — equally a mistake.”
Analyzing the surge on Meet the Press, September 9, 2007: “I mean, the truth of the matter is that, that the — America’s — this administration’s policy and the surge are a failure, and that the surge, which was supposed to stop sectarian violence and — long enough to give political reconciliation, there’s been no political reconciliation... The reality is that, although there has been some mild progress on the security front, there is, in fact, no, no real security in Baghdad and/or in Anbar province, where I was, dealing with the most serious problem, sectarian violence. Sectarian violence is as strong and as solid and as serious a problem as it was before the surge started.”
Biden in October of 2002: “We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after.”
On Meet the Press, January 7, 2007, assessing the proposal of a surge of troops to Iraq: “If he surges another 20, 30, or whatever number he’s going to, into Baghdad, it’ll be a tragic mistake, in my view, but, as a practical matter, there’s no way to say, ‘Mr. President, stop.’”
On Meet the Press, November 27, 2005: “Unless we fundamentally change the rotation dates and fundamentally change how many members of the National Guard we’re calling up, it’ll be virtually impossible to maintain 150,000 folks this year.” (The number of troops in Iraq peaked at 162,000 in August 2007, during the surge.)
Having said all that: “There’s something decent at the core of Joe Biden.” — Jim Geraghty, December 13, 2007
— Jim Geraghty writes the “Campaign Spot” blog for NRO.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NGRhNzJlMWY5NjdiNzhjMTRkYjMzNjYwOGJmYzNjMTY=
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In today's L.A. Times Book Section there is a good review of "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule"
by Thomas Frank
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-thomas-frank24-2008aug24,0,7775862.story
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"I knew that the man in charge of disaster preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out to be incompetent and unqualified."
**So, how did the conservatives get the incompetent DEMOCRATS elected to Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor?**
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/24/hot-air-tv-encounters-with-the-left/comment-page-1/#comments
Unadulterated leftist "thought" at the DNC.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/24/free-speech-denver-style/
Winning over the swing voters!
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/23/dnc-dispatch-the-planned-parenthood-protest/
More smart leftists at the DNC!
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Doesn't all this endless BS just make you want to move to Alaska and turn off the TV and radio and not read newpapers or get online sometimes?
Amen...
I am so looking forward to my upcoming 3 week vacation. I am making a conscious effort to avoid any and all outside information. No news, internet, or cable television.
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"I knew that the man in charge of disaster preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out to be incompetent and unqualified."
**So, how did the conservatives get the incompetent DEMOCRATS elected to Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor?**
Ahhhh, I am confused; it was actually the REPUBLICANS at the FEDERAL Emergency Management Agency who were unbelievably incompetent. Katrina was truly a terrible national disaster that should have been resolved on a Federal (Republican) level; it could not be resolved on the local level; the disaster was too big. That is what FEMA is for. And failed miserably to do.
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http://junkyardblog.net/archives/2005/09/busted-update.php
The Ray Nagin memorial motor pool.
____________________________________________________________________________
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1589
Public and Private Responses to Katrina: What Can We Learn?
October 20, 2005
Mary L. G. Theroux
This talk was presented at the Chief Executive Organization's Women's Seminar October 7, 2005.
For the lessons to be gleaned in the aftermath of Katrina, I look to two non-profits with which I have been involved for many years and that I see as providing a two-pronged strategy for solving problems—immediate-term and long-term.
I’ve served for 10 years on the San Francisco board, and three years on the National board of The Salvation Army, which Peter Drucker has termed “the most effective organization in the U.S.” It does an amazing job at addressing and alleviating immediate problems and suffering. It brings people in off the street to become clean and sober and learn to lead productive lives through its detox and transitional housing and programming. It provides job training, character-based after-school and summer camp programming for children, toys at the holidays; shelters for battered women and their children; senior feeding and housing; delivery of hot meals to the homebound, housing and programming for aged-out foster care young adults; and is one of the largest relief agencies worldwide. Based in London, it operates in 109 countries every day, with 65,000 employees in the U.S. alone. So when disaster strikes, the Salvation Army is already there, ready to spring into action.
The Independent Institute, where I am a director and Vice President, tackles many of these same problems on a long-term basis. We commission and produce research into the underlying causes of problems like homelessness, urban problems, health-care costs, energy, the crisis in education, drugs, and global poverty. We use these studies to devise and promote innovative, market-based solutions to these problems.
The Gift of Markets
Why market-based? Well, here are some statistics from 100 years ago that I think well illustrate my point:
In 1905, our average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47. Only 14% of homes had a tub; 8% had a phone; 95% of all births took place at home; women washed their hair once a month, using borax or egg shampoo; and the average worker made about $300 per year.
Our rapid advancement to the bounty found in even the poorest home in the U.S. today is due not to any government program or non-profit initiative, but primarily because profit-pursuing individuals have innovated to produce hitherto unknown prosperity.
And it’s also due to the for-profit, market-based sector that many of our threatened crises never materialize. For example, when I was a girl, it was widely predicted that there would be mass starvation in the near future, as exploding populations would overwhelm the planet’s limits on food production. Instead, the development of higher-yielding plants and better farming methods created an international green revolution.
Yet when was the last time you received an invitation for a gala black-tie event honoring a for-profit hero? Don’t most of us instead find ourselves inundated with celebrations of those who have “given back” or honoring “public servant” politicians?
Social Innovation and Civil Society
That said, there certainly are problems we see in our communities that we would like to be able to do something about, and we form non-profit organizations to do so. And innovation and entrepreneurship can do much to address those as well. Americans have a long tradition of banding together to do just that. Probably the best-documented study of this can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. A young French aristocrat, Tocqueville toured America in 1831-32, and he made an amazingly extensive study of our society and institutions. One thing that struck him the most was our penchant for forming what he dubbed “associations”:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or dimunitive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools....
Unlike the societies Tocqueville had known—the England of a privileged aristocracy, where Noblesse Oblige would tend to the poor, or post-revolutionary France, whose strong central government was assumed to be responsible for taking care of all such problems, in the American democratic society power and money were widely diffused among individuals, such that they had to combine forces to solve any given problem:
Among democratic nations ... all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. [emphasis added]
So, I think our tradition of innovative individuals forming alliances to solve problems stands us in good stead. The Independent Institute’s book, The Voluntary City, similarly brings together case studies of innovative alliances that historically met and many which continue to meet, needs from housing, transportation, education, medical care, to police and law courts. Long before there was unemployment or health insurance, for example, many people belonged to mutual-aid societies, into which they would pay dues. When they found themselves out of work, facing unexpected medical or other costs, they could receive funding from the society. By 1925, there were 120,000 such societies across the country.
And so we have a rich and proven-effective tradition of voluntary associations solving problems. Yet, in case after case, we see government taking over more and more of our voluntary sector. And that is why I’m so concerned about the calls in the aftermath of Katrina to expand FEMA and other programs.
First of all, there’s just the plain evidence that the public sector doesn’t do the job nearly as well as the private. Let’s take a look at the vast differences in the responses to Katrina from the public vs. the private sector.
Responses to Katrina: Public vs. Private
FEMA, and all levels of state and local governments in the affected areas have claimed that a disaster of Katrina’s proportions could not have been foreseen or planned for and they should thus be given a pass—or better, yet, a bigger budget and more power—for having performed so badly.
Yet let’s take a look at what happened in the private sector:
The giant private hospital company HCA held a “Hurricane Lessons Learned” planning meeting last fall, following last year’s devastating Florida hurricanes. Some key gaps they identified were: cell phones often fail, so alternative phone systems are needed. Roads become impassable, so emergency supplies have to be stored closer to hospitals. Back-up generators are needed. As a result of the meeting, HCA provided its hospitals with satellite phones, hurricane shutters and additional backup generators. It struck deals with local businesses like refrigeration, water, diesel and gasoline companies, to provide supplies quickly in the event of an emergency. In hurricane-prone areas it also warehoused food, medical supplies and other gear closer to its hospitals. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, senior management set up a “war room” and quickly decided they would need to lease 20 helicopters to evacuate their Tulane hospital. HCA’s chairman and CEO didn’t hesitate in ordering them to do so. They used ham radios to create a makeshift air-traffic control system and immediately began ferrying critically ill patients out, without one mishap.
Literally across the street, the state-run Charity hospital was without emergency supplies and unable to get any governmental help in evacuating. Subsisting on fruit cocktail and a dwindling supply of water, Charity’s patients were only saved by being ferried by boat to Tulane and evacuated by HCA’s privately-leased helicopters.
Similarly, Wal-Mart and Home Depot had emergency-response plans in place and their senior management immediately sprang into action ordering them implemented, sending supplies like generators, food, water, flashlights and batteries into the areas hit. They were able to quickly establish and maintain a supply chain throughout the region. Pfizer distributed needed drugs and medicines via Wal-Mart and other retailers. Budweiser delivered truckloads of water and ice. Ford provided vehicles for search and rescue.
At the heart of the corporate response was a stunning array of advanced communication networks that kept firms in touch and coordinating. Following last year’s tsunami aid effort, the Business Roundtable had arranged for each of its 160 member companies to designate a disaster-relief point man. They were in place and ready before Katrina hit. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce set up a clearinghouse to compile lists of needed supplies. Each donor company indicated what order it could fill, eliminating duplication or delay. Black & Decker’s employees worked through Labor Day weekend to produce more generators.
And on and on.
Meanwhile, what was going on the New Orleans mayor’s and Louisiana governor’s offices? Both expressed frustration and helplessness, caused by having no plans for an emergency of this magnitude. The mayor’s office set up operations in the privately owned and operated Hyatt hotel, judged the safest base. They were equipped with old field-type phones that couldn’t be recharged. Both the governor and mayor claimed they were paralyzed by lack of communication, and pointed the finger at the feds’ failure to come to the rescue. The entire governmental response, from top to bottom, was beset by lack of leadership, action, and absolutely no coordination or communication between any two agencies. It had been immediately pointed out following 9/11 that much of that rescue effort was hindered and many of the deaths of firefighters and police were due to the inability of rescue agencies to communicate among and between themselves. Yet four years later, and despite billions of dollars distributed to and by the new Dept. of Homeland Security, the exact same systems were in place.
When one mayor in Louisiana called FEMA to get supplies, he was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually a bureaucrat promised to write a memo to his supervisor. Evacuees on a boat could not receive permission to dock along the Mississippi river. A sheriff was told he could only get the help he was seeking if he emailed his request—of course, his parish was flooded and without electricity.
School buses sat idle in parking lots—contrary to the City of New Orleans’ emergency plan that called to use such buses to evacuate residents to safety—not to the Superdome, which lay within the threatened area. Furthermore, the Superdome had been used as emergency shelter before, and there had been violence and civil disorder within it on those occasions. Yet no provision had been made to prevent the recurrence of such violence that had occurred before and worsened under the “hell-like” conditions following Katrina. The people in the Superdome were essentially held under house arrest, not allowed to leave or even go outside for fresh air. No provision was made to provide them food, water, sanitation, counseling, or even communicate to them what was happening and what they could expect. It’s little wonder that such desperate “Lord of the Flies” conditions led to a breakdown in civil society. It could have been a laboratory study in what happens when you treat people like cattle—only worse, because cattle owners feed and water their stock.
A group of 500 guests in French Quarter hotels pooled their resources to come up with $25,000 to charter buses to come and rescue them, subsidizing those without the means to contribute. They waited 48 hours for the buses whose arrival was said to be “imminent,” only to learn that the military had commandeered them as soon as they arrived in the city. Once kicked out of the hotels, “by orders,” they learned they would not be allowed in either of the two city shelters—the Convention Center and the Superdome—which had descended into humanitarian and health hellholes. Yet neither could they leave the city—those trying to leave the city on foot were turned back by armed police, “protecting” neighboring cities from fleeing evacuees. Only those with transport could leave, yet, as we’ve seen, transport was denied them.
Companies wanting to send in planes and helicopters to rescue their people were prohibited from doing so. One company contacted Louisiana Congressman Bobby Jindal’s office for help identifying who could grant them permission to send in a helicopter to rescue their stranded employees. Unable to find anyone at FEMA, the FAA or the military who would accept responsibility to grant permission, the congressman advised the company to just go ahead.
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What is probably most inexcusable and has been kept relatively quiet is that the Red Cross and the Salvation Army were staged and ready to enter New Orleans with food, water and other emergency supplies. The roads to the Superdome and the Convention Center were open, and other areas of the city remained similarly accessible. But the Louisiana Dept. of Homeland Security denied them permission to go in, saying their presence would “prevent people from leaving.”
In the ultimate, horrible example of a bureaucratic Catch-22, the government kept people from leaving New Orleans, and the Dept. of Homeland Security would not let aid agencies in, saying having aid available in the city would create a magnet to keep people from leaving.
Eventually, of course, aid agencies were allowed in, and within a few days following Katrina, the Salvation Army had in place 10 mobile feeding units, including at the evacuation points, as well as 2 large mobile kitchens, with a total capacity of serving 200,000 meals per day. As of Sept. 30, the Salvation Army has served over 2 million hot meals plus over 3 million sandwiches, snacks, and drinks from its 150 mobile feeding trucks plus 10 field kitchens deployed throughout the region. It has distributed over 35,000 cleaning kits: brooms, mops, buckets and detergent; and 60,000 food boxes. It has sheltered and provided counseling to approximately half a million people. Its Emergency Radio Network, designed to help people locate family members, has received over 60,000 inquiries and found almost 16,000 survivors. A woman from our San Francisco office was dispatched to run the Astrodome operations, returning last week. As Hurricane Rita built up, the Salvation Army deployed office workers, including our webmaster, to Houston to be prepared to provide disaster assistance there—everyone else was already deployed following Katrina. In all, almost 7,000 Salvation Army officers, together with almost 7,000 Salvation Army employees, plus thousands of trained volunteers have served in the affected areas, and they will remain as long as relief is needed. They’re still serving in Florida in the aftermath of last year’s hurricanes there, and they remained onsite at Ground Zero for two years following 9/11, with a large tent facility housing rest facilities, food, clean socks, counseling and other needs for the rescue workers there.
The Salvation Army is being judged the most effective relief agency throughout the Gulf Coast—and, with reason. A front-page story in the September 29 Wall Street Journal praised the Salvation Army for its quick, effective hurricane relief efforts. Based from their operations already well-established in nearly every community, where they work daily in permanent shelters with the homeless and poor and with people trying to put their lives back together after an apartment fire or years of alcohol and drug abuse, they’re well prepared to meet the needs of victims of natural disasters. Its military-style structure is designed for rapid mobilization and puts a premium on training people in advance to deal with disasters. Most people aren’t aware that the Salvation Army is actually a church. Its officers are all ordained ministers and they are in the Army as a calling—their way of ministering to the poorest of the poor in the name of Christ, with love and without discrimination, and for very little pay. The head of the Red Cross draws a salary of $450,000. The head of the U.S. Salvation Army is paid less than $30,000. They do this work from their hearts, and they do it very, very well.
Now I don’t want to make it sound as if I think that every private organization walks on water. Not every private entity did perform well in the disaster. The government says it will bring criminal charges against the owners of a nursing home whose 34 abandoned residents died, and it is proper that they should be held liable for this negligence. But who do the victims of the gross and arguably criminal neglect in the Superdome, the Convention Center—or for that matter, the thousands whose property and lives were lost due to the government’s failure to maintain its levees—sue?
The Lesson
For this is the salient point: private organizations, whether for-profit or non-profit, perform or lose their customers or their donors. When a private entity fails to deliver on its promise, or actually causes harm, it is held liable for the failure and pays the damages. When government fails, it gets a bigger budget and even more power.
Relying on big bureaucracies is itself a recipe for disaster. Bureaucracies do not talk to each other, and they are actually disincented from solving problems. Last year’s 9/11 commission issued a comprehensive, damning indictment of the intelligence community’s failure to perform its basic function. Yet rather than waiting for any facts on which to act, government had instead three years before created a whole new level of bureaucracy that could be guaranteed to only exacerbate the failings we saw 9/11 and now again with Katrina.
And that is exactly the danger we face again now: suddenly, in the heat of the immediate, emotional aftermath of the disaster, frantic calls go up to have FEMA do more, not less. The federal government is jumping in with promises to perform tasks no-one would have dreamed appropriate following previous disasters: reimburse faith-based charities for their expenses in providing relief; rebuilding entire neighborhoods and communities under no-bid, cost-plus contracts.
What’s going to happen when we allow the pre-empting of our very effective charitable sector by bureaucracy? What’s going to happen to the voluntary, charitable sector when people see enough examples of their tax dollars being used for the purpose for which they used to designate their charitable giving? Just as with the tradition of mutual-aid and other voluntary initiatives, private charity will fade as government’s involvement increases.
Although you may not be aware of it, this is already happening. Organizations like the Salvation Army are already dependent on government funding. When that funding is lost in the face of politics, as happened here in San Francisco when the Salvation Army’s faith-based mission fell in disfavor among our extremist city council, we lost $3 million per year in government funding of detox, homeless shelter, and senior feeding programming. Losing the funding forced us to revitalize the board and get back in closer touch with our community—now that we were again wholly dependent upon it for support.
We also took a close look at the programs for which we had suddenly lost funding, and discovered, a bit to our chagrin, that they could actually be run better and more efficiently than government requirements. I dubbed it the “Pentagon model” of social service. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the adage that the Pentagon is always preparing to fight the last war—commissioning weapons systems, for example, designed to defeat the Soviet Union, not fight a dispersed, decentralized War on Terror; and of course its well-deserved reputation for being bloated. While nothing like that scale, several of our government-funded programs turned out to be a bit behind the times, and we revamped them to better meet our community’s needs today. For example, the Federal Meals on Wheels program has an age 60 minimum. Revamped as the privately-funded Meals That Heal, in addition to providing for seniors, we also deliver nutritious meals to younger people homebound by diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
Similarly, there had been excessive administrative and reporting requirements. We were able to cut administrative positions and place a case-worker in every one of our 16 facilities across the city.
Disasters of Government Failure
As the Independent Institute’s research shows time and again, the Katrina disaster aftermath is simply the current most obvious example of government failure. It is not the exception, it is the pattern: a crisis occurs, often because of existing government failure such as inadequate levees, the cry goes up that government must “do something,” it moves in with ambitious new programs that drive out voluntary initiatives, until the myth that government has to do it or it wouldn’t be done is true.
We saw only too clearly in New Orleans what happens when government is allowed a monopoly on disaster response: bureaucratic bungling and mistreatment of those who most need help.
But to me, at least as important as the fact that government performs relief work less well than private initiatives, is the message Tocqueville drew from observing our society: voluntary association brings us closer together and keeps us free and “democratic.” By working together in voluntary association to help one another and solve our own problems, we learn that we as individuals are effective and powerful.
The lessons of Katrina provide a picture-perfect case study of what happens when we surrender these functions to nameless, unaccountable bureaucrats: levee systems that everyone knows are inadequate and no one does anything about; a Keystone Cop scenario of bureaucrats pointing fingers and waiting for the feds to save them; and helpless victims.
I prefer the very real and well-functioning world documented in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Independent Institute’s The Voluntary City. Communities in which individuals working together in voluntary association meet and solve their problems in common.
Unlike the Superdome, the Astrodome was operated as a shelter under the auspices of the Red Cross and The Salvation Army. Government forecasts had predicted that evacuees would be there for months. Instead, less than 4,000 remained in the Astrodome two weeks after Katrina, with all of them placed within a month.
So instead of the Federal government’s disbursing no-bid, cost-plus contracts to rebuild New Orleans (and who on earth is the master planner of what is being built, where, and why?) how about instead declaring the affected region an enterprise zone—exempt from tax and regulatory restrictions? There would be an inflow of investment as dramatic as the phoenix rising from the ashes. Think Hong Kong, that island rock with no natural resources, having even to import drinking water. Yet the economic success story of the 20th century—that could be New Orleans, freed of the most corrupt government at all levels in the entire country. Freed of slums, dead-end lives of hopelessness.
As for the levees, the failure of which was the proximate cause of New Orleans’ devastation, let’s fire the Army Corps of Engineers and turn that agency over to stakeholders who will have incentives to invest in bringing it up to 21st century standards and be held accountable if it fails. You could privatize it as many former iron-curtain countries privatized formerly state-run enterprises, by distributing a share to every citizen of the area; or have the levees be owned and operated through insurance schemes; or bid them out for sale to a consortium of business or other condominium-type holding.
The wonderful thing about the market is that no one has to be prescient—when you get barriers out of the way, innovative entrepreneurs devise ways of solving needs never thought of before. For example, one of the most vibrant economies today is Estonia. This former Soviet satellite was so thrilled to be freed of their hated Russian rulers that they have since 1990 allowed almost no central control. The result is the most booming, energetic, happy place—rediscovering and revitalizing things like traditional native dance. At the same time it is one of the most advanced countries technologically in the world. Estonia leapfrogged traditional telephone technologies and jumped right into the wireless age. You can even pay for your parking meter from your cell phone.
It’s amazing what happens when you set the private sector free.
So, what can we learn from Katrina? First of all, let’s realize that no knight in shining armor is going to come save us, so let’s do what needs to be done ourselves. Let’s believe Mayor Gavin Newsom when he tells us he won’t be able to evacuate San Francisco in the event of an emergency, and that Rudy Guiliani didn’t actually single-handedly save New York post-9/11. They’re just guys, they’re not super-heroes.
The Independent Institute will pursue activities like documenting and publicizing examples like the Business Roundtable’s proactive emergency communication system. Let’s champion those examples, get involved in efforts to promote and replicate them, and support and get involved with organizations like the Independent Institute and the Salvation Army that produce solutions.
And let’s help spread the word to others that this is the way to take care of ourselves and those in our communities who need help. Yes, it’s work, time, and money, and government’s promises to do it for us, at an invisible cost to us, are tempting to believe. But next time we hear a great new proposal for a great new government initiative that’s going to solve everything once and for all, let’s just say, “No, thanks. We’d rather do it ourselves.”
Mary L. G. Theroux is Vice President and Secretary at The Independent Institute and a member of both the National and San Francisco Advisory Boards of the Salvation Army. She is also former Chairman of the San Francisco Salvation Army Advisory Board.
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Woof JDN:
IMHO GM's response to you (cut and paste as it may be :evil: :lol: ) makes many very cogent points. I await your responce :-D
In a separate vein, it is shocking that MSM has not covered BO getting his butt kicked in debate with a black conservative.
TAC!
Marc
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Woof JDN:
IMHO GM's response to you (cut and paste as it may be :evil: :lol: ) makes many very cogent points. I await your responce :-D
In a separate vein, it is shocking that MSM has not covered BO getting his butt kicked in debate with a black conservative.
TAC!
Marc
Marc,
It is my thought on a disaster of the magnetude that the government FEMA was or should have been
most qualified to coordinate and fund the response. They failed and should be held responsible.
That being said,
What can I say? GM cut and pasted well :-)
I agree with most of the "Lessons Learned"
And I think the Salvation Army is an Outstanding Organization and
I have a very high respect for the Red Cross here and internationally.
Plus many other organizations, churches, etc. stepped up when the
government didn't. Almost all were truly outstanding.
It just wasn't (couldn't be) enough without government's help. And
I think FEMA failed.
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I'll agree that the FEMA was a screw up too, headed by a crony. Anyway, back to the subject of this thread.
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Due to our constitutional "separation of powers", it is your local level government that is responsible for police/fire/EMS. Then it falls to your state. The USG is 3rd. in line. FEMA is much more of a "check writing" entity rather than a first responder by congressional design.
BTW, you are actually the person who holds the core responsibility for your security and safety. Much of the problems in N.O. result from the entrenched mentality of governmentally based learned helplessness.
Even "Kah-lee-fohr-niah" encourages individual preparation:
http://www.oes.ca.gov/WebPage/oeswebsite.nsf/Content/42B416238228CDEA8825742F0072DF84?OpenDocument
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I understand and agree for that smaller manageable tragedies I am responsible and then local and then the State; BUT like Katrina, an overwhelming tragedy, if CA had the "big one" I would hope FEMA and the Federal Government would move to the head of the line rather than being 3rd man up. They have the resources and the money and supposedly the expertise.
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http://people.howstuffworks.com/fema3.htm
"FEMA employs about 2,600 people full-time nationwide, with a reserve of 4,000 more who remain on standby until a disaster strikes."
**If the "BIG ONE" hits SoCal, the entire FEMA entity isn't even a drop in the bucket for what will be needed.**
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GM is correct IMHO
Anyway, lets return to the subject of this thread-- and there is plenty of raw material for it:
Michelle Obama spoke last night-- assessment? I saw reports of some Nazi type clowns arrested for a plot to shoot BO, McC was on the Leno show (I caught only the last few minutes, he looked good, and was pithy AND funny-- a good combination) Biden is a major gun grabber-- how will this play in the wake of the assassination plot? etc etc etc
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Yes, McCain did look good on Leno; even I had to like him :-) I find it odd/disappointing that Obama who is highly educated, a fine lawyer, is still unwilling to debate in an open forum. This is a close race; no one is truly ahead, so let them go head to head. Obama's reluctance to do so may haunt him.
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I find it amazing how the Clintons still make it about *them*.
This country just cannot be rid of them. That is why I felt Limbaugh was wrong to try to down BO and up Hillary in the nomination process. Any time we get a chance to dispose of these two criminals we should. We will not be rid of them in my life time.
Is any Republican not glad its BO and not the Clintons now? How would you like it if McCain was running against Shrillary? I would take BO as my opponent any day.
It is amazing all the gals who run around saying she lost because of sexism. Oh I get it. It's not that she is a lying stinking manipulative selfish thief. It is because she is a woman. Right, and she "broke through 18 million ceilings". This country is f***.
Now of course hedge fund Chelsea is being groomed to continue the clan of grifters.
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It is amazing all the gals who run around saying she lost because of sexism. Oh I get it. It's not that she is a lying stinking manipulative selfish thief. It is because she is a woman. Right, and she "broke through 18 million ceilings". This country is f***.
Now of course hedge fund Chelsea is being groomed to continue the clan of grifters.
O Great Moderator in the Sky, whether you like the Clintons (some do, many do not) or not, or whether you have criticism to offer, isn't there a limit on a forum searching for truth? As GM (with whom I often disagree) appropriately likes to say and usually does, "back it up with facts." But wonton defamation doesn't seem appropriate or am I wrong?
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I found M.O.'s speech to be boring and run of the mill. My wife thought it was overly sincere and heartfelt, which means it probably played well to the Oprah watchers in the audience (she found it ridiculous that there were women in the crowd crying). And I don't know why media "professionals" have not yet figured out that children, microphones, and live television NEVER work.
All in all, a wasted night for the Dems. Tonight will be for Hillary supporters (who I predict will promptly leave the building post-speech) and the rest is just the usual over-hyped garbage. I find the conventions to be an incredible waste of time and money.
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"isn't there a limit on a forum searching for truth?"
Everything I posted is the truth.
Oh I get it. She is not a liar. She is not a criminal. She is not manipulative. She is not selfish. And they are not grooming Chelsea for politics. And Chelsea is not cleaning up as a hedgefund insider.
I get it - she is not liked because she has a vagina.
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I get it - she is not liked because she has a vagina.
:?
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Marc, you mentioned you don't like Cafferty, but you might find this article interesting.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/25/cafferty.clintons/index.html
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JDN,
Just another way of saying what is claimed by many. That is she didn't win the nomination because she is a woman.
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http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2008/08/charlie_wilsons_slip.html
Charlie Wilson's Slip
Posted by BLAKE DVORAK
Former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson -- yes, that Charlie Wilson -- was speaking at an anti-war rally when he, um, flubbed a line:
"We should be led by Osama bin Laden," he said, then quickly corrected himself. "I mean Obama and Biden."
How does that Southwest commercial go? Want to get away?
**Honest mistake. :-D **
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/01/biden-obama-will-surrender-on-nukes-to-iran/
Biden: Obama will surrender on nukes to Iran
POSTED AT 9:13 AM ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
Ha’aretz reports that Joe Biden told Israeli leaders that they would have to accept a nuclear Iran if Barack Obama wins the Presidency. Israelis expressed “amazement” at Biden’s attitude:
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was quoted Monday as telling senior Israeli officials behind closed doors that the Jewish state will have to reconcile itself to a nuclear Iran.
In the unsourced report, Army Radio also quoted Biden as saying that he opposed “opening a additional military and diplomatic front.”
Biden, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has long been considered strongly pro-Israel. His nomination as Barack Obama’s running mate had been expected to shore up the Democrats’ strength with U.S. Jewish voters.
For those unfamiliar with Ha’aretz, it doesn’t exactly have a knee-jerk conservative spin. In fact, it’s at best a center-left editorial board. They’re not terribly sympathetic to the Bush administration or most of its policies. They wouldn’t have much reason to simply make this up.
If anyone doubted that an Obama presidency would surrender to radicalism and hostile forces abroad, this should clinch it. Biden has pretty much told the Israelis that they’re on their own, and America won’t bother to support them against the nutcases in the region. If Obama and Biden don’t have the courage to face Iran’s nuclear ambitions, then exactly when will they defend American interests?
And what of our Western allies? Europe wants Iranian nukes stopped just as much as we do, especially since they’re more directly threatened by them. Obama and Biden talk about bolstering our alliances, but it looks like they’re more interested in leaving them holding the bag.
Hugh Hewitt sees this as further evidence that Obama is nothing more than the second coming of Jimmy Carter:
American supporters of Israel have to understand that Obama-Biden is a disaster for Israel’s security. It would be Carter II, but without the keen insight that Carter brought to Iran policy.
It’s worse than that. Carter at least had a deranged notion of justice as a foundation; this just looks like cowardice.
Update: The Jerusalem Post says this conversation took place three years ago:
Army Radio reported that the Delaware senator was heard saying in closed conversations with Jerusalem officials three years ago that he was firmly opposed to an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reportedly claimed that Israel would likely have to come to terms with a nuclear Iran. He reportedly expressed doubt over the effectiveness of economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic and said he was against the opening of an additional military and diplomatic front, saying that the US had more pressing problems, such as North Korea and Iraq.
The Ha’aretz report didn’t mention a time frame. Still, either way, the message is the same: Biden won’t stand up to Iran, and since Barack Obama chose him for his foreign-policy chops, one has to figure that Obama agrees. After all, Biden is the man who once proposed sending $200 million to Tehran to pacify the mullahs.
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Sarah Palin and Joe Biden: Worlds Apart
Friday, August 29, 2008
Even before this week, the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was clear. For one, McCain joined more than 300 other members of Congress in signing a "friend of the court" brief, in District of Columbia v. Heller, urging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the Second Amendment and against D.C.'s handgun ban.
Obama refused to sign the Heller brief, and supports reinstituting the Clinton gun and magazine ban. He also supports Ted Kennedy's bill to ban semi-automatic handguns in the guise of "micro-stamping," and supports banning inexpensive handguns as "junk guns."
But now that each candidate has chosen his running mate, the difference is even clearer than before. And when it comes to guns, the two prospective vice-presidents are as far apart as the states from which they hail.
Sen. McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is a NRA Life Member and hunter who says, "I support our Constitutional right to bear arms and am a proponent of gun safety programs for Alaska's youth," adding "I have always strongly supported the personal use of fish and game by Alaskans. I grew up hunting and fishing in Alaska, and I am proud to raise my children with this same uniquely Alaskan heritage."
NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox says "Governor Palin doesn't just talk about supporting the Second Amendment, it's part of her life, and she did her part to vindicate the Second Amendment for all Americans when Alaska joined 30 other states in signing a legal brief supporting Heller's challenge to the D.C. gun-ban."
As for Joe Biden, from Delaware, the Brady Campaign sums it up in a straightforward enough fashion, saying, "Senator Biden has been a consistent supporter of the Brady Campaign," and "Senator Biden was a key player in the fight for the federal assault weapons ban that passed in 1994. He also worked hard for passage of the Brady Law (sic)."
In fact, Biden introduced an "assault weapons" ban in Congress five years before the Clinton gun and magazine ban was imposed. In 1989, Biden's Senate Bill 1970 proposed to ban the Colt AR-15 and eight similar firearms as "assault weapons," and authorize the Secretary of the Treasury (in reality, BATF) and the Attorney General to recommend to Congress any other firearms, regardless of type, to be banned as "additional assault weapons."
As lead sponsor of the Senate crime bill to which the Feinstein gun ban amendment was attached, Biden was instrumental in the passage of the 1994 Clinton gun and magazine ban. Biden reiterated his support for the ban—and, in fact, took credit for authoring it—in response to a question at the CNN/YouTube debate earlier this year (to view the video, please click here).
Biden voted for the ban on a stand-alone vote in 1993, and voted to extend the ban in 2004 as an amendment to the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act." He also included a renewal of the ban in his crime bill last year, along with gun show restrictions.
Currently, Biden's S. 2237 proposes to renew the Clinton ban on roughly 200 makes and models of semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and handguns on the basis of things like the shape of their grips, and on ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, regardless of the kind of firearm in which they are used.
As if that's not enough, Biden voted against the law that prohibits lawsuits designed to bankrupt law-abiding firearm manufacturers and dealers. He also refused to sign the Congressional brief in Heller, and voted to confirm only one of the five justices who ruled in favor of the Second Amendment in Heller, yet he voted to confirm all four justices who voted against the Second Amendment in that case.
To put it simply, Gov. Sarah Palin would be one of the most pro-gun vice-presidents in American history, and Joe Biden would definitely be the most anti-gun.
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The predictable from a woman of the left. At least Palin won an election against an incumbent. What election has Hillary won?
Oh yes. And Obama has all his support because of his qualifications. :roll: Has this or would this lady ever support anyone from the right? I doubt it.
September 2, 2008
A woman — but why this woman?
Susan Reimer
September 1, 2008
Sen. John McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the presumptive Republican nominees, greet supporters in Washington, Pa. (Getty Images / August 30, 2008)
So. This is what being pandered to feels like.
John McCain picked Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and mother of five, to be his running mate to woo women like me.
He seems to think that my girlfriends and I are so disappointed that an utterly qualified woman is not going to be president that we will jump at the chance to vote for an utterly unqualified woman for vice president.
You gotta love a guy who thinks things are that simple.
• More news Women already outvote men in this country, and it isn't because we like voting for all those women on the ballot.
Does McCain think we will be so grateful for a skirt on the ticket that we won't notice that she's anti-abortion, a member of the NRA and thinks creationism should be taught alongside evolution?
His selection of Sarah Palin is insulting on so many levels that I am starting to feel like the Geico caveman.
You want to look like a maverick and like you think outside the box? Pick a woman for a running mate.
You want to look good to the evangelicals? Choose a running mate with a Down syndrome child.
(When James Dobson, the conservative Christian radio host who fancies himself a kingmaker, jumped up to say that the selection of Palin means he can now "pull the lever" for John McCain, I almost felt sick. I don't know what I'll do if she trots out the story of her 5-month-old baby to shore up the Republican base.)
Palin's personal story is very compelling, but it reads more like a movie pitch than a resume for national leadership.
Champion high school athlete, beauty queen. Married to her high school sweetheart. Car-pooling supermom who went from PTA activist to mayor of her tiny (population 9,000) Alaskan town.
Fisherman, sportswoman, hunter. Speaks truth to power in a state corrupted by oil. Has a son headed to Iraq. A woman who made the decision to carry to term a baby she knew to be developmentally disabled.
She makes John McCain, Naval Academy graduate, fighter pilot and prisoner of war, look like just another grouchy, old, rich white guy.
Oh. Right. He is.
And that's the other point here. McCain is 72. He has had at least four go-rounds with melanoma, a deadly cancer.
Under the circumstances, the decision to choose this woman over the likes of, say, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson looks less like a stroke of genius than a stroke. It looks crazy. It looks wacky.
And that's the other part of this decision that is so infuriating.
If you are going to pick a woman for the sake of picking a woman, can you at least make it a credible choice?
Can you at least make a choice that doesn't give the gag writers for Jay Leno and Jon Stewart the month off?
(The jokes started immediately: She won't be able to hold her own against Joe Biden in a vice presidential debate. But wait until the swimsuit portion of the competition.)
Can you at least make a choice that doesn't have Rush Limbaugh panting? (He called Palin a "babe." It was another memorable moment in the ascent of women in this country.)
Barack Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review, for heaven's sake. And the best McCain can do is a woman who minored in poly-sci at the University of Idaho?
Palin might do just fine during the campaign. And she might do an excellent job of going to diplomatic funerals. (Which McCain once said is the only job description for the vice presidency.)
But it is more likely that she will be in over her head, and all the women McCain thinks he is courting will be cringing for our sister instead. And then we will be furious at him for setting one of us up to fail.
It isn't just that Palin might look bad campaigning against the likes of Biden or Obama.
It's that she already looks bad compared to the likes of Hillary Clinton.
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I think Susan Reimer said it perfectly; I am glad you printed the whole article.
By the way, "what election has Hilary won?" Ahhh, you might not like her, but did you forget
she is a U.S. Senator from the State of New York. Again, like her or not, but the experience
of Hilary, her education, her intellect, puts Palin to shame. I understand Reimer's point.
Palin was mayor of a town of 9000 (I don't know offhand any towns that small) and
governor for two years of a State with a raindeer population greater than the number of people.
She's not too bright (nor is McCain), she seems to be a "nice person" but second in line to be President???
Especially one who already is 72 and has had cancer??? Surely McCain could have done better???
If you truly wanted a qualified woman, how about Rice? First class, very very bright, and experienced.
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IMHO Rice has been a substantial factor in some of President Bush's biggest errors.
Speaking of Hillary Evita Peron, the idea that being married to Bill Clinton was presidential preparation is something I take as seriously as Laura Bush or Nancy Reagan being presidential timber. After she bombed with her efforts to socialize 14% of GDP, the only substantive things she did were to dodge sniper fire, hide the billing records of her law firm which would have revealed in her role in the criminal activities of her law firm (IIRC Webster Hubbell took the fall and got $700,000 from the Riadys(a Chinese front) for staying quiet), sell presidential pardons via her husband, and steal White House furninture and silverware on her way out of town.
As for Palin, I share the notion she is not ready to step in, but on the other hand, neither is BO-- and he is the presidential candidate for the Dems, not the Veep candidate. Substantial cognitive dissonance in the Dems brayng about this :-P
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I think Rice was just following Bush's direction; that's her job. And she is respected around the world. And at least she is qualified.
And I agree, in general, being married to the President doesn't qualify you for anything (although I find it odd that when a politician dies his spouse is the first to run for that office); that being said, Hillary, much more than Bush or Reagan participated in the legislative process. As for experience, she is a U.S. Senator; something a lot more than only being a two year governor or Alaska is in comparison. And oh yeah, before that she was Mayor of a town with 9000 people.
And as we have discussed before, allegations, rumors, and false inuendoes about Hilary do not a criminal make. Rather she was found guilty of nothing, zero, nada. Nor was her husband... In politics, it seems everyone is being accused of something. The ones that are proven, taken to court and indicted, those are the ones to watch. The others are just talk.
And while BO does not have comperable experience to McCain, he does have more national experience than does Palin. Not to mention his intellect, as issue I believe, is far superior to Palin or for that matter McCain. She/Palin seems like a "nice person"; that is fine for a neighbor, but as President???
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I see no evidence that Barry-O is any sort of intellect. Sure, he adopts pseudo-intellectual poses but his academic career is as accomplishment-free as his career as a "community organizer" or politician. Although given he was never arrested for dealing coke, he might have some ability there. I doubt we'll see that touted by his campaign.
Both McCain and Palin have actually done tangible things in their lives. If you want to talk intellectually rigorous jobs, put naval aviator at the top of the list.
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BO got into the Senate in a freak election wherein a quality Republican opponent had to drop out at the last moment and only Alan Keyes :roll: was available to step in to be his opponent. BO had 143 days in the Senate before he announced. He has a subcommittee from which he could have launched various investigations related to foreign affairs, but , , , how rare! , , , has done nothing.
Look, I went to Columbia Law School-- not Harvard but not too shabby either. My Constitutional Law prof was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I've been around these people and my clear sense of it is that a goodly number of them are as clueless about the real world as they are bright. They think to cleverly articulate a synthesis of positions matters in the real world.
BO has done NOTHING but talk and fence with words. That ain't excrement in the real world. He has never worked in the private sector, never run a business, never been in harm's way, never broken with left liberal orthodoxy, never put together a major piece of legislation, never written a law reivew article. The man has DONE nothing.
As for Lady Evita, no she hasn't been convicted, but I have followed her in these matters pretty durn closely and I think her quite guilty. You would too I suspect , , , if she were a Republican. :evil: :lol: :-)
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Not one law review article, and he was the freakin' editor. :roll:
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The only thing not felonious IMO about Hillary's commodity trading escapades was that the records were hidden until the statute of limitations had expired. Certainly she is entitled to presumption of innocence in a criminal sense, but in a political sense she is shameless felon, one who committed felony without remorse. That is an opinion based on public information, not a court-proven fact.
If Sen. Obama loses she will be the automatic nominee next time, nearly as certain as she was this time.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/06/07/comedy-gold-rhetorical-genius-explains-his-iraq-policy-or-something/
Take away Obama's teleprompter, and it's like the end of "Flowers for Algernon" .
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Look, I went to Columbia Law School-- not Harvard but not too shabby either. My Constitutional Law prof was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I've been around these people and my clear sense of it is that a goodly number of them are as clueless about the real world as they are bright. They think to cleverly articulate a synthesis of positions matters in the real world.
Definitely "not too shabby"; outstanding actually. And you are very bright (even if you lapse once in a while and are a Republican) :-) And in BO's case being chosen Editor of the Law Review means he too is quite bright. I understand your point that many of your classmates were clueless; but forgive them they are usually near the age of 25. Fifteen years later, I bet most of your classmates are bright, articlulate, informed, and accomplished (whatever form that may take). God (and hard work) gave them, and you, and BO higher intelligence than the average. Definitely higher than a low graduating person at Idaho or someone near the bottom of their class at Annapolis who was admitted on connections. Intelligence is not a prerequisite for higher office, but it would be nice if they were even above average.
PS I think Ginsburg is fabulous; did you take good notes in her class? You should review them :-D
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Look, I went to Columbia Law School-- not Harvard but not too shabby either. My Constitutional Law prof was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I've been around these people and my clear sense of it is that a goodly number of them are as clueless about the real world as they are bright. They think to cleverly articulate a synthesis of positions matters in the real world.
Definitely "not too shabby"; outstanding actually. And you are very bright (even if you lapse once in a while and are a Republican) :-) And in BO's case being chosen Editor of the Law Review means he too is quite bright. I understand your point that many of your classmates were clueless; but forgive them they are usually near the age of 25. Fifteen years later, I bet most of your classmates are bright, articlulate, informed, and accomplished (whatever form that may take). God (and hard work) gave them, and you, and BO higher intelligence than the average.
**On what do you base your assumption that Barry is so smart?**
Definitely higher than a low graduating person at Idaho or someone near the bottom of their class at Annapolis who was admitted on connections.
**You take cheap shots at McCain, yet I wonder what sort of heroism and sacrifice you could point out that Barry Obama has in his past? Anything to demonstrate he's not just an opportunist and an empty suit?**
Intelligence is not a prerequisite for higher office, but it would be nice if they were even above average.
**Well, we know Biden is smart. Just ask him. http://hotair.com/archives/2008/08/23/flashback-the-obligatory-i-think-i-probably-have-a-much-higher-iq-than-you-do-clip/
PS I think Ginsburg is fabulous; did you take good notes in her class? You should review them :-D
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Ginsburg was VERY dry. A cup of coffee before class was usually a good idea.
I never understood her position that "abortion rights" were a matter of the equal protection clause. As best as I could tell she was saying that because men didn't get pregnant from sex, women too had a right not to get pregnant from sex. :? :? :?
She and I knocked heads over National League of Cities vs. Usery and we didn't see eye to eye on the Equal Right Amendment :evil:
And I can tell you that her concern for States Rights in Bush vs. Gore was a first :x :roll:
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As for my classmates and their current level of understanding, I think my point still applies to quite a few of them-- especially those that, like BO, never worked in the private sector.
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**On what do you base your assumption that Barry is so smart?**
Definitely higher than a low graduating person at Idaho or someone near the bottom of their class at Annapolis who was admitted on connections.
**You take cheap shots at McCain, yet I wonder what sort of heroism and sacrifice you could point out that Barry Obama has in his past? Anything to demonstrate he's not just an opportunist and an empty suit?**
I am talking God given brain power "smart". BO is "smart", ask Crafty, only the "smart", actually the very "smart" get into Harvard Law and become Editor of the Law Review. BO is smart.
As for "cheap shots at McCain, it is a fact. The guy graduated very very near the bottom of his class at Annapolis. And for that matter he would never even have gotten in except for his Daddy. The guy is not smart; sorry, he's the one who is an opportunist. Except for his Daddy he would be no where. However to be fair, his experience is excellent and I think he is a good man. The issue on the table however is "smarts"; not if he is a nice guy.
As for his "heroism and sacrifice" what does that have to do with "smart"? I mean if he ran a four minute mile I would be impressed, but it has nothing to do with smart. As for sacrifice or not being an opportunist in an empty suit, again as Marc might confirm, graduating from Harvard Law as Editor of the Law Review gives you wonderful opportunities to make big money. BO didn't go for it; he chose to help people instead. I have a good friend, she was "only" third in her class at Berkeley Law School, clerked for an Appeals Judge for one year, and now at the ripe old age of 25 joined a firm downtown LA at $175,000 including a nice little bonus. Now she is bright, but she couldn't get into Harvard (she tried) so I guess that makes BO even brighter.
By the way, (separate subject) I have always been curious about the word "hero" and "heroism". I guess my definition is to do something extraordinary above and beyond your duty and what is expected of you to the benefit of another(s) at risk to yourself. Simply choosing to be a Policeman, Fireman, or soldier does not make you a "hero". I respect you, but a "hero" is someone who goes far and beyond their "usual" job. Following that logic, a soldier who dies on the battlefied or a policeman who is shot by a robber is not automatically a "hero". Nor is a roofer who falls off a roof and dies. Or an Iron Worker who falls and dies. They were doing their job; albeit all deaths are tragic. But the soldier, the fireman, the policeman, even the roofer or Iron Worker, the individual who goes above and beyond his job at great risk to his own life, now that is a hero to me. Nor does simply doing your job give you hero status. Or do you disagree? Or ?
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**On what do you base your assumption that Barry is so smart?**
Definitely higher than a low graduating person at Idaho or someone near the bottom of their class at Annapolis who was admitted on connections.
**You take cheap shots at McCain, yet I wonder what sort of heroism and sacrifice you could point out that Barry Obama has in his past? Anything to demonstrate he's not just an opportunist and an empty suit?**
I am talking God given brain power "smart". BO is "smart", ask Crafty, only the "smart", actually the very "smart" get into Harvard Law and become Editor of the Law Review. BO is smart.
As for "cheap shots at McCain, it is a fact. The guy graduated very very near the bottom of his class at Annapolis. And for that matter he would never even have gotten in except for his Daddy. The guy is not smart; sorry, he's the one who is an opportunist. Except for his Daddy he would be no where. However to be fair, his experience is excellent and I think he is a good man. The issue on the table however is "smarts"; not if he is a nice guy.
**You need to read up on what it takes to be a naval aviator. It's a very difficult career path in the Navy/ Marine Corps and not one for those looking to coast along. The applied math/physics just for basic flight school washes out lots of applicants.**
As for his "heroism and sacrifice" what does that have to do with "smart"? I mean if he ran a four minute mile I would be impressed, but it has nothing to do with smart. As for sacrifice or not being an opportunist in an empty suit, again as Marc might confirm, graduating from Harvard Law as Editor of the Law Review gives you wonderful opportunities to make big money. BO didn't go for it; he chose to help people instead. I have a good friend, she was "only" third in her class at Berkeley Law School, clerked for an Appeals Judge for one year, and now at the ripe old age of 25 joined a firm downtown LA at $175,000 including a nice little bonus. Now she is bright, but she couldn't get into Harvard (she tried) so I guess that makes BO even brighter.
**Yeah, what about the "affirmative action" factor? Did B.O. get in because he's smart or a handsome black guy that met "diversity" goals?**
By the way, (separate subject) I have always been curious about the word "hero" and "heroism". I guess my definition is to do something extraordinary above and beyond your duty and what is expected of you to the benefit of another(s) at risk to yourself. Simply choosing to be a Policeman, Fireman, or soldier does not make you a "hero". I respect you, but a "hero" is someone who goes far and beyond their "usual" job. Following that logic, a soldier who dies on the battlefied or a policeman who is shot by a robber is not automatically a "hero". Nor is a roofer who falls off a roof and dies. Or an Iron Worker who falls and dies. They were doing their job; albeit all deaths are tragic. But the soldier, the fireman, the policeman, even the roofer or Iron Worker, the individual who goes above and beyond his job at great risk to his own life, now that is a hero to me. Nor does simply doing your job give you hero status. Or do you disagree? Or ?
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By the way, (separate subject) I have always been curious about the word "hero" and "heroism". I guess my definition is to do something extraordinary above and beyond your duty and what is expected of you to the benefit of another(s) at risk to yourself. Simply choosing to be a Policeman, Fireman, or soldier does not make you a "hero". I respect you, but a "hero" is someone who goes far and beyond their "usual" job. Following that logic, a soldier who dies on the battlefied or a policeman who is shot by a robber is not automatically a "hero". Nor is a roofer who falls off a roof and dies. Or an Iron Worker who falls and dies. They were doing their job; albeit all deaths are tragic. But the soldier, the fireman, the policeman, even the roofer or Iron Worker, the individual who goes above and beyond his job at great risk to his own life, now that is a hero to me. Nor does simply doing your job give you hero status. Or do you disagree? Or ?
**Let me give this some thought.**
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I understand being an aviator by definition means you cannot be stupid; rather you must be an intelligent person not to mention have physical ability. Although I wonder how fast an Admiral's son would be washed out. However the argument on the table was the degree of God given intelligence. I think McCain is a fine person and he is far far from stupid. And experience counts. My young and even beautiful attorney friend whom I mentioned is very very bright, but as Crafty mentioned, sometimes her common sense is very lacking. But give her time...she has the basics.
As for "hero" I am sincerely curious about your opinion. To perhaps repeat my question, please understand I have the greatest respect and gratitude for Soldiers, Policemen, Fireman, etc. but are they all "heroes"? Or is the "hero" the special individual who goes above and beyond at risk to themselves?
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My quick answer is it's a matter of degree. Anyone who knowingly places themselves in harm's way for a greater good than themselves has an element of heroism to them, though i'd say that not everyone who puts on a uniform is automatically a hero. I certainly wouldn't describe myself as one. A uniform isn't required to be heroic either. I'd call MLK a hero. I'd say that a teacher with good options that deliberately goes to work in a violent inner city school because he or she wants to give poor kids a chance at a better life is a hero in my book.
Just a few things that leap to mind.
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http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/09/03/focus-group-palin-was-alarmingly-strong.aspx
Focus Group: Palin Was (Alarmingly) Strong
Several moderate-Democrat friends of mine have been emailing--few if any would ever vote for McCain--but all agree that Palin was very strong. The more liberal among them are a little panicked.
I completely misjudged how negative she would be. Her lines about Obama were brutally cutting and possibly over the top in places. But she's a far better messenger than an angry white man. (Note, by the way, how both Rudy and Huckabee employed a tone that was more bemused than angry. That's the modern GOP's favorite trick--comedic ridicule in place of outright nastiness.)
--Michael Crowley
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The digs at BO were beautiful in their graceful brutality :-D
And now the WSJ lays the groundwork for going after Biden:
Biden Was Wrong
On the Cold War
By PETER WEHNER
September 4, 2008
The choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has electrified many conservatives and strengthened John McCain's claim that his administration would be far more reform-minded than Barack Obama's. At the same time, it has triggered accusations that Gov. Palin is far too inexperienced to be vice president, and has little knowledge of national security issues.
Mrs. Palin's lack of mastery of national security issues is often contrasted with Mr. Obama's vice presidential pick, Joseph Biden Jr. Mr. Biden has served in the Senate since 1973, is currently chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and is often described as a "statesman."
In fact, decade after decade and on important issue after important issue, Mr. Biden's judgment has been deeply flawed.
In the 1970s, Mr. Biden opposed giving aid to the South Vietnamese government in its war against the North. Congress's cut-off of funds contributed to the fall of an American ally, helped communism advance, and led to mass death throughout the region. Mr. Biden also advocated defense cuts so massive that both Edmund Muskie and Walter Mondale, both leading liberal Democrats at the time, opposed them.
In the early 1980s, the U.S. was engaged in a debate over funding the Contras, a group of Nicaraguan freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the Communist regime of Daniel Ortega. Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of President Ronald Reagan's efforts to fund the Contras. He also opposed Reagan's efforts to send military assistance to the pro-American government in El Salvador, which at the time was battling the FMLN, a Soviet-supported Marxist group.
Throughout his career, Mr. Biden has consistently opposed modernization of our strategic nuclear forces. He was a fierce opponent of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Biden voted against funding SDI, saying, "The president's continued adherence to [SDI] constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft." Mr. Biden has remained a consistent critic of missile defense and even opposed the U.S. dropping out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was the co-signatory to the ABM Treaty) and the end of the Cold War.
In 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and, we later learned, was much closer to attaining a nuclear weapon than we had believed. President George H.W. Bush sought war authorization from Congress. Mr. Biden voted against the first Gulf War, asking: "What vital interests of the United States justify sending Americans to their deaths in the sands of Saudi Arabia?"
In 2006, after having voted three years earlier to authorize President George W. Bush's war to liberate Iraq, Mr. Biden argued for the partition of Iraq, which would have led to its crack-up. Then in 2007, Mr. Biden opposed President Bush's troop surge in Iraq, calling it a "tragic mistake." It turned out to be quite the opposite. Without the surge, the Iraq war would have been lost, giving jihadists their most important victory ever.
On many of the most important and controversial issues of the last four decades, Mr. Biden has built a record based on bad assumptions, misguided analyses and flawed judgments. If he had his way, America would be significantly weaker, allies under siege would routinely be cut loose, and the enemies of the U.S. would be stronger.
There are few members of Congress whose record on national security matters can be judged, with the benefit of hindsight, to be as consistently bad as Joseph Biden's. It's true that Sarah Palin has precious little experience in national security affairs. But in this instance, no record beats a manifestly bad one.
Mr. Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds
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Sarah Palin knocked my socks off FWIW. For my money she is the next Reagan. She is an unapologetic conservative able to explain that view (my view) in simple and direct terms. I wish McCain had that quality and wish the other side ran as unapologetic liberals instead of sneaky ones who conceal the extent of their liberalism behind centrist rhetoric.
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Re. the discussion on heroes: I gave this some thought when people said nice things about me for rescuing my daughter as a baby. When you climb through harm's way to save yourself or save your own family, you are just a normal living thing or a normal parent with a normal survival instinct. Not a hero. But when you enter a burning building for example to rescue your neighbor's children, then you are a hero. Maybe a few firefighters or fighter pilots are there for non-heroic reasons, but in my view, most anyone like a McCain who served his country, risked his own life, flew a plane into enemy air space performing a mission and held out even a shred of information for more than a second from his enemy captors through even a perceived threat of harm is without a doubt a HERO. Same goes for people like my father who performed medical rather than combat functions in WWII, maybe not front line but close enough and part of the mission. They are all heroes.
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Back to the RNC. GM I think mentioned humor in the message. My favorite came from Rudy telling Biden to get it in writing:
"Look at just one example in a lifetime of principled stands -- John McCain's support for the troop surge in Iraq. The Democratic Party had given up on Iraq. And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that when they gave up on Iraq they were giving up on America. The Democratic leader in the Senate said so: "America has lost."
Well, if America lost, who won? Al Qaida? Bin Laden? In the single biggest policy decision of this election, John McCain got it right and Barack Obama got it wrong.
If Barack Obama had been President, there would have been no troop surge and our troops would have been withdrawn in defeat.
Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge. And it was unpopular.
What do you think most other candidates would have done in that situation? They would have acted in their own self-interest by changing their position.
How many times have we seen Barack Obama do that?
Obama was going to take public financing for his campaign, until he didn't.
Obama was against wiretapping before he voted for it.
When speaking to a pro-Israel group, Obama favored an undivided Jerusalem. Until the very next day when he changed his mind.
I hope for his sake, Joe Biden got that VP thing in writing."
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*Sarah Palin knocked my socks off FWIW*
Yes mine too. Gulianni was the best I ever heard him as well. A definite sigh of relief from me. The rage from the mostly leftist commentators was palpable and obvious.
The glares, the stares from the likes of Rachel from MSNBC, and Easton from Fortune mag (Fox I think) who were both desparately trying to come up with something negative to say. Even the 360 guy Anderson had to admit, "well" we didn't mention Obama's speech writer like we are doing with Sarah P. as he and John King were amazingly questioning theirs as well as the newsmedias fairness. :-)
Buchanan was drunk with excitement. Maybe Reaganism isn't dead. But with the country's demographics ever changing...
And the people who come here now aren't like the immigrants of our fathers and forefathers. Now they expect and demand benefits. So the demographics may still be insurmountable. :-D
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It must have been years since Buchanan was this excited.
I gotta love this line:
"He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket"
The article:
***The risk John McCain took last Friday is comparable to the 72-year-old ex-fighter pilot knocking back two shots and flying his F-16 under the Golden Gate Bridge.
McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his co-pilot was the biggest gamble in presidential history. As of now, it is paying off, big-time.
The sensational selection in Dayton, Ohio, stepped all over the big story from Denver -- Barack Obama's powerful address to 85,000 cheering folks in Mile High Stadium, and 35 million nationally, a speech that vaulted him from a 2-point deficit early in the week to an 8-point margin. Barack had never before reached 49 percent against McCain.
As the Democrats were being rudely stepped on, however, Palin ignited an explosion of enthusiasm among conservatives, Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, gun owners and Right to Lifers not seen in decades.
By passing over his friends Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, and picking Palin, McCain has given himself a fighting chance of winning the White House that, before Friday morning, seemed to be slipping away. Indeed, the bristling reaction on the left testifies to Democratic fears that the choice of Palin could indeed be a game-changer in 2008.
Liberals howl that Palin has no experience, no qualifications to be president of the United States. But the lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together.
None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.
She has no foreign policy experience, we are told. And though Alaska's neighbors are Canada and Russia, the point is valid. But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense.
She will be up to speed in her first year.
And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.
Where Obama has poodled along with the Daley Machine, Palin routed the Republican establishment, challenging and ousting a sitting GOP governor before defeating a former Democratic governor to become the first female and youngest governor in state history.
For his boldness in choosing Palin, McCain deserves enormous credit. He has made an extraordinary gesture to conservatives and the party base, offering his old antagonists a partner's share in his presidency. And his decision is likely to be rewarded with a massive and enthusiastic turnout for the McCain-Palin ticket. Rarely has this writer encountered such an outburst of enthusiasm on the right.
In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, Evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives -- wholly independent of President McCain.
A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has. Look for the neocons to move with all deliberate speed to take her into their camp by pressing upon her advisers and staff, and steering her into the AEI-Weekly Standard-War Party orbit.
Indeed, if McCain defeats Barack, 2012 could see women on both national tickets, and given McCain's age and the possibility he intends to serve a single term, women at the top of both -- Sarah vs. Hillary.
The arrival of Palin on the national scene, with her youth, charisma and vitality, probably also portends a changing of the guard in Washington.
With Republicans having zero chance of capturing either House, and but a slim chance of avoiding losses in both, a Vice President Palin, with her reputation as a rebel and reformer, would surely inspire similar revolts in the Republican caucuses.
As Thomas Jefferson said, from time to time, a little rebellion in the political world is as necessary as storms in the physical.
The Palin nomination could backfire, but it is hard to see how. She has passed her first test, her introduction to the nation, with wit and grace. And the Obama-Biden ticket, having already alienated millions of women with the disrespecting of Hillary, is unlikely to start attacking another woman whose sole offense is that she had just been given the chance to break the glass ceiling at the national level.
Her nomination, which will bring the Republican right home, also frees up McCain to appeal to moderates and liberals, which has long been his stock in trade.
With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.
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Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."
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Reader Comments: (250)
Here are a few of the comments submitted by our readers. Click to view all Report Abusive Post
Right on, Pat ! This lady is a winner
and a future President !
Sep 03, 2008 @ 03:14 AMGino, Rio Rancho
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Sara is going to gut Biden like a salmon and skin Obama like a moose. Yahoo! I never thought, I would vote for a ticket with McCain on it. Pat we love you for those exchanges with Oberman and mathews.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:04 AMJohnny, Pewaukee Wi.
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Thank the Lord that Sarah has little or no experience!!!
Consider what Bush's master puppeteer (Dirty Dickie) has wrought - endless wars
(http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5293057486293276897&vt=lf&hl=en); bankrupting banks; Marie Antoinette collapsing economy; etc. etc.
Both McWar & Obama are owned by the Bilderbergs, Trilateralists, CFR (Michelle is a member)& Joe Biden declared himself a ZIONIST. Unfortunately, if Sarah tries to clean up the DC corruption (as she apparently did in Alaska), she better bring her current state security staff with her to Washington.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:21 AMART, VA BEACH, VA
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With his selection of Sarah Palin, John McCain has not only shaken up this election, he may have helped shape the future of the United States -- and much for the better.
********************************************************
Pat I love you.. But, I couldn't disagree with you more. When McCain selected Sarah Palin as his V.P... This just showed me how John McCain thinks when things get tough. I don't think I want him thinking for me..
Here is the reason why Senator Obama is going to be our next President of American. The people are finally starting to catch on to what is happening in Washington D.C..
I know Senator John McCain has never meet a FREE TRADE AGREEMENT he didn't like, just like President Bush (another four years of Bush). The American people want their high paying jobs back.
I know Senator Obama will bring all those Free Trade Agreements up before the new Congress for debate and just maybe the American people may win the debate this time.
This would force Big International Companies to move back to America all these Plants and good paying jobs they move to CHINA.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 04:29 AMHarry Dingey, Baguio City, Philippines
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My Friends America is on the verge of total of a Collapse because of NAFTA and the WTO Free Trade Agreements.
Look around you, all the Big Financial Banks are failing, your house value has drop 30%, the American Dollar has lost 50% of its value and all the higher paying jobs are being move to China.
When you find yourself in a HOLE. “STOP DIGGING”.
Has anyone thought about the repercussions of the lost of all those high paying jobs transfered to China.
Well to start off with all of the America workers will eventually be working for a lot less money. That means the government will end up short of revenues.
You could very well wakeup one morning and the government say, we don't enough money to continue paying you that month Social Security Check any longer. And by the way your Medicare payments will be also be discontinued too.
If you think for one minute this is not a possibility. When America has loss all this income revenues, where will our government get the money to pay for these services?
I live in the Philippines and see exactly what happens. The American people will be the first ones to lose their Benefits..
I really can not believe that anyone is stupid enough to vote for a candidate that tells him he wants to move his job to China.
Then at some point he and his family may be be required to sleep in the street and may be in the soup line. If there is a soup line available.
You people better wakeup before you lose everything.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 05:22 AMHarry Dingey, Baguio City, Philippines
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When John Mcain introduced Sarah Palin on Friday at Wright State it was the most excited I've been about an announcement since Pope Benedict XVI was elected in 2005. I wanted to be there since WSU is only minutes away but, unlike liberals, I actually work for a living so I watched on TV (FOX of course!) at work while having lunch. I knew it was going to be a good day because my priest gave the invocation at the McCain rally at WSU!
When Sarah Palin came out and spoke I was so happy. I bawled like a little girl at a Hannah Montana concert during her speech, too, because I realized this country is going to be iin good hands for a long time. She spoke like we do at the water cooler, not using the high sounding language of DC policyspeak.
John McCain just stood there, content to let his VP nominee have the spotlight, and I saw another side of him at that moment. Unlike the left who deal with the cult of personality, John McCain knows this election is not about him. It's about us.
You're on notice, Joe Biden. I can't WAIT for the VP debates because Sarah Palin is going to clean your clock. In fact, I'm going to Jungle Jim's near Cincinnati and buying some moose burgers to grill for the occasion.
Sep 03, 2008 @ 05:47 AMJohn Florio, Fairborn, Ohio
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I wish I knew how Harry Dingey makes those incredibly long postings.
Several reasons why Palin is a HOME RUN, in no particular order:
1) Because BOTH she and McCain have a son who either was, is, or will be in Iraq, they have tremendous credibility on the war issue. Leftists are fond of saying that those who support the war don't want to send their own children to fight it. Well, they CAN'T say that about McCain or Palin, or Biden either, for that matter.
2) As a major politician -- which she is now because of her candidacy -- NOBODY has EVER had more credibility on Right-to-Life issues than she.
3) She gets an A+++ rating from NRA for being rabidly pro-gun.
4) Her husband is a classical skilled union manual laborer. Any working class partisan other than the pinky-ring union bosses should readily relate to her and her family.
5) She SUPPORTS ANWR. And she may even be able to get McCain to change his RIDICULOUS opposition to ANWR.
6) Gov. Palin's family situation has attracted a lot of blogging attention in the past few days.
Although it could not have been intended to be so, I hold that her family situation will be of TREMENDOUS APPEAL to the average American family.
ALL parents, and especially dads, who have daughters, have either themselves experienced unwed teenage pregnancies or are petrified that it's going to happen to them.
They will relate VERY well to Gov. Palin.
7) The women's vote. McCain needed to reach out beyond the Party base AND to unite it if possible.
He could NOT do that by the traditional Great White Hopeless male pick, who MIGHT at best help him with a state or two. Instead, THIS year, McCain needed someone who could help in in EVERY state.
This is the year when the Hitlery supporters had screamed that it is past time to elect a woman for president. Did they REALLY mean that, or did they really mean it's time to elect a LIBERAL woman for president?
I suspect it is some of yes, some of no. And in this case, McCain picks up votes in every state he'd not ordinarily get.
I never throught McCain would go past the GOP establishment. I always thought that in the end, he'd pick a safe, nice, but useless Great White Hopeless male GOP hack, like the Party itself did in 1996 when it picked Sen. Bob Dull.
8) McCain himself has said that whomever he picks will receive greater than normal scrutiny because of his own age and his diminished health (courtesy of the Hanoi Hilton).
Gov. Palin therefore has an EXCELLENT chance of becoming president someday. Even if McCain makes it through 4 years, odds are he'd not run again, so she then becomes the Heir Apparent for 2012, which she again becomes in the event the McCain ticket loses this year.
Are women serious about wanting one of their own to be president? Here's their shot!
A TREMENDOUS pick.
Sep 03, 2008 ***
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A real snore of a speech tonight from McCain. :cry:
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"A real snore of a speech tonight from McCain. "
He is trying to recapture the enthusiasm of Bob Dole's '96 campaign. It looks hard for middle of the roaders to get specific or passionate about their principles.
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"He is trying to recapture the enthusiasm of Bob Dole's '96 campaign."
Bwahahahahahaha!!!!!!!
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3 times during the speech I called my daughter in to 'make' her watch because she will be voting next time and 3 times I said skip it because no clarity was being given at the time to any important issue. Seemed like an NFL coach thanking everyone who made it possible to be only 2 touchdowns (house and senate) and a field goal behind coming into halftime.
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'A Servant's Heart'
September 5, 2008 11:24 a.m.
Sarah Palin killed. And more than killed.
Much has been said about her speech, but a few points. "The difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick" is pure American and goes straight into Bartlett's. This is the authentic sound of the American mama, of every mother you know at school who joins the board, reads the books, heads the committee, and gets the show on the road. These women make large portions of America work.
She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc. But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is something so normal about her, so "You've met this person before and you like her," that she broke through in a new way, as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine.
***
Associated Press
Her flaws accentuated her virtues. Now and then this happens in politics, but it's rare. An example: The very averageness of her voice, the not-wonderfulness of it, highlighted her normality: most people don't have great voices. That normality in turn highlighted the courage she showed in being there, on that stage for the first time in her life and under trying circumstances. Her averageness accentuated her specialness. Her commonality highlighted her uniqueness.
She seemed wholly different from, and in fact seemed a refutation to, all the men of Washington at their great desks who make rules others have to live by but they don't have to live by themselves, who mandate work rules from which they exempt Congress, for instance. They don't live by the rules they espouse. She has lived her expressed values. She said yes to a Down Syndrome child. This too is powerful.
***
What she did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life. But Palin really damaged him. She took him square on, fearlessly, by which I mean in part that she showed no awkwardness connected to race, or racial history. A small town mayor is kind of like a community organizer only you have actual responsibilities. He wrote two memoirs but never authored a major bill. They've hauled the Styrofoam pillars back to the Hollywood lot.
This was powerful coming from Baberaham Lincoln, as she's been called.
By the end, Democrats knew they had been dinged, and badly. After the speech they descended on cable news en masse with the dart-eyed, moist-browed look of the operative who doesn't believe his talking points. They seemed like they were thinking, "I've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well." Actually they haven't seen it before in that Palin is something new, but they have seen it before in terms of what she said.
Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.
It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.
This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in '80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this country that never stops changing is.
***
It all left me wondering if this campaign is about to take on a new shape, with the old time conservatism on one side, and a smoother, evolved form of the old style liberalism on the other.
It doesn't get more dramatic, or dramatically drawn, than that.
***
I don't like the new media war. I don't like what it has the potential to do to the election, and the country.
The media overstepped. The Republican party resented it. GOP strategists saw a unifying force rising: anger in the base. They too had seen this movie before. They slammed the media. The media shot back: "You're attacking us for doing our job!"
How did the media overstep? By offending people by going so immediately and so personally into issues surrounding Mrs. Palin's family. They did not overstep by digging, by deep reporting, by investigating Palin's professional record.
Campbell Brown of CNN did nothing wrong for instance in pressing a campaign spokesman on Palin's foreign policy credentials. She was unjustly criticized for following an appropriate and necessary line of inquiry. But endless front page stories connected to Mrs. Palin's 17-year-old daughter? Cable news shows that had people insinuating Palin, whom America had not yet even met, was a bad mother, and that used her daughter's circumstances to examine Republican views on abstinence education? That was ugly.
In the end it made Palin the underdog, and gave her the perfect platform for the perfect dive she made Wednesday night.
We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.
But this latest fight commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite; the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical website.
This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential of great harm. Everyone really ought to stop, breathe deep, and think.
I am worried they won't. A friend IM'd the day after Palin's speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding. He surprised me by saying he shared it. "Calling all underworlds reporting for duty!," he wrote. "The bed is about to fly around the room, the puke is about to come out." He meant: this campaign is going to engage unseen powers and forces. He meant: this campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.
***
It is starting to look to me like a nation-defining election. And in this it seems almost old-fashioned. 1992 for instance didn't seem or feel nation-defining, not as I remember it, nor did 2000. 1964 did, and '80 did, but they both ended in landslides. Landslide is not what I'm seeing here.
Where are the Democrats going to go? I suspect to foreign policy. In politics it used to be called Tolstoy: war and peace. McCain-Palin will mean more war, Obama-Biden will mean peace.
This campaign is about to become: epic.
***
John McCain also made a speech. It was flat.
***
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/05/guess-which-card-obama-pulled-out-of-the-deck-today/
Guess which card Obama pulled out of the deck today?
POSTED AT 3:30 PM ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
With both Rasmussen and Gallup showing Barack Obama moving backwards even before the Republican Convention dropped its balloons on Andrea Mitchell, one can excuse the Democratic nominee for hearing footsteps. How desperate has he gotten? Looks like he’s playing the race card once again:
“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”
“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’
Once again, Obama has resorted to a smear campaign against the McCain campaign. They have never –never — even hinted that Obama has “Muslim connections”. They have never made even a slight attempt to make his race an issue, despite this fourth repeat of this particular smear. Neither has the RNC nor any mainstream Republicans. In fact, the McCain campaign let go one staffer who only Twittered a link to a Jeremiah Wright video earlier this year.
If Obama wants to argue that some misdirected bloggers have made these kind of attacks, he might have a point. But by that standard, the Democrats have attacked Bristol Palin, smeared Sarah Palin about the maternity of her youngest child, and questioned the mental capacity of John McCain. If Obama wants to start making these kinds of accusations, then maybe he ought to get his own house in order first.
That’s not the only data point of desperation today, either:
Sen. Barack Obama ditched his normal languid cool today, punching back at Gov. Sarah Palin as he spoke with reporters in York, Pa, hotly defending his work as a community organizer. He said he assumes Palin “wants to be treated same way guys want to be treated, which means their records are under scrutinty. I’ve been through this for 19 months. She’s been through it, what four days?”
Obama’s hackles were clearly raised by Palin’s dismissal of his community organizing –a response to his earlier dismissal of her record as a small-town mayor. “Why would that kind of work be ridiculed?” Obama said. “Who are they fighting for?” The idea that community organizing is not relevant to the presidency, he said, just shows why Republicans “are out of touch and don’t get it.”
The Obama campaign was clearly on the defensive today, acknowledging how appealing Palin came across, and sending out surrogates hitting their talking points that Republicans have spent their time on attacks rather than substance.
Says the man who keeps calling John McCain the same as George Bush. There’s a word for a man who can dish it out but can’t take it. I’ll leave it to you to reach your own conclusions.
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Thanks, Guys
The media's attacks on Sarah Palin backfire.
by William Kristol
09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01
The editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD believe in giving credit where credit is due. The presidential race looks a whole lot better today than it did two weeks ago. For this, thanks are owed to two men--Barack Obama and John McCain--and to that herd of independent minds, the liberal media.
First: Thank you, Barack Obama. He lacked the confidence or the strength to ask Hillary Clinton, recipient of some 18 million votes, to join him on the ticket. Such a ticket, uniting and exciting the Democratic party, would have been hard to beat in this Democratic year. Having ruled out Clinton, Obama then lacked the nerve to double down on the theme of change, by selecting, say, Virginia governor Tim Kaine or Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius. A change versus experience election wouldn't have been a bad bet for Obama. Instead, he settled on an unimpressive vice presidential pick, a long-time, long-winded overrated senator from a safe state, who gave him no lift at all in the polls, and offers no prospect of doing so.
Second: Thank you, John McCain. He showed guts with his pick of Sarah Palin. He also demonstrated a shrewd strategic sense. He knew that running on experience would carry him only so far--most likely to a respectable defeat. He understood the implications of Obama's passing over Hillary--not that Clinton voters would vote for McCain-Palin (though if even a few do so, it could make a difference), but that his pick of Palin when compared with Obama's shying away from Hillary would show McCain as a bolder and more confident leader. And he had the sense that Palin's anti-establishment conservatism, pro-family feminism, and tough-minded reformism would add something important to his campaign.
Third: A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing--but well-received--presentation the following evening.
The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media's prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.
By the end of the week, after Palin's tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren't being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin--who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times--lamented in a piece for Slate: "So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison." I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.
For instance, what in the world can she be thinking when she refers to "Sarah Palin's wreck of a home life"? The only "domestic irregularities" (to use Ms. Rosin's loaded term) she cites are "two difficult pregnancies--Palin's with a Down syndrome baby and now her unmarried teenage daughter's." The second of these is a situation that the young woman and her family seem to be dealing with appropriately by their own lights. "Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family," the Palins said. But what is "irregular" about bringing to term a Down syndrome child? Is Rosin suggesting--without having the courage to say so--that Mrs. Palin should have aborted the baby? Is it upsetting to her to have a prominent woman choose not to do so?
Some may think we should also thank Sarah Palin for coming through, under pressure, with flying colors. But we're looking forward to expressing those thanks personally, at the vice presidential residence here in Washington.
--William Kristol
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Bill Kristol is a sharp guy, but I will disagree with him here on his comments about BO not nominating Hillary. What he says is true I suppose, but utter ignores that if BO had won, he would have been but one of three presidents and would have been spending a lot of money on food testers and time hiring new ones.
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" if BO had won [with Hillary], he would have been but one of three presidents"
Barack in his quiet wisdom may know that part of the Obama phenomenon was really anti-Hillary, anti-Clinton excitement - to win WITHOUT these weaseling triangulators. On that theory, the combined Hillary and Obama forces are not additive, but partially canceling. With her on the ticket he might or might not lock in Hillary voters but certainly would alienate parts of the grass roots far left.
The food taster comment is very funny but Clintonistas in the White House would always have the power of the leak to undermine Obama.
My thought is that he would lose his entire image by having the old guard share the stage, removing the mystique of amazing new leadership and a complete break with the past. Instead he chose Washington consummate insider Joe Biden. Lol.
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Pretty much anyone else but Biden would have been a better choice.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/06/the-recycled-flags-of-the-dncc/
The Recycled Flags of the DNCC; Update: Pathetic spin by Team O
POSTED AT 12:00 PM ON SEPTEMBER 6, 2008 BY ED MORRISSEY
Democrats brought out tens of thousands of American flags to Invesco Field, saluting Barack Obama as he spoke from the Styrofoam columns of the Barackopolis at the conclusion of the Democratic convention. Perhaps some of them took the flags home as souvenirs, but where did the rest go? According to David Harsanyi, they went into the trash — and would have gone to a landfill, except for a worker at Invesco who rescued them from the dumpsters:
This morning, Republicans tell me that a worker at Invesco Field in Denver saved thousands of unused flags from the Democratic National Convention that were headed for the garbage. Guerrilla campaigning. They will use these flags at their own event today in Colorado Springs with John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Before McCain speaks today, veterans will haul these garbage bags filled with flags out onto the stage — with dramatic effect, no doubt — and tell the story.
Didn’t anyone make arrangements for better disposal of these flags from Invesco? At the very least, they were an investment that could have been re-used at rallies in Colorado as well as the rest of the nation during the general election. Instead, they’ve handed a dramatic moment to John McCain and Sarah Palin, as well as relieved them of the cost of 12,000 such flags — as well as a full 3′x5′ flag that also wound up in the trash.
Remember when the DNCC was supposed to be the “greenest convention ever”? How they worried about the color of the food and using organic materials in their merchandise? I guess we can see where the “green” concern ends … at red, white, and blue.
Still … I hope the RNCC did a better job rescuing discarded flags at the Xcel Center.
Update: If you want to know how to properly dispose of flags, you can check the US Flag Code. If you’re still confused, contact your local American Legion or VFW, and they will help you dispose of them. (h/t: Indythinker in comments)
Update II: I’m getting e-mails saying that we need to “stop the lies” because Team Obama put this out as a statement:
Stories circulating about flags from the Democratic National Convention are false. More than 125,000 American-made flags were distributed at the Convention - any flags removed from the Convention after the event were taken without authorization. It’s disappointing that someone would take American flags without authorization and then falsely describe their intended purpose. We have the utmost respect for the American flag and it’s sad to see them being used for a cheap political stunt.
They claim that the flags were “bundled” for return to their manufacturer. If so, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone bundling returned merchandise in Hefty bags and storing them “in and around dumpsters” while awaiting the RMA. Here’s the picture that ran in the Denver Post:
I sincerely doubt that these flags got sold to Team Obama in Hefty bags. And let’s try to parse this story down with some common sense:
Why would a manufacturer provide a refund on open product? They certainly couldn’t resell them, especially not after being left like this at Invesco.
12,000 flags must have cost at least $2,000 or so, and probably more. Once Democrats discovered the “theft”, why didn’t they report it to the police? It’s been more than a week apparently since they were “stolen”, and Team Obama just discovered it?
Leaving material in and around dumpsters, especially in Hefty bags, makes it look like trash. That’s hardly a way to store American flags, and it’s certainly not a way to keep janitors and waste management people from taking them to landfills.
Instead of just saying that their people made a really stupid error and apologizing, though, Team Obama decided to tell a ridiculous lie to get themselves off the hook.
Update III: David Harsanyi now has several updates to his first report, including this:
I just spoke with the person at Invesco who found the flags and he thinks both sides are exaggerating a bit. The person claims the majority of the bags with flags in them were near the trash, on a dock, and would have been thrown away. The person thinks it was probably an “oversight” by the Democrats rather than any nefarious plot against the flag. But the person doesn’t believe anyone was coming to get them: “The flags were there for a week and a day and no one came looking for them.”
No one suggested here that it was a “nefarious plot”, and like Harsanyi, I hardly think that Obama would have directed his staff to throw 12,000 American flags in a dumpster. In fact, until Team Obama issued this ludicrous statement, the story didn’t have anything to do with them. However, the obvious carelessness with which the DNCC treated the flags is a rather revealing moment for them, and the lie for people in Obama’s organization.
Update IV: Gateway Pundit has pictures of individual flags sitting in trash bags, but that’s not the DNCC’s fault; it’s the fault of the individuals who threw out their flags. The DNCC couldn’t possibly be expected to sort through all of the thousands of bags of normal trash. They can be expected to know better than to toss 12,000 American flags in with it.
Jazz Shaw’s following the story at TMV.
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The Biden pick: Before the pick and before the final short list I tried hard to think of a Democrat with perceived 'gravitas' and perhaps foreign policy experience that could fill his ticket. Shallow bench. They really had to have served in the Clinton administration or settle for one of the second-guessers from the foreign relations committee. I thought of Madeline Halfbright but I don't think she is eligible. Sandy Burglar, but the docs in the boxers was for sure a deal-killer. Not exactly foreign policy experience, but I recalled that Clinton had a pretty well respected Treasury Secretary from the private sector. Came up with the name Robert Rubin, looked him up on Wikipedia to find out he was older than McCain [correction: similar in age to McCain]. That wouldn't work. I still couldn't take seriously the idea that the dream--hope-change ticket would have Joe Biden on it. I assume that he was the neutral choice for Obama, not to enhance his ticket but for the party faithful across the board to accept without revolt.
Questioning Biden's experience, I LOVE this piece by Thomas Sowell from last week:
"The difference between being a spectator and being a participant, with responsibility for the consequences of what you say and do, is fundamental."
Foreign Policy "Experience"
by Thomas Sowell, Sept. 3, 2008
Now that the Democrats have recovered from the shock of Governor Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican's candidate for vice president, they have suddenly discovered that her lack of experience in general-- and foreign policy experience in particular-- is a terrible danger in someone just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States.
For those who are satisfied with talking points, there is no need to go any further. But, for those who still consider substance relevant, this is an incredible argument coming from those whose presidential candidate has even less experience in public office than Sarah Palin, and none in foreign policy.
Moreover, if Senator Barack Obama is elected, he will not be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his would be the heartbeat of the president-- and he would be the one making foreign policy.
But the big talking point is that the Democrats' vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden, has years of foreign policy experience as a member, and now chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
That all depends on what the definition of "experience" is.
Before getting into that, however, a plain fact should be noted: No governor ever had foreign policy experience before becoming president-- not Ronald Reagan, not Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor any other governor.
It is hard to know how many people could possibly have had foreign policy experience before reaching the White House besides a Secretary of State or a Secretary of Defense.
The last Secretary of War (the old title of Secretaries of Defense) to later become President of the United States was William Howard Taft, a hundred years ago. The last Secretary of State to become President of the United States was James Buchanan, a century and a half ago.
The first President Bush had been head of the C.I.A., which certainly gave him a lot of knowledge of what was happening around the world, though still not experience in making the country's foreign policy.
Senator Joe Biden's years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is even further removed from foreign policy experience. He has had a front-row seat as an observer of foreign policy. But Senator Biden has never had any real experience of making foreign policy and taking the consequences of the results.
The difference between being a spectator and being a participant, with responsibility for the consequences of what you say and do, is fundamental.
You can read books about crime or attend lectures by criminologists, but you have no real experience or expertise about crime unless you have been a criminal or a policeman.
Although I served in the Marine Corps, I have no military experience in any meaningful sense. The closest I ever came to combat was being assigned to photograph the maneuvers of the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
That was photographic experience, not military experience. If someone gave me a policy-making job in the Pentagon, I wouldn't have a clue.
The fact that Senator Joe Biden has for years listened to all sorts of people testify on all sorts of foreign policy issues tells us nothing about how well he understood the issues.
Out of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates this year, only Governor Palin has had to make executive decisions and live with the consequences.
As for Senator Obama, his various pronouncements on foreign policy have been as immature as they have been presumptuous.
He talked publicly about taking military action against Pakistan, one of our few Islamic allies and a nation with nuclear weapons.
Barack Obama's first response to the Russian invasion of Georgia was to urge "all sides" to negotiate a cease-fire and take their issues to the United Nations. That is standard liberal talk, which even Obama had second thoughts about, after Senator John McCain gave a more grown-up response.
We should all have second thoughts about what is, and is not, foreign policy "experience."
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Actually Robert Rubin although "old" is still younger than McCain. That is my worry; simply put, McCain is too old for the job. And Rubin, although brilliant (more than I can say for McCain or Palin), has had no foreign policy experience. Biden, short of a former Secretary of State, has the most "experience" of anyone possible. As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee he has done more than simply "listen" to the experts. His knowledge and contacts are vast. His experience will be a great asset to Obama. "Executive decisions" hmm what "executive decisions" did Palin make as a mayor of a town with less than 5000 people??? That's a joke I presume? Or governor for only two years of perhaps the least populated state??? That's experience??? Please...Palin might be a brilliant political pick, but please don't talk about her "experience".
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JDN, I appreciate having different views posted. From my viewpoint, Biden presided over the Bork and Clarence Thomas, two of the worst chapters of phoniness and character assassination in our history and was wrong twice on Iraq - by his own judgment. Not the new harmony or leadership Obama claimed he would bring.
Since it is an opinion board I must say that I have a hard time holding against McCain the years he wasted in N. Vietnam while I frolicked in freedom. Maybe he should have run 5 1/2 years sooner, but he was detained.
Curious, would you repeal other laws about age discrimination or just make this exception? :-) - Doug
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Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?
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Doug, to be honest, I happened to like Bork, he was/is brilliant, although I don't always agree with his conclusions, but that's ok. Thomas is not; simply put, I don't think he's up to the job. Unfortunately, Republicans and Democrats politicize the judiciary system. I think it's wrong.
I too frolicked in freedom (also I was a bit young) rather than serve in Vietnam; McCain in contrast served our country with distinction. But that was 30+ years ago; what does running 5 1/2 years sooner have to do with it? He should have run a long time ago and he did to no avail. Time has defeated many fine politicians.
I am not asking to repeal any laws about age discrimination; I am talking reality. There is no law at this level. You mentioned that you admire Robert Rubin. Did you know that Goldman Sachs has a mandatory retirement age for partners? Also, the four US largest accounting firms have a mandatory retirement age at 60 for partners. And most major law firms have a mandatory retirement age at 65. Most Corporate Presidents must retire at 65, but many like HP have a mandatory retirement age at 60. They demand energy and vitality and brilliance from their partners and managers. Is that wrong? They all want their partners and presidents at their best. I would not expect less from the President of the United States. Maybe the toughest job in the world. I know many very successful people in their 70's, they are fine people, but even they will admit they are past their prime both intellectually and physically. And they are all retired. I am not picking on McCain, but he too is past his prime regardless of how he spent 5 years of his time thirty years ago.
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http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/534rlysq.asp
Why They Hate Her
Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left.
by Jeffrey Bell
09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01
For months John McCain has apparently been hoping to use his selection of a running mate to shake up the presidential race. By picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin, McCain has accomplished that--and very likely a lot more than that, more than he or anyone else could have imagined.
I'm not talking about the widely remarked fact that if Palin performs well, and regardless of whether McCain wins or loses, she becomes a future Republican presidential prospect. Given the end of the remarkable 28-year run of the Bush family--present on six of the last seven GOP national tickets, a record that could stand forever--and McCain's own status as a pre-baby boomer, this was baked in the cake no matter what younger Republican politician McCain chose to elevate.
But even apart from its political implications, the rollout of the Sarah Palin vice presidential candidacy may be regarded decades from now as a nationally shared Rorschach test of enormous cultural significance.
From the instant of Palin's designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards's affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.
The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It's not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.
In her acceptance speech last Wednesday night, anyone could see the poise and skill that undoubtedly attracted McCain's attention months ago, when few others were even aware that he was looking. But it was precisely the venom of the left's assault that heightened the drama and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.
This is a rare talent, one shared by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. For this quality to have even a chance to develop, there must be something real to serve as an emotional backdrop: disproportionate, crazy-seeming rage by one's political enemies. Roosevelt was on his party's national ticket five times and Reagan sought the presidency four times. Each became governor of what at the time was the nation's most populous state. It took Roosevelt and Reagan decades of national prominence and pitched ideological combat to achieve the gift of enemies like these. Yet the American left awarded Sarah Palin this gift seemingly within a microsecond of her appearance on the national stage in Dayton, Ohio. Why?
The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.
Full human liberation always remained the ultimate vision of the left--Marx, for one, was explicit on this point--but the left in its more than 200-year history has been flexible and adaptable in the forms it was willing to assume and the projects it was willing to undertake in pursuit of its anti-institutional goals. For more than a hundred years, the central project of the global left was socialism.
It's hard to credit today, but as recently as the 1940s most Western political elites believed government ownership of business and national planning were the keys to economic modernization. Even when socialism's economic prestige was eroded by the West's capitalist boom after World War II, socialism retained credibility as a means of income redistribution.
It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.
In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it, leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.
This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion and limit the autonomy of the family did not.
For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory "liberated" men.
With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.
The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.
Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.
If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.
On August 29, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement by the McCain campaign, all that was widely known of the governor of Alaska was that she was married with five children, the last one of whom had been carried to term with Down syndrome, and that she was pro-life. No one knew that her oldest daughter was pregnant. No one knew much about what she had done as governor or in her previous career. No one knew how she had been drawn into politics, or that her sister had had a reckless husband and a contentious divorce. Above all, with the possible exception of John McCain, no one knew that Sarah Palin was both a married mother of five and a brilliant political talent with a chance not just to change the dynamics of the 2008 election but to rise to the top level of American politics, whatever happens this year.
The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was--before anything else about her was known--enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah Palin's many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to shape not just America's politics but its culture.
Jeffrey Bell, author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992), is completing work on Social Conservatism: The Movement That Polarized American Politics. He is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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Interesting thought piece. Some overlapping points with the book "Liberal Fascism" which I have not finished yet. It is an uneven, but interesting book.
And here's this humorous stroll down memory lane with the NY Times-- not the date: :lol: :lol: :lol:
From a New York Times editorial on July 3, 1984, on Geraldine Ferraro's nomination for vice president:
Where is it written that only senators are qualified to become President? . . . Or where is it written that mere representatives aren't qualified, like Geraldine Ferraro of Queens? . . . Where is it written that governors and mayors, like Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, are too local, too provincial? . . . Presidential candidates have always chosen their running mates for reasons of practical demography, not idealized democracy. . . . What a splendid system, we say to ourselves, that takes little-known men, tests them in high office and permits them to grow into statesmen. . . . Why shouldn't a little-known woman have the same opportunity to grow?
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responding to JDN's points but writing to all ( or none?): I challenge you or anyone to post and rebut ANY written opinion on the supreme court from Justice Thomas that makes you think he is not up to the job. Without an example or a pattern, that sounded too much like an Obama talking point and Obama also did not provide one example. My point was not just the vote on an opposing party's appointment, it was that the conduct of the hearings was a disgrace (IMO) and that the leadership lacking came from the chair. Regarding votes on nominees, I would point out that Obama was one of the 22 furthest to the left in opposing confirmation Chief Justice John Roberts, a very competent opposing party appointment IMO. Is Roberts also not "up to the job"?
Age discrimination: I very rarely support ANY rule where government tells private companies how to run their business, but certainly there is a difference between retirement according to a consensual contract with a fat golden compensation package and the issue of not hiring a qualified applicant. Our personal experiences are obviously VERY different on age. Some of the people I admire most in the world right now are a decade older than McCain. I would more likely question Obama as too young and too new. The Palin situation is slightly different because she MIGHT serve suddenly as President, but she is running for 2nd position. Assuming, and I don't, that McCain dies or retires later in his term or more likely declines to run for a second term, she will have new experience gained because of her selection, just as Obama would have more experience running for a second term that he doesn't have now.
JDN, thanks for your honest, candid views. FWIW, if you read deeper in these threads you will see that I didn't support McCain and I didn't favor the Palin appointment before it was made. I just prefer this ticket at this time presented with these choices.
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Poll: Convention lifts McCain over Obama
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.
McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican's biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.
The convention bounce has helped not only McCain but also attitudes toward Republican congressional candidates and the GOP in general.
"The Republicans had a very successful convention and, at least initially, the selection of Sarah Palin has made a big difference," says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "He's in a far better position than his people imagined he would be in at this point."
However, in an analysis of the impact of political conventions since 1960, Sabato concluded that post-convention polls signal the election's outcome only about half the time. "You could flip a coin and be about as predictive," he says. "It is really surprising how quickly convention memories fade."
McCain has narrowed Obama's wide advantage on handling the economy, by far the electorate's top issue. Before the GOP convention, Obama was favored by 19 points; now he's favored by 3.
The Republican's ties to President Bush remains a vulnerability. In the poll, 63% say they are concerned he would pursue policies too similar to those of the current president. Bush's approval rating is 33%.
In the new poll, taken Friday through Sunday, McCain leads Obama by 54%-44% among those seen as most likely to vote. The survey of 1,022 adults, including 959 registered voters, has a margin of error of +/— 3 points for both samples.
Among the findings:
• Before the convention, Republicans by 47%-39% were less enthusiastic than usual about voting. Now, they are more enthusiastic by 60%-24%, a sweeping change that narrows a key Democratic advantage. Democrats report being more enthusiastic by 67%-19%.
• Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a national unknown before McCain chose her for the ticket 10 days ago, draws a strong reaction from voters on both sides. Now, 29% say she makes them more likely to vote for McCain, 21% less likely.
Obama's choice of Delaware Sen. Joe Biden as running mate made 14% more likely to vote for the Democrat, 7% less likely.
• McCain's acceptance speech Thursday received lower ratings than the one Obama gave a week earlier: 15% called McCain's speech "excellent" compared with 35% for Obama.
Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-09-07-poll_N.htm
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responding to JDN's points but writing to all ( or none?): I challenge you or anyone to post and rebut ANY written opinion on the supreme court from Justice Thomas that makes you think he is not up to the job. Without an example or a pattern, that sounded too much like an Obama talking point and Obama also did not provide one example. My point was not just the vote on an opposing party's appointment, it was that the conduct of the hearings was a disgrace (IMO) and that the leadership lacking came from the chair. Regarding votes on nominees, I would point out that Obama was one of the 22 furthest to the left in opposing confirmation Chief Justice John Roberts, a very competent opposing party appointment IMO. Is Roberts also not "up to the job"?
Age discrimination: I very rarely support ANY rule where government tells private companies how to run their business, but certainly there is a difference between retirement according to a consensual contract with a fat golden compensation package and the issue of not hiring a qualified applicant. Our personal experiences are obviously VERY different on age. Some of the people I admire most in the world right now are a decade older than McCain. I would more likely question Obama as too young and too new. The Palin situation is slightly different because she MIGHT serve suddenly as President, but she is running for 2nd position. Assuming, and I don't, that McCain dies or retires later in his term or more likely declines to run for a second term, she will have new experience gained because of her selection, just as Obama would have more experience running for a second term that he doesn't have now.
JDN, thanks for your honest, candid views. FWIW, if you read deeper in these threads you will see that I didn't support McCain and I didn't favor the Palin appointment before it was made. I just prefer this ticket at this time presented with these choices.
Doug, nothing wrong with supporting McCain or Palin; I don't but frankly, if they are elected I will still sleep well at night. I just think we really do need a change from Bush and McCain voted 90% of the time with Bush.
And I don't think our experiences are that different on age. I too admire many people older than McCain. And I respect them deeply. Many are wise and experienced. But the daily rigors of the job of being President of the US is truly amazing. People seem to age before your eyes. It's a tough and demanding job; you need to be at your peak mentally and physically. No one, especially after what McCain has gone through can be at their "peak" and begin a job as difficult as being President at age 72.
As for Justices, perhaps I was too harsh on Thomas, but I do not think he has the intellect of the others; he just seems to go along. While I may not always agree with Scalia he is brilliant. And I think Robert's runs a good court, not to mention he too is very accomplished. And I think it is wrong (both parties seem to have a litmus test) to politicize the selection of Judges. I think good people can be found on both sides of the aisle.
For example, regarding age and nonpartisan, for a long time I have belonged to an old social/business club (The California Club) here in LA; it's comfortable and quiet. Mostly Republican, but a few Democrats. All great people. It's fun to listen to Pete Wilson argue politics in the steam room, a CEO express his business opinion on the squash court, or Warren Christopher criticize Rice over lunch. I may not always agree, but most of them are accomplished and I learn a lot; it's casual so we have fun and it's a good and take (I usually lose) but how else can one learn but to listen and hear all sides? Their being a Republican or Democratic doesn't affect me in the least. Nor does their age. Warren Christopher is still brilliant, I admire him greatly, however, as I implied above, could he now maintain the daily demands and rigors of the office of Secretary of State? I doubt it. Age catches up with all of us.
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", , , for a long time I have belonged to an old social/business club (The California Club) here in LA; it's comfortable and quiet. Mostly Republican, but a few Democrats. All great people. It's fun to listen to Pete Wilson argue politics in the steam room, a CEO express his business opinion on the squash court, or Warren Christopher criticize Rice over lunch."
Tres cool 8-)
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Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?
GM,
Sarah Palin went to a church that equates gibberish to speaking to God. Mitt Romney believes in holy text that were reveled from a hat, and I go to church that protected child molesters. Look at any church/religion hard enough and you will find something 'f*cked up'. Obama has already addressed and has made his feelings clear, its time to move on.
I agree though that voting "present" as a legislator is relevant, what is also relevant is what were the votes for.
Vince
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Barry-O has 20 years attending a racist, America-hating church and mostly voted "present" as a legislator. And this is experience we want for a president?
GM,
Sarah Palin went to a church that equates gibberish to speaking to God. Mitt Romney believes in holy text that were reveled from a hat, and I go to church that protected child molesters. Look at any church/religion hard enough and you will find something 'f*cked up'. Obama has already addressed and has made his feelings clear, its time to move on.
I agree though that voting "present" as a legislator is relevant, what is also relevant is what were the votes for.
Vince
**If Sarah Palin attended a church that taught "christian identity" theology (white supremacist ideology masquerading as christianity) I could not vote for her ever, for any reason. Barry-O chose to find a "black church" in Chicago. Obviously there were quite a few to choose from. He had to choose one that is formed around a racist theology, one that honored Louis Farrakhan. In fact, the only person to appear on the cover of the church's magazine cover as many times as Farrakhan was Barry-O. Does he hate the white people that raised him, or was it just a cynical move to enhance his "blackness" for running for the Illinois state legislature? Neither speak well of his character.**
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31200_Bill_Ayers-_Violent_Resistance_Not_Necessarily_the_Answer
**Obama's political mentor. Unrepentant terrorist.**
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and Frank Davis Marshall, and Rev. Wright, and Rezko, and the Syrian (IIRC?) businesman with Rezko, and ACORN (voter reg. fraud) and and and
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The original political point about Justice Thomas was that he received bad treatment from the judiciary committee under Sen. Biden's watch. The allegation wasn't 'vetted'. This was pre-Lewinski when they brought 'pubic hair on a coke can' and 'Long Dong Silver' into our living rooms with our children and into our congressional record based on one person saying it was so. No incident before. No incident after. No pattern. No evidence. No second 'victim', no witness, no contemporaneous complaint. The point at the time IMO was that Thomas like Bork didn't find an unenumerated right of privacy unwritten into the constitution that trumped life so they believed the adjudicated right to an abortion would become in jeopardy. That may be enough reason for certain senators to vote against him, but not a license to smear.
Obama dove in there lately by singling out Thomas as unworthy of the court, then like I said previously, failed to back up his harsh judgment with anything unique to this Justice, such as at least one badly reasoned opinion. Two recent posts at powerlineblog.com take this story from there:
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August 19, 2008
A strange singling out
During the forum at Saddleback, Barack Obama said he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court because Thomas lacked relevant experience at the time. I (Paul Mirengoff at powerline) suggested that this statement was disingenuous because Obama clearly wouldn't have selected Thomas, a powerful spokesman against the "liberal" view of civil rights, regardless of how much judicial experience Thomas had possessed. I agreed, though, that Thomas lacked substantial experience as a judge, adding that in this respect (and this respect alone) Thomas could be viewed as the Barack Obama of the Supreme Court.
A reader reminded me, however, that when Thomas joined the Court, it was not unusual for Justices to have little or no prior judging experience. Two of the sitting Justices at that time, White and Rehnquist, had never been judges. Two others, O'Connor and Brennan had never been federal judges. Lewis Powell, who retired four years before Thomas joined the Court, likewise had never been a judge before he joined the Supreme Court. Neither had former Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Obama isn't the only person who has singled out Justice Thomas for his lack of prior judging experience. It makes for interesting speculation to ponder the reasons for this singling out.
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August 24, 2008
A strange singling out explained
Barack Obama's recent comment about Justice Thomas -- that he would not have nominated Thomas for the Supreme Court due to Thomas' "inexperience" -- coupled with Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, provide a painful reminder of the judicial confirmation wars of the past 20 plus years. I wrote about Biden's central (and disgraceful) role in these wars here. I wondered why Thomas is singled out for having been inexperienced at the time of his nomination here.
The latter post brought this response from a reader:
The answer is this: liberals like Mr. Obama simply cannot fathom how a black person could hold seriously thought-out views about jurisprudence like those of Clarence Thomas. And there is something too crass about attacking Justice Thomas' jurisprudence on the merits, as well as too time-consuming.
Liberals deem it too crass because they like to pretend that their objections are unrelated to politics, perhaps out of a concern that conservatives will apply the same approach to liberal judicial nominees when the tables are turned. So they find other reasons: Bork is too smart and doesn't understand the "common man;" and Thomas is too dumb. But the Thomas-as-too-dumb view is too crass also, so the easy thing to do is say he was "unqualified" or too inexperienced.
Substantive critiques of Justice Thomas' jurisprudence are too time-consuming because people like Mr. Obama don't want to read, much less engage, his opinions. Note that criticisms of Justice Thomas never cite any examples of actual opinions he's written. Obama certainly failed to do so at the Saddleback forum.
Ultimately, the theme continues for liberals: "self-hating" minorities who deviate from liberal orthodoxy are attacked because liberals view them as turn-coats. For more recent examples, see the treatment Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown received when the president nominated them to the D.C. Circuit, while the white guy, John Rodgers, sailed through to confirmation. And, recall Justice Thomas' words:
"This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."
The "old order" is liberalism. Mr. Obama's cheap shot against Justice Thomas, which would be applauded in Cambridge and Hyde Park, is the most recent example of the stereotypical left-wing effort to keep minorities on the plantation.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/09/10/biden-hey-you-know-who-might-have-been-a-better-pick-for-vp-than-me/
Joe Biden tells the truth!
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**If Sarah Palin attended a church that taught "christian identity" theology (white supremacist ideology masquerading as christianity) I could not vote for her ever, for any reason. Barry-O chose to find a "black church" in Chicago. Obviously there were quite a few to choose from. He had to choose one that is formed around a racist theology, one that honored Louis Farrakhan. In fact, the only person to appear on the cover of the church's magazine cover as many times as Farrakhan was Barry-O. Does he hate the white people that raised him, or was it just a cynical move to enhance his "blackness" for running for the Illinois state legislature? Neither speak well of his character.**
Wright and Christian Identity are hardly the opposite of the same coin. As for why he chose that church, again i think you are streching in saying he hates his white family because he joined a black church and as for joining to appear more black for legislature, come on now, he joined the church in the 80's he did run for state legislature until 97.
Vince
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Vince:
What do YOU think explains his decsision to join this church/follow this pastor? What do YOU think this says about him?
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Why Does Obama's Pastor Matter?
By John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, February 04, 2008
Barack Obama, in a way that recalls John F. Kennedy, a politician to whom he's frequently compared, has carefully controlled and burnished his image to create the impression of an independent figure, free from dogma and ideological entanglements. But there is one man who threatens to undermine Obama's appealing narrative as a man above the ugly quarrels and divisive partisanship of the past: his longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
On March 1, 1972, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. became the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a position he still holds to this day. Because he has been a revered figure in the life of presidential aspirant Barack Obama for two decades, Wright's political views, which he commonly draws from the tenets of liberation theology, are worthy of some scrutiny—if only to shed light on the teachings that have had enough resonance to retain Obama as a TUCC congregant since 1988. So great is Obama's respect for Wright, that the former sought the Reverend's counsel before formally declaring his candidacy for U.S. President. Moreover, Obama and his wife selected Wright to perform their wedding ceremony and to baptize their two daughters. These are honors of considerable magnitude, and it is reasonable to speculate that if we learn more about Rev. Wright, we may gain some insight into the personal qualities and belief systems Barack Obama holds in high regard.
When we read the writings, public statements, and sermons of Rev. Wright, we quickly notice his unmistakable conviction that America is a nation infested with racism, prejudice, and injustices that make life very difficult for black people. As he declared in one of his sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We [Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."
In a similar spirit, Wright laments "the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed."[1] Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, he complains that "African Americans don't run anything in the Capital except elevators."[2] On its website, Wright's church portrays black people as victims who are still burdened by the legacy of their "pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism," and who must pray for "the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people."
Wright detects what he views as racism in virtually every facet of American life. In the business world, for instance, he attributes the high unemployment rate of African Americans to "the fact that they are black."[3] Vis-à-vis the criminal justice system, he similarly explains that "the brothers are in prison" largely because of their skin color. "Consider the 'three strikes law,'" he elaborates. "There is a higher jail sentencing for crack than for cocaine because more African Americans get crack than do cocaine."[4] Notwithstanding Wright's implication that the harsh anti-crack penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, the Congressional Record shows that such was not at all the case. In 1986, when the strict, federal anti-crack legislation was being debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black community—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for even harsher penalties. In fact, a few years earlier CBC members had pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy.[5]
In Wright's calculus, white America's bigotry is to blame not only for whatever ills continue to plague the black community, but also for our country's conflicts with other nations. "In the 21st century," says Wright, "white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns."
Remarkably, no mention of jihad—the ageless Muslim tradition of aggressive, permanent warfare whose ultimate aim is to achieve Islam's dominion over the human race at large—managed to find its way into Wright's analysis. Rather, he assured us that the 9/11 atrocities were ultimately traceable to the doorstep of U.S. provocations. In fact, Wright apparently sees no reason to suspect that Islam may be incompatible in any way with Western traditions. "Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize," he has written. "Islam comes out of Christianity."[6]
Apart from America's purported racism, Wright also despises the nation's capitalist economic structure, viewing it as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. "Capitalism as made manifest in the 'New World,'" says Wright, "depended upon slave labor (by African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the 'Two-Thirds World' under oppression."[7] This anti-capitalist perspective is further reflected in TUCC's "10-point vision," whose ideals include the cultivation of "a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY." Dispelling any doubt that this is a reference to socialism and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, the TUCC mission statement plainly declares its goal of helping "the less fortunate to become agents of change for God who is not pleased with America's economic mal-distribution!"
This view is entirely consistent with Rev. Wright's devotion to the tenets of liberation theology, which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Devised by Cold War-era theologians, it teaches that the gospels of Jesus can be understood only as calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia where today's poor will unseat their "oppressors" and become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their spiritual) deprivations. An extension of this paradigm is black liberation theology, which seeks to foment a similar Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class solidarity. Wright's mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Arguing that Christianity has been used by white society as an opiate of the (black) masses, Cone asserts that the destitute "are made and kept poor by the rich and powerful few," and that "[n]o one can be a follower of Jesus Christ without a political commitment that expresses one's solidarity with victims."
Many of Wright's condemnations of America are echoed in his denunciations of Israel and Zionism, which he has blamed for imposing "injustice and … racism" on the Palestinians. According to Wright, Zionism contains an element of "white racism." Likening Israel's treatment of Palestinians to South Africa's treatment of blacks during the apartheid era, Wright advocates divestment campaigns targeting companies that conduct business in, or with, Israel.
Given Wright's obvious low regard for the U.S. and Israel, it is by no means surprising that he reserves some of his deepest respect for the virulently anti-American, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. "When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens," says Wright. "Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen … His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest. Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience. His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation's most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose."
Wright's paean to Farrakhan was parroted in the November/December issue of TUCC's bimonthly magazine, the Trumpet, which featured an interview with the NOI "icon" who, according to the publication, "truly epitomized greatness." "Because of the Minister's influence in the African American community," the Trumpet announced that it was honoring him with an "Empowerment Award" as a "fitting tribute for a storied life well lived."
This seems an odd distinction to confer upon someone whose anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic statements are numerous. For example, in 1996 Farrakhan told a Tehran newspaper that God would "bestow upon Muslims" the honor of "destroy[ing] America." In February 1998, he sent a cordial and supportive letter to Saddam Hussein, calling him a "visionary" who had earned the Iraqi people's "love," and whose demise would "mean a setback for the goal of unity [among Muslims]." In July 2002, he declared that America, "with blood dripping from [its] hands," had no moral authority by which to overthrow Saddam. In February 2005, he condemned the United States for waging a war "against Islam," adding: "[T]here's no way that I, as a Muslim, could countenance my children or grandchildren fighting a war against fellow believers in any part of the world."
Farrakhan also has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the white "blue-eyed devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate America's black communities from coast to coast. Moreover, he has referred to white people as "the skunks of the planet."
On a 1984 trip to meet with the Libyan dictator (and America's arch enemy) Muammar Qadhafi, Farrakhan was accompanied by none other than Jeremiah A. Wright.
Farrakhan has long considered Qadhafi to be his trusted "friend," "brother," and "fellow struggler in the cause of liberation for our people." In 1996, the NOI leader formed a partnership with Qadhafi, who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political lobby in the U.S. Said Qadhafi: "We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities—and at their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians—for they play an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S. elections." "Our confrontation with America," added Qadhafi, "was [previously] like a fight against a fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a breach to enter into this fortress and confront it."
Farrakhan's October 16, 1995 Million Man March ranks among the events about which Rev. Wright has written most extensively and passionately. Wright attended the rally with his son, and has described it as "a once in a lifetime, amazing experience."[8] When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to boycott the demonstration because of Farrakhan's well-documented history of hateful rhetoric, Wright derided those critics as "'Negro' leaders,"[9] "'colored' leaders," "Oreos," and "house niggras"[10] whose most noteworthy trait was their contemptible "Uncle Tomism."[11] "There are a whole boat load of 'darkies' who think in white supremacist terms," added Wright. "… Some 'darkies' think white women are superior to black women…. Some 'darkies' think white lawyers are superior to black lawyers. Some 'darkies' think white pastors are better than black pastors. There are a whole boatload of 'darkies' who think anything white and everyone white is better than whatever it is black people have."[12]
In the book titled When Black Men Stand up for God, a collection of sermons and reflections on the Million Man March, Wright identifies Kwanzaa founder Maulana Karenga as an attendee of the rally.[13] In the end notes that follow a transcript of one of Wright's sermons, Karenga is described as "an internationally acclaimed social activist and scholar in Pan African Studies"; "the founder and creator of Kwanzaa, the well-known African American holiday"; and "the director of Pan African Studies and Visiting Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside."[14] Unmentioned is the fact that Karenga is a self-identified "African socialist" whose "Seven Principles of Blackness," which are observed during Kwanzaa, are not only the Marxist precepts of parity and proletariat unity, but are also identical to those of the 1970s domestic terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Nor is it noted that in 1971 Karenga was convicted of torturing two women who were members of United Slaves, a black nationalist cult he had established.
On its website, Wright's church describes itself in distinctly racial terms, as being an "Unashamedly Black" congregation of "African people" who are "true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization," and who participate in TUCC's "Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community."
Some have suggested that such seemingly exclusionary assertions, coupled with Wright's own racially loaded statements and his close affiliation with Farrakhan, indicate that Wright is guilty of racism. But Wright casually dismisses this charge, stating: "I get tickled every time I hear a 'Negro' call me a racist. They don't even understand how to define the word. Racism means controlling the means."[15] In other words, Wright employs a rhetorical escape hatch that permits him to evade all charges of racism simply by claiming that only the "dominant" (i.e., white) demographic is capable of such ugliness. The implication is that no deed or utterance, however hateful or vile, is egregious enough to qualify any black person as a racist; that blacks are always the victims of racism, never its perpetrators.
American voters ought to have more than a passing interest in the fact that when Barack Obama formally joined TUCC in 1991, he tacitly accepted this same Jeremiah Wright as a spiritual mentor. Moreover, he pledged allegiance to the church's race-conscious "Black Value System" that encourages blacks to patronize black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming "entrapped" by the pursuit of a "black middle-classness" whose ideals presumably would erode their sense of African identity and render them "captive" to white culture.
In addition, voters should examine carefully the question of whether Obama shares Wright's socialist economic preferences. They ought to be aware, for instance, that the Democratic candidate is on record as having said that his religious faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market." Moreover, Obama's voting record and his issue positions show him generally to favor high spending and increased government intervention in all realms of life.
When Rev. Wright's controversial statements and positions recently became more widely publicized, Obama said, "There are some things I agree with my pastor about, some things I disagree with him about." It is the duty of every American voter to determine exactly where those agreements and disagreements lie.
Notes:
[1] When Black Men Stand up for God (Chicago: African American Images), 1996, p. 17.
[2] Ibid., p. 102.
[3] Ibid., p. 17.
[4] Ibid., p. 17.
[5] John DiIulio, Jr., "My Black Crime Problem, and Ours," City Journal (Spring 1996), pp. 19-20.
[6] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 16.
[7] Blow the Trumpet in Zion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 2005, pp. 8-9.
[8] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 10.
[9] Ibid., pp. 11, 37.
[10] Ibid., p. 80.
[11] Ibid., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 81.
[13] It should be noted that Wright's church has conducted Kwanzaa programs for its congregants. See When Black Men Stand up for God, p. iv.)
[14] When Black Men Stand up for God, p. 25.
[15] Ibid., p. 102.
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The side by side comparison is pretty special:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sj91NH5fvw
A spontaneous endorsement of McCain
http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8
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Obama’s Descent to Earth
It’s hard to maintain a celestial conceit for four years — even if you believe it yourself.
By Charles Krauthammer
The Democrats are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. Tom Friedman tells him to “start slamming down some phones.” Camille Paglia suggests, “be boring!”
Meanwhile, a posse of Democratic lawyers, mainstream reporters, lefty bloggers, and various other Obamaphiles are scouring the vast tundra of Alaska for something, anything, to bring down Sarah Palin: her daughter’s pregnancy, her ex-brother-in-law problem, her $60 per diem, and now her religion. (CNN reports — news flash! — that she apparently has never spoken in tongues.) Not since Henry II asked if no one would rid him of his turbulent priest, have so many so urgently volunteered for duty.
But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. For no presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why McCain’s Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama’s meteoric rise was based not on issues — there was not a dime’s worth of difference between him and Hillary on issues — but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.
The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer’s remorse, was the Democrats’ realization that the arc of Obama’s celebrity had peaked — and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.
It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever.
Five speeches map Obama’s trajectory.
Obama burst into celebrityhood with his brilliant and moving 2004 Democratic convention speech (#1). It turned an obscure state senator into a national figure and legitimate presidential candidate.
His next and highest moment (#2) was the night of his Iowa caucus victory when he gave an equally stirring speech of the highest tones that dazzled a national audience just tuning in.
The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers — the chants, the swoons, the “we are the ones” self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan’s revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama’s movement, the man is the transcendence.
Which gave the Obama campaign a cult-like tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the high-flown, self-referential rhetoric, the campaign’s insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (#3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (#4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.
From there it was but a short step to Paris Hilton. Finally, the Obama people understood. Which is why the next data point (#5) is so different. Obama’s Denver acceptance speech was deliberately pedestrian, State-of-the-Unionish, programmatic, and only briefly (that lovely coda recalling the March on Washington) lyrical.
The problem, however, was that Obama had announced the Invesco Field setting for the speech during the pre-Berlin flush of hubris. They were stuck with the Greek columns, the circus atmosphere, the rock-star fireworks farewell — as opposed to the warmer, traditional, balloon-filled convention-hall hug-a-thon. The incongruity between text and context was apparent. Obama was trying to make himself ordinary — and serious — but could hardly remember how.
One star fades, another is born.
The very next morning, John McCain picks Sarah Palin and a new celebrity is launched. And in the celebrity game, novelty is trump. With her narrative, her persona, her charisma carrying the McCain campaign to places it has never been — and by all logic has no right to be — she’s pulling an Obama.
But her job is easier. She only has to remain airborne for seven more weeks. Obama maintained altitude for an astonishing four years. In politics, as in all games, however, it’s the finish that counts.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=N2JiYTc5OWEyYmRlZjY0ZTI1NjQ5OTU4ODgzMmM2YmE=
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McCain Flies His Campaign Past Obama
Michael Barone
Saturday, September 13, 2008
John McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Sarah Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Barack Obama's OODA loop.
That term was the invention of the great fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
"The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer Robert Coram writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary."
For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position.
The Palin selection -- and her performance at the convention and on the stump -- seems to be having that effect. Obama chief strategist David Axelrod admitted of the Palin pick: "I can honestly say we weren't prepared for that. I mean, her name wasn't on anybody's list." But it was known that McCain's VP adviser had traveled to Alaska, and anyone clicking on youtube.com could see Palin's impressive performance in political debates. The McCain campaign shrewdly kept the information that she was on the short list and that she was the choice to a half-dozen people, who didn't tell even their spouses. The Obama team failed to Observe.
Then they failed to Orient. Palin, as her convention and subsequent appearances have shown, powerfully reinforces two McCain themes: She is a maverick who has taken on the leaders of her own party (as Obama never has in Chicago), and she has a record on energy of favoring drilling and exploiting American resources. Instead of undermining these themes, they dismissed the choice as an attempt to appeal to female Hillary Clinton supporters or to religious conservatives.
Then team Obama and its many backers in the media failed to Decide correctly, so when they Acted they got it wrong. Their attacks on Palin tended to ricochet and hit Obama. Is she inexperienced? Well, what has Obama ever run (besides his now floundering campaign)? Being a small-town mayor, as Palin said, is like being a community organizer, "except that you have actual responsibilities."
Is she neglecting her family? Well, how often has Obama tucked his daughters in lately? For more than a week we've seen the No. 1 person on the Democratic ticket argue that he's better prepared than the No. 2 person on the Republican ticket. That's not a winning argument even if you win it. As veteran California Democrat Willie Brown says, "The Republicans are now on offense, and Democrats are on defense."
Perhaps the Obama campaign strategists expected their many friends in the mainstream media to do their work for them. Certainly they tried. But their efforts have misfired, and the grenades they lobbed at Palin have ricocheted back and blown up in their faces. Voters are on to their game.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that 68 percent believe "most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win" and that 51 percent -- more than support McCain -- believe the press is "trying to hurt" Sarah Palin. The press and the Democratic ticket are paying the price for decades of biased mainstream media coverage.
I am not the only one to notice that John McCain and Sarah Palin have gotten inside the Obama campaign's (and mainstream media's) OODA loop. Blogger Charlie Martin sprang into pixels on www.americanthinker.com before I could spring into print with this column. But as I write, Barack Obama is in his second daily news cycle of explaining why his "lipstick on a pig" comments are not a sexist attack on the hockey mom who compared herself to a pit bull with lipstick.
Robert Coram describes what can happen when one player gets inside another's OODA loop. "If someone truly understands how to create menace and uncertainty and mistrust, then how to exploit and magnify the presence of these disconcerting elements, the loop can be vicious, a terribly destructive force, virtually unstoppable in causing panic and confusion and -- Boyd's phrase is best -- 'unraveling the competition.' ... The most amazing aspect of the OODA loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened."
John Boyd would have been a terrific political consultant.
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I think I am Over Dosing on the "OODA loop". But what a great acronym, huh? GM on 8/30 quoted a similar article (almost the same) on the "OODA loop" in the McCain forum as referenced (Charlie Martin) in this article. I am sure it has excellent military application, it's brilliant, but McCain himself was a fighter pilot over 40 years ago. And I think Boyd wrote about the OODA Loop after McCain's service as a fighter pilot...
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http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000172.html
More on the history of the OODA loop concept.
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Vince:
What do YOU think explains his decsision to join this church/follow this pastor? What do YOU think this says about him?
Crafty,
Sorry took so long to respond. Work getting in the way!
For me to really get a feel for his decision to pick this particular church I think i would need to read his books. Not much for auto biographies (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!).
From what I gather this is a fairly prominent church in Chicago with many community out reach programs, seems like a good reason to join any church. Is it Black centric, yeah, where they angry at white people, yeah, I also think at the times they good reason for both. (I think its debatable if this type of rhetoric is needed now and if so to what extent). Do I think this mean Obama hates white people, no.
As for staying, as Obama has said he has many ties to the church. A church is not just pastor but all the people who belonged.
I give you an example, a friend of my thinks that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI are too liberal and didn't particularly like them. I asked him if he considered them anti-popes, he said "no they are the real popes, they might lead the church but they are not the church".
Vince
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I appreciate your points, but apart for Rev. Wright this is a church that had a particularly warm relationship with Louis Farrakhan and featured him prominently. There's plenty of black churches with community programs that don't promote such virulent bigots.
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I think I am Over Dosing on the "OODA loop". But what a great acronym, huh? GM on 8/30 quoted a similar article (almost the same) on the "OODA loop" in the McCain forum as referenced (Charlie Martin) in this article. I am sure it has excellent military application, it's brilliant, but McCain himself was a fighter pilot over 40 years ago. And I think Boyd wrote about the OODA Loop after McCain's service as a fighter pilot...
The acronym might post-date McCain's training, but the concepts have been stated one way or another in aviator training since it began. Indeed, I'd argue the FMA concept of flow is pretty synonymous: you move more fluidly than your opponent and hence get inside his or her game. Think McCain/Palin have that going currently.
A point of order: McCain is not a fighter pilot; he flew ground attack aircraft. NYT et al can't get that one right.
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This tends to highlight BOs fraudulant claims that he is "post" partisan:
ANALYSIS:
Sen. John McCain's record of working with Democrats easily outstrips Sen. Barack Obama's efforts with Republicans, according to an analysis by The Washington Times of their legislative records.
Whether looking at bills they have led on or bills they have signed onto, Mr. McCain has reached across the aisle far more frequently and with more members than Mr. Obama since the latter came to the Senate in 2005.
In fact, by several measures, Mr. McCain has been more likely to team up with Democrats than with members of his own party. Democrats made up 55 percent of his political partners over the last two Congresses, including on the tough issues of campaign finance and global warming. For Mr. Obama, Republicans were only 13 percent of his co-sponsors during his time in the Senate, and he had his biggest bipartisan successes on noncontroversial measures, such as issuing a postage stamp in honor of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
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Zogby electoral college - gap is closed. Looks like the usual red vs blue map:
http://www.zogby.com/50state/
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McCain, Obama Confront the Market
By NICK TIMIRAOS and ELIZABETH HOLMESArticle
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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. -- The U.S. banking crisis is shaking up the presidential race as well as the agenda of the next president, forcing both candidates to confront a financial calamity.
John McCain and Barack Obama jockeyed to seize an advantage on the financial crisis, signaling how Wall Street's troubles have become a bigger concern on Main Street. The candidates wrapped the market instability into broader campaign themes but found themselves wrestling on unfamiliar territory. Republican candidate Sen. McCain pointed to his credentials cleaning up Washington's excesses while Democratic candidate Sen. Obama blamed the crisis on Washington's deregulatory bent over the past three decades.
Both candidates blamed Wall Street greed and special-interest influences in Washington. "We've seen self-interest, greed, irresponsibility and corruption undermine these hard-working American people," Sen. McCain said at a rally in Orlando, Fla., where he promised to "put an end...to running Wall Street like a casino." He offered no specific prescriptions but did call for ending "multimillion-dollar payouts to CEOs that have broken the public trust."
Sen. McCain pushed the need for an updated regulatory system, a cry he began this spring. "And there's an alphabet soup of different agencies, and they have to be streamlined, they have to be consolidated, and they have to be effective," he said. "Those regulators have been asleep at the switch, and we've got to fix it." Sen. McCain also promised he wouldn't use taxpayers' dollars to solve the problem.
Sen. Obama singled out the Bush administration's deregulatory push for what he described as "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression." While Sen. McCain wasn't at fault, he said, "I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to...one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down."
While the candidates and their running mates focused on the financial crisis Monday, all four found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Sen. McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, have little experience dealing with financial crises, and neither do Sen. Obama or his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, whose expertise is in foreign affairs.
Sen. McCain's campaign pointed out that the senator had talked with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for "seven to 10 minutes" and contacted his economic team, including former Hewlett-Packard Co. head Carly Fiorina. Sen. Obama said he spoke about the market turmoil Monday morning with his economic team, including former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
Regardless of who wins the election, the crisis will further constrain the next president, sapping time and money from proposals on health care and tax relief. Both sides have promised more regulation of financial institutions and more transparency for investors. Sen. McCain has called for tougher measures to overhaul Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Sen. McCain Monday stressed the importance of allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages, saying that the financial markets couldn't stabilize until the housing market found a bottom.
In a March speech on financial-market overhaul, Sen. Obama called for extending commercial-banking regulations to investment banks, hedge funds and mortgage brokers. He called for a commission that would monitor threats to the financial system. He said deregulation that culminated in 1999 with a partial repeal of the 1930s' Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banks and commercial banks, had been driven by lobbyists and was intended primarily to facilitate mergers.
Neither candidate backed a government rescue deal for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. over the weekend. But each offered few specifics about what they would do. "We are going to have a lot of rebuilding to do," Sen. Obama said at a rally in Colorado.
The McCain campaign released a new ad Monday to capture the mantle of reform by promising tough changes to "protect your life savings."
Sen. McCain promised to overhaul the regulatory system. Among the problems Sen. McCain has identified, according to policy head Doug Holtz-Eakin, is the lack of a clearing house for derivatives so investors know the risks they entail; the lack of accountability for mortgage brokers; and the overall lack of capital backing in the system.
Both candidates had rushed to address the need for regulatory overhaul in March after the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos., but until the government was forced to backstop Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week, the financial crisis was viewed as a problem that concerned Wall Street bankers but not rank-and-file workers.
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http://video.google.com:80/videoplay?docid=1592171482172108406
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Plausible, but unsourced from Jack Wheeler's "Tothepoint":
PROOF THE CLINTONS ARE SCREWING OBAMA
Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
Monday, 15 September 2008
To The Point has long maintained that the Clintons will do what they can to make sure Obambi loses in November - for only then does Hillary have a chance for the White House in 2012.
Now there's proof.
As reported by WorldNetDaily, last Wednesday (9/10), billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife met Bill Clinton in the latter's Harlem office in New York. Ostensibly, the purpose of the meeting was to gain Scaife's funding support for Clinton's Global Initiative project.
But WND missed the real story - for that wasn't the purpose of the meeting at all, only the cover. Here's what really happened.
The day after the end of the Republican convention (Friday 9/05) with Palinmania beginning to sweep the country, Bill Clinton made a personal phone call to Scaife and asked when they could meet. They settled on the following Wednesday - the day before Clinton was to meet Obama in his Harlem office on Sept. 11.
In the meeting Clinton had personally requested, the two discussed the Global Initiative project, but it was clear to Scaife that this wasn't Clinton's purpose. The discussion was perfunctory, Clinton didn't go into detail about the project nor push Scaife for specific ways to support it.
So Scaife waited for the other shoe to drop and it did.
"How's NewsMax doing?" Clinton asked. Scaife is the one the principal investors in NewsMax, which has become a major conservative news website. Then after a little blah-blah, Clinton casually mentioned the purpose of the meeting.
"You know, Dick, one thing that nobody has really checked out yet is Obama's long-standing and deep relationship with Louis Farrakhan. It's going to really hurt him badly once it's fully disclosed."
Your assignment, Mr. Scaife, is to unleash NewsMax and the conservative media on Obama's connection with the most rabidly anti-Semitic black racist in America.
Expect NewsMax to do so.
Finally we have specific evidence of Clinton submarining Obama. This isn't the only instance, of course. The Clintons are launching a full-court press to ensure Obama's defeat.
Take Pennsylvania. It's a must-win state for Obambi. He cannot do so without the legendarily corrupt "overvote" support of former Philadelphia mayor and now governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell. As Philly mayor in 2004, Rendell's machine stuffed enough ballot boxes in South Philly to ensure victory for Kerry.
Last April, Hillary defeated Obambi in the Dem Pennsylvania primary by 10%. Note who is raising her hand in victory in this story: Gov. Ed Rendell.
What Clinton has asked Rendell to do is shut off the fraud machine. And more. Word is that Rendell intends to shut down the independent vote fraud organizers of ACORN in Philly and Pittsburgh.
Obambi can kiss the Keystone State adios.
Thus the left can also kiss goodbye any hope for their latest delusion - that Obambi will dump Biden and throw a "Hail Hillary" pass.
As explained this week by Jack Kelly, the speculation is that Saracuda is going to field dress Biden and make moose stew out of him in their October 2 debate. So on October 3, the entire leftie media/blogosphere chorus will deafeningly demand Hillary replace Slow Joe.
She will tell Obambi to not even think about it.
She and Bubba have too many fun October Surprises planned for Obambi. What Bubba tasked Scaife with was only one of them. There'll be lots more. Relax and enjoy.
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Come on man, its all about McCain and Palin. I can't wait for the day when Palin is getting of AirForce One on a rainy day, and for whatever reason she kind of slips and her skirt kind of gets pulled up over her head.
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financial crisis changes the entire shape and feel of the presidential election. It isn't just bad news, it's bad news that reveals what many people deep down feared, and hoped not to see revealed: that the huge and sprawling financial system of Wall Street is maintained essentially on faith, mood and assumption; that its problems are deep; that at some level the system looks to have been a house of cards. It isn't just bad news; it's deep bad news that reaches into the heart of widespread national anxiety.
APEveryone is afraid—the rich that they will no longer be rich, the poor that they'll be hit first by the downturn in the "last hired, first fired" sense, the middle class that it will be harder now to maintain their hold on middle-classness.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans spent the week treating the catastrophe as a political opportunity. This was unserious. A serious approach might have addressed large questions such as: Was this crisis not, at bottom, a failure of stewardship?
Instead, from Barack Obama: It's the Republicans' fault, and John McCain means more of the same. From McCain: We're reformers and we'll clean up the mess, unlike Mr. I Can't Think of Anything to Do but Raise Taxes.
Open question only history will answer: President Bush did not address the nation on the crisis until Thursday of this week, almost a week after it began, and Democrats are going to try to paint this as 9/11 times Katrina: Where was he? Will this work? Will it stick? They're going to try to turn Mr. Bush into Herbert Hoover. Hoover was not good for the Republican brand.
The economic crisis brings a new question, unarticulated so far but there, and I know because when I mention it to people they go off like rockets. It is: Do you worry that neither of them is up to it? Up to the job in general? Is either Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama actually up to getting us through this and other challenges? I haven't heard a single person say, "Yes, my guy is the answer." A lot of shrugging is going on out there. This is a read not only on the men but on the moment.
The overarching political question: In a time of heightened anxiety, will people inevitably lean toward the older congressional vet, the guy who's been around forever? Why take a chance on the new, young man at a time of crisis? Wouldn't that be akin to injecting an unstable element into an unstable environment? There's a lot at stake.
Or will people have the opposite reaction? I've had it, the system has been allowed to corrode and collapse under seven years of Republican stewardship. Throw the bums out. We need change. Obama may not be experienced, but that may help him cut through. He's not compromised.
The election, still close, still unknowable, may well hinge on whether people conclude A or B.
A mere hunch in a passing moment: In a time of crisis, confusion and fear, Americans just might, in their practicality, turn back to the old tradition of divided government. They know the Congress will be Democratic. They assume it will soon be more Democratic. Therefore the president they choose may well be of the other party.
A fearless prediction: My beautiful election enters its dark phase.
Lots of signs of the new darkness. Mr. Obama's army is swarming, blocking lines when Obama critics show up for radio interviews. A study out Thursday said the Obama campaign has become more negative than the McCain campaign. There is the hacking—no one at this point knows by whom—of Sarah Palin's personal email account. From Mr. Obama himself, a new edge. He tells an audience in Elko, Nev., to "argue" with McCain supporters and "get in their face." Bambi is playing Chicago style. No doubt everyone around him has been saying, and for some weeks now, "Get tough." But this is not how to get tough, and it does not reflect a shrewd reading of what the moment demands. People want depth, not ferocity. We've got nerves that jingle-jangle-jingle.
And it gives Mr. McCain a beautiful opening. He can now play Oldest and Wisest, damning the new meanness more in sorrow than in anger.
There's another reason things will get more mean than meaningful. Here is the tough, sad, rather deadly assumption I see rising among our media people, our thinkers, observers and chatterers, the highly sophisticated who've seen'em come and seen'em go: It is, again: What if neither of them is the right man? What if neither of them is equal to the moment? What if neither party is equal to the moment?
This is not in itself important—who cares what they think, really? But there will be a small impact in terms of tone. If you are a longtime Obama supporter and are beginning now to admit to deep doubts, you can't just announce you've been wrong for the past year. You'd look like a fool. You cannot speak credibly, or in a way you yourself believe, in rosy support. But what you can do is turn, with new rage, on the guy you've at least long opposed. So you ignore Mr. Obama and attack Mr. McCain with new ferocity. Or, if you have doubts about Mr. McCain, you ignore him and turn your heat on Mr. Obama.
The Obama campaign has been one of real dignity and cool, and in this it reflected its candidate. It won't be good to see this end. It will be sad, actually.
On the Republican side, the legitimate anger sparked by the media's personal attacks on Sarah Palin and her family has now been funneled, coolly and almost chillingly, into antimedia manipulation. This is no good. It may help the Republicans win, because no one likes the media. Even the media doesn't like the media. But it invites charges of winning bad. And if you win bad in a 50/50 nation, it makes it really hard to govern.
A final point. Do you ever have the passing thought that the presidential election doesn't matter as much as we think? Whoever wins will govern within more of less the same limits, both domestically and internationally. A New York liberal leaning toward Mr. McCain told me this week he has no fear that Mr. McCain may be a more militant figure than Mr. Obama. We already have two wars, "we're out of army." Even if Mr. McCain wanted a war, he said, he couldn't start one.
I wonder if we follow the election so passionately because we're afraid. We're afraid a lot of our national problems are intractable, and the future too full of challenge.
We cannot tolerate feeling this way. So we make believe the election can change everything. And we follow it passionately to convince ourselves its outcome will be decisive and make everything better. We reassure ourselves with pictures of the cheering crowds at the rally. We even find some comfort in the latest story of the latest dirty trick. But deep inside we think: Ah, that won't work either.
Some part of me thinks we are all making believe this is a life-changing election because we know it's not a life-changing election. Ever have that thought? Me too. Then there's a rally or a scandal or a gaffe, and it passes.
Please add your comments to the Opinion
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It seems McCain is having a bad week :-o
http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/19/how-does-the-wsj-article-affect-mccain/
And elsewhere, he is busy quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt; poor McCain, he must really be confused.
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I saw Obama looking extra-nervous recently, is he back on coke? Did he ever quit?
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**Sounds like Mr. Cafferty was confused.**
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/...0,675980.story
By Karen Freifeld
Staff Writer
August 5, 2003, 3:37 PM EDT
Like most journalists, CNN morning anchor Jack Cafferty would prefer to cover news than make it. Especially when it's bad news.
But Tuesday, a stunned Cafferty was greeted by photographers as he went into a midtown Manhattan court to plead guilty in connection with a hit and run accident.
According to the criminal complaint, Cafferty was driving a Cadillac with a New Jersey Press license plate on Ninth Avenue near 42nd Street May 14th when he allegedly made an abrupt turn and hit bicyclist Billy Maldonado.
About five people tried to stop Cafferty by running after the car, waving their arms and yelling, "Hey Stop," according to the complaint, but the newsman allegedly continued through at least two red lights, while dragging the bicycle underneath the vehicle.
Maldonado, who was knocked to the ground, suffered bruises.
Cafferty was charged with leaving the scene of an accident, reckless driving, assault and harassment.
But Tuesday he was allowed to plead guilty to only a traffic violation: Operating a motor vehicle knowing or having cause to know property damage had been caused. He was sentenced to 70 hours of community service, with six months to complete it, and a $250 fine. He also apparently made restitution.
Cafferty had no comment yesterday but the criminal complaint said Cafferty told police he saw the bicyclist get off the ground but didn't realize he had hit him. "I am unaware I was in an accident," he said.
Cafferty's attorney Seth Rosenberg insisted his client had acted responsibly ."This was never anything more than a traffic violation," he said.
Attorney Suzanne Holzberg, who represents Maldonado, expressed disappointment. "He did not plead guilty to the more serious charge of leaving the scene knowing he caused personal injury," she said. "I think he got off pretty easy."
Maldonado, she said, wasn't as lucky. Bruised up from the fall, she said, he still needs an operation on his right elbow.
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http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=1740
Does Obama Have Cocaine-Related Mental Impairment?
Cocaine is a risk factor for permanent mental impairment, and disqualification for access to nuclear weapons
The Obama campaign, as shown by material on my.barackobama.com over which the campaign’s staff exercises editorial control, sanctions the spread of rumors to the effect that John McCain has an age-related neurodegenerative disease. The Obama campaign is apparently unfamiliar with the adage about glass houses and stones. Let’s begin with the facts, as stated by Barack Obama himself.
I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though… (Barack Obama, “Dreams From My Father,” page 93, paperback edition. http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/streetterms/ByAlpha.asp?strTerm=B, “Blow” = “Cocaine; to inhale cocaine; to smoke marijuana; to inject heroin”)
While the Obama campaign sanctions supporters’ use of McCain’s age (younger than Dianne Feinstein, Robert Byrd, and Ted Kennedy by the way) to suggest that he might have a neurodegenerative disease, Obama’s admitted use of cocaine puts him at higher risk for mental impairment. It also disqualifies him from access to or control of nuclear weapons under the Armed Forces’ Nuclear Weapon Personnel Reliability Program.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1739
Cocaine is one of the most potent, addictive, and unpredictable recreational drugs, and thus can cause the most profound and irreversible damage to the nervous system. The high risk associated with cocaine remains the same regardless of whether the drug is snorted, smoked, or injected into the user’s bloodstream. In addition to the intense damage cocaine can cause to the liver, intestines, heart, and lungs, even casual use of the drug will impair the brain and cause serious damage to the central nervous system. Although cocaine use affects many components of the body, including vision and appetite, the most significant damage cause by cocaine takes place in the brain and central nervous system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3503931.stm adds,
Taking cocaine could cause irreversible brain damage, scientists from Edinburgh University have warned.
Tests on genetically modified mice showed that cocaine inhibited the brain by destroying a key protein responsible for learning and memory.
Abusing the highly addictive drug can lead to long-term memory loss and learning difficulties, say experts.
The fact that cocaine use increases the risk for permanent mental impairment does not make such impairment automatic, just as age does not make neurodegenerative diseases automatic. On the other hand, if the Obama campaign wishes to tacitly albeit not actively suggest that the country should not take a chance on McCain because of his age, we are quite prepared to argue that the country should not take a chance on a former cokehead–and the Armed Forces’ Nuclear Weapon Personnel Reliability Program agrees. While pre-service marijuana use does not automatically disqualify a service member from access to or control of nuclear weapons, pre-service cocaine use does.
(2) Drug Abuse
(a) See definition 15. in enclosure 2. It is not the intent of this
Directive to automatically render ineligible for the PRP any individual
who, before the effective date of this Directive, has disclosed
pre-Service drug abuse, or who has not yet been asked to make such
disclosure, and who is currently certified for PRP duties after having been
formally screened in accordance with then-existing guidance. Further
recertification of such individuals for future PRP status shall be in
accordance with this Directive, except that previously disclosed and
considered drug abuse and pre-Service drug use not required previously
to be disclosed, shall not be sole grounds for denial of
recertification or for mandatory decertification.
(b) Except for the category of individuals identified in
subparagraph B.2.a.(2)(a), above, or otherwise provided in this
Directive, any pre-Service use, admitted or otherwise discovered, of illicit drugs such as heroin, heroin derivatives, cocaine, “crack,” phencyclidine (PCP), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ecstasy,” or other “designer” drugs, amphetamines, barbiturates, or other narcotic drugs not prescribed by proper medical authorities, and anabolic steroids shall
render an individual ineligible for admission to or retention in PRP
duties. The individual shall not be certified into the program or shall be permanently decertified, and those actions shall be made a matter of
permanent record.
The reference adds that prior marijuana use (to which Bill Clinton as well as Barack Obama admitted) is not an automatic disqualifier. The bottom line is, however, that prior history of cocaine use disqualifies a member of the Armed Forces from touching a nuclear launch key, or indeed any access to weapons of mass destruction. The idea of giving someone with that kind of history the authority to order the use of such weapons, or even access to the codes for launching such weapons, should therefore appall all Americans. This document from the Secretary of the Navy adds,
b. Drug Abuse. Drug abuse is a violation of the law. It
demonstrates a behavior pattern or action which is reasonably
indicative of a contemptuous attitude toward the law or other
duly-constituted authority. Any conduct which falls within the
definition of drug abuse may be grounds for disqualification or
decertification.
(1) Any personnel determined to have pre-service or inservice abuse
of any drug will be disqualified prior to initial assignment to a PRP
billet or, if currently assigned, will be permanently decertified except:
(a) pre-service or in-service cannabis use which was acceptably
screened under previous PRP guidance will not be the sole basis for
disqualification or decertification,
Again, PRP refers to the (Nuclear Weapon) Personnel Reliability Program, and pre-service marijuana use is not an automatic disqualifier. Any history of cocaine use, however, does permanently disqualify an individual from access to or control of nuclear weapons, because the Armed Forces cannot afford to take the slightest chance on a person with impaired judgment having access to weapons that can kill millions of people.
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Actually GM, my point was not Cafferty (do I really care if he was in a car accident and got a traffic violation ticket? Gee, I got a traffic ticket this month too)
but that the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch publication (Fox News) came out and skewered McCain. You know, the WSJ, the same publication that
the conservatives love to quote? Even the WSJ wonders if McCain knows what end is up!
Here's the article from September 19, 2008 in case you missed it.
Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox.
To give readers a flavor of Mr. McCain untethered, we'll quote at length: "Mismanagement and greed became the operating standard while regulators were asleep at the switch. The primary regulator of Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) kept in place trading rules that let speculators and hedge funds turn our markets into a casino. They allowed naked short selling -- which simply means that you can sell stock without ever owning it. They eliminated last year the uptick rule that has protected investors for 70 years. Speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground.
"The chairman of the SEC serves at the appointment of the President and has betrayed the public's trust. If I were President today, I would fire him."
Wow. "Betrayed the public's trust." Was Mr. Cox dishonest? No. He merely changed some minor rules, and didn't change others, on short-selling. String him up! Mr. McCain clearly wants to distance himself from the Bush Administration. But this assault on Mr. Cox is both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential.
Take "naked" shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short -- betting that it will fall in price -- without first borrowing the shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing.
The rules announced Wednesday will increase penalties and close loopholes that exempted broker-dealers from the rules against naked shorting. They also make it clear that deliberately selling short a stock whose shares cannot be borrowed is fraud under the Securities Exchange Act. That's all to the good, we suppose; fraud is fraud. But regular short selling is not fraud. It adds valuable information to the market about what investors believe to be the price direction of a stock. Demonizing short-sellers as a band of criminals, or barring short-selling outright in financial stocks, as regulators in the U.K. did Thursday, removes information from the market.
Then there's Mr. McCain's tirade against the "uptick rule," a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock after a rise in that stock's price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule's effect on stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it "protected" no one. The SEC's permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC's commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007.
While he was at it, Mr. McCain added the wholly unsupported assertion that "speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the ground." It wasn't very long ago that he blamed speculators on the long side for sky-high oil prices. Then oil prices fell. Now Mr. McCain wants voters to believe speculators are responsible for driving mismanaged financial companies to ruin. The irony is that this critique puts Mr. McCain in the same camp as some of the Wall Street CEOs who have led their firms so poorly. They also want someone (else) to blame.
In case Mr. McCain is interested, overall short interest in financial companies actually declined by 20% between July and the end of August. That's right: Far from driving this crisis, shorts were net buyers of financial stocks this summer, as they must buy stocks back to close their positions and realize their gains (or losses).
In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution. He'll never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore, circa 2000.
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BTW, I already posted that WSJ editorial.
Concerning this: "a Murdoch publication (Fox News)" as a very long time WSJ reader (30 years now) I found the Murdoch takeover to be very concerning and since it has happened I have seen a disconcerting drift towards posting more and more articles by Democrats, liberals, and others of that ilk in some sort of misguided "fair and balanced" nonsense. I don't go to the WSJ for "fair and balanced", I go there for informed, intelligent discussion i.e. people who have already figured out the free minds and free markets are the way to go. Fox News (excepting the outstanding Brit Hume Report, and the solid Neil Cavuto show) is not right or left, it is pandering to market segments underserved by the MSM.
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September 19, 2008, 7:00 a.m.
Obama 101
My firsthand lesson.
By Amir Taheri
On Monday, in an opinion piece published in the New York Post, I suggested that Senator Barack Obama had urged Iraqi leaders to postpone making an agreement with the United States until there was a new administration in Washington.
I said this because Obama himself had said it.
In an interview broadcast by NBC on June 16, 2008, Obama said that he had told Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari that “the Congress should be involved in any negotiations regarding the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq” and “suggested it may be better to wait until the next administration to negotiate such an agreement.”
I said it because Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said it.
In an interview published by the pan-Arab daily Asharq Alawast on September 11, 2008, Zebari raised the issue at length. This is part of what he said: “Obama asked me why, in view of a change of administration, we were hurrying the signing of this special agreement, and why we did not wait until the coming of a new administration next year to agree on some issues and matters.”
I said it because my Iraqi sources, who asked not to be identified because they do not wish to pick a quarrel with someone who could be the President of the United States next year, said it.
A day after my op-ed was published, Obama’s campaign issued a statement, in effect confirming what I had said.
It said, in part, “Senator Obama has consistently said that any security arrangements that outlast this administration should have the backing of the US Congress — especially given the fact that the Iraqi parliament will have the opportunity to vote on it.”
On Wednesday, the senator issued another statement — also in response to my op-ed — denying that he had ever opposed “a redeployment and responsible drawdown” of U.S. forces in Iraq. But I never said he did. I also never said that he opposed motherhood and apple pie; In any case, no one would oppose “redeployment and responsible drawdown,” something that is happening all the time. Redeployment means moving some units from one location to another. Drawdown means reducing the size of the expeditionary force in accordance with the task at hand. Right now troops are being redeployed from Anbar province to Salahuddin. There is also drawdown: The number of U.S. troops has been drawn down to 136,000, the lowest since a peak of 170,000 in 2003.
What Obama hopes his more radical followers will not notice is that he is no longer speaking of “withdrawal.”
He also hopes to hide the fact that by telling the Iraqi leaders that a putative Obama administration might scrap agreements reached with the Bush team, he might have delayed the start of a process that should lead to a withdrawal of U.S. forces within a mutually agreed timeframe. The later you start the negotiating process, the later you get an agreement. And the later you have an agreement, the later you can withdraw your troops based on the agreed necessary security arrangements to ensure their safe departure.
By trying to second-guess the present administration in its negotiations with Iraq, Obama ignored a golden rule of American politics. I first learned about that rule from Senator Edward Kennedy more than 30 years ago. During a visit to Tehran, Kennedy received a few Iranian reporters for a poolside chat. The big question at the time was negotiations between Washington and Tehran about massive arms contracts. When we asked Kennedy what he thought of those negotiations, his answer was simple: He would not comment on negotiations between his government and a foreign power, especially when abroad. That, he said, was one of the golden rules of American politics.
A few years later, I spent a day with Ronald Reagan during his visit to Iran. I asked what he thought of the strategic arms limitation talks between the U.S. and the USSR. He echoed Kennedy’s golden rule: He would not comment on his government’s negotiations with a foreign power, especially when abroad.
A couple of years ago, I ran into that golden rule again. At a meeting with Senator Hillary Clinton in Washington, I asked what she thought of the Bush administration’s negotiations with the Iraqis concerning security cooperation. She said she would not second-guess the president and would wait for the outcome of the negotiations. In a statesmanlike manner, Senator Clinton reminded me of the golden rule—one that is common to all mature democracies where the opposition is loyal and constitutional.
Today, Senator Obama is the leader of a loyal opposition in the United States, not the chief of an insurrection or a revolutionary uprising. What we are witnessing in the U.S. is an election, not an insurrection or a coronation, even less a regime change.
Obama should not have discussed the government-to-government negotiations with the Iraqis. That he did, surprised the Iraqis no end. Raising the issue with them, especially the way he did, meant that he was telling them that he did not trust his own government. The Iraqis could not be blamed for wondering why they should trust a government that is not trusted by the leader of its own loyal opposition. (There was also no point in raising the matter, because Obama did not know the content of the negotiations.)
An opposition leader’s foreign trips are useful as fact-finding missions. This means that the opposition leader listens to the locals, asks questions, and tries to get the political feel of the place. He is not there to lecture the natives or bad-mouth his own government back home.
Obama might have attended a session of the new Iraqi parliament and congratulated the people of Iraq for defying death to go through one referendum and two general elections to build a new democracy.
He might have visited some of the good work done by over 1.2 million Americans, both military and civilian, who have heroically served in Iraq since its liberation.
He might have visited some of the wounded victims of terrorism, both U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, to comfort them, and assure them of continued U.S. determination to fight the forces of evil.
He did none of those things during his eight-hour photo-op visit.
In the American system, the administration can conclude agreements with foreign powers on a range of issues backed by an executive order from the president. I am no expert, but the U.S. has signed scores, maybe hundreds of such agreements with many countries across the globe. To be sure, the U.S. legislature always has the power to seek the abrogation of any of these agreements. When it comes to treaties, however, they cannot come into effect without full Senate approval.
However, Iraq and the U.S. are not negotiating a treaty, and, if they were, Obama could have waited until the draft text was submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by his vice-presidential running mate Joseph Biden.
In any case, every agreement and every treaty contains mechanisms for its suspension or abrogation. Therefore, even supposing Bush was negotiating an absolutely terrible agreement with the Iraqis in which he would be selling the family silver, Obama should have waited until he saw the text, and then demanded the cancellation of the accord through the constitutional channels.
One key feature of all mature powers, at least since the Congress of Vienna, is the reliability of their international commitments. Even putschists who seize power in a military coup make sure that their first pronunciamento includes this key sentence: We shall honor all of our country’s international obligations and commitments. Even regime change does not absolve states from their international obligations. The new Iraqi government, for example, has not rejected the estimated $100 billion in foreign debt left by Saddam Hussein.
Instances of a state reneging on all its obligations as a result of change are rare in history. One instance came in 1918 when Trotsky, appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs by Lenin, announced that he had abrogated all of Tsarist Russia’s treaties with foreign nations and ordered the texts burned to heat the rooms of an empty foreign ministry.
What Obama was attempting, however, was more original. It amounted to preemptive diplomacy used against one’s own government: opposing an agreement not yet negotiated and of the content of which he knew nothing. A neophyte in matters of politics and diplomacy, the young senator is certainly not wanting for originality.
Since I do not wish to become involved in an Alphonse-and-Gaston number with Obama, I suggest that we focus our attention on the fact that the nominee is left without anything resembling a policy on Iraq. So, rather than coming out with another denial of something I never said that he had done, the esteemed senator should ponder these questions:
Does he still believe that toppling Saddam Hussein was illegal and “the biggest strategic blunder in U.S. history”? If yes, we might wonder why he is prepared to deal with the new Iraqi leaders who, by definition, have usurped Hussein’s power in Baghdad with American support.
Does he still want to withdraw from Iraq or does he want to stay, doing a bit of “drawdown” and “redeployment” every now and then? And, if he wants to stay, on what basis, for what purpose, and for how long?
Is Senator Biden’s plan to carve Iraq into three separate states still a live option or has it been thrown into the dustbin where it should have been from the start?
Would Obama now support the conclusion of a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) through negotiations between the Bush administration and the Iraqi administration of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, also a “lame duck,” as it faces elections early next year?
— Amir Taheri’s new book, The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution, is due for publication in November.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OWI3MDQyNGIwOTczMTU2YmI1NjE5OWMxMGJkYTQzZTg=
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Jack Wheeler:
, , , And fourth is the release this week of John Fund's book Stealing Elections. This is an incredibly important book. John exposes the plans of the ultimate "community organizer" ACORN to commit massive voter fraud in cities throughout the country - and details how Obama is an ACORN operative. He was a "community organizer for ACORN and then their lawyer.
Obambi, John reveals, has 9,000 lawyers ready to challenge November 4 election results in thousands of precincts in hundreds of counties in dozens of states, all under the phony claim of "voter suppression" perpetrated by evil election-stealing Republicans.
Just to take one single county, Bernalillo County in New Mexico: over 1,000 fraudulent voters registrations have been submitted by ACORN, and if they are not accepted, ACORN will scream "voter suppression!"
Incidentally, Obambi's call for his followers to "argue with your neighbors and get in their face" if they don't support him (9/17 in Elko NV) is a classic ACORN intimidation technique. Read John's book.
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/586pbxqj.asp
Democrats and Double Standards
Obama's not-so-secret weapon: the media.
by Stephen F. Hayes
09/29/2008, Volume 014, Issue 03
When Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, he promised to change the practice of American politics.
This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice--to push us forward when we're doing right, and to let us know when we're not.
Obama told the crowd on that chilly day that he was running "not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation." He was particularly concerned with the way politicians run for office. He decried "the smallness of our politics" and "the chronic avoidance of tough decisions" and politicians who win by "scoring cheap political points." All of this, he said, had led voters to look away in "disillusionment and frustration."
"The time for that politics is over," Obama said.
Or maybe not.
This past week at a campaign rally, Obama told his supporters to challenge Republicans and independents skeptical of his candidacy. "I want you to argue with them and get in their face," he said.
This is the newer, tougher Obama. The avatar of a new American politics of hope is gone, replaced by a no-nonsense practitioner of the old politics. His campaign is now less the vehicle of your hopes and your dreams than a vehicle of your frustration and your anger.
You might think that this walking, talking contradiction would be the focus of intense media scrutiny--hypocrisy being a staple of modern political reportage--but you'd be wrong.
The media line on the new Obama is simple: It's John McCain's fault. Barack Obama would like to win the presidency the right way but McCain won't let him.
According to the press, in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has so distorted Obama's record and campaign proposals that the young senator has had no choice but to fight back with old-school tactics. "McCain's tactics are drawing the scorn of many in the media and organizations tasked with fact-checking the truthfulness of campaigns," wrote Politico's Jonathan Martin. "In recent weeks, Team McCain has been described as dishonorable, disingenuous and downright cynical."
And so while McCain's every utterance is factchecked and factchecked again in an attempt to shame him from challenging Obama too aggressively, Obama gets a pass.
Consider two examples.
On August 16, Pastor Rick Warren asked John McCain how much money someone would have to make to be considered rich. McCain didn't answer directly. "I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited," he said.
Then he made a joke: "So, I think if you are just talking about income, how about $5 million?"
The audience laughed, immediately understanding that McCain was being facetious. Just in case there were any doubts McCain started his next comment by saying "seriously," to underscore the joke. Then he made a prediction.
"I'm sure that comment will be distorted," he said with a shrug of his shoulders.
And it has been. "It should come as no surprise that John McCain believes the cutoff for the rich begins at $5 million," Barack Obama's campaign said in a statement. "It may explain why his tax plan gives a $600,000 tax cut to the richest 0.1 percent of earners." At a campaign appearance two days after McCain made the comments, Obama himself mocked McCain. "I guess if you're making $3 million a year, you're middle class," Obama said.
Some news accounts noted that McCain was joking and others even reported that McCain predicted his words would be twisted and used against him. In an August 18 article in the Los Angeles Times, Greg Miller actually did both and noted that McCain aides had made clear their boss was joking. "Even so," Miller wrote, "the remark highlighted the candidates' disparate outlooks. Analysts who study income distribution said the answers appeared to reflect shifting political calculations more than economic reality."
So Miller, writing under the headline, "Who's Rich? McCain and Obama have very different definitions," used McCain's facetious answer as if he had meant it. (Miller also speculated that Cindy McCain's family money may have shaped McCain's views of what constitutes rich.) Not only was Obama not called on his misuse of McCain's comment, reporters piled on. Is it any wonder that the line has made regular appearances in Obama speeches over the past month?
"Now, I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans," Obama said in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under $5 million a year?"
Then there are the absurd lengths to which some reporters are willing to go to protect Obama and attack McCain. Last week, the McCain campaign released an ad accusing Obama of being too close to Fannie Mae executives. In particular, it claims Obama took advice on housing and finance issues from former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines. The Obama campaign protested, saying that Raines was not an adviser and had not given Obama counsel in any capacity. The McCain campaign defended the claim by citing an article that ran in the Washington Post on July 16, 2008. That article noted that Raines had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."
Last Friday, the Washington Post "factchecked" the McCain ad and concluded that the campaign had been "clearly exaggerating wildly" in order to link Obama to Raines and that the "latest McCain attack is particularly dubious."
Factchecker Michael Dobbs wrote that McCain's evidence that Raines had advised Obama was "pretty flimsy"--not a description that probably endeared him to Anita Huslin, the reporter who wrote the story this summer. But Dobbs did talk to Huslin. Here is his account of their conversation:
Since this has now become a campaign issue, I asked Huslin to provide the exact circumstances of the quote. She explained that she was chatting with Raines during the photo shoot, and asked "if he was engaged at all with the Democrats' quest for the White House. He said that he had gotten a couple of calls from the Obama campaign. I asked him about what, and he said 'oh, general housing, economy issues.' ('Not mortgage/foreclosure meltdown or Fannie-specific,' I asked, and he said 'no.')"
By Raines's own account, he took a couple of calls from someone on the Obama campaign, and they had some general discussions about economic issues.
Got that? Huslin stands by her reporting--that Raines had given advice to the Obama campaign about mortgage and housing policy matters--and yet the McCain campaign is faulted by the Washington Post for relying on information that comes from the Washington Post.
More amusing, though, is that in the rush to accuse the McCain campaign of lying, Dobbs glosses over a major discrepancy between the story that appeared in his paper and that of the Obama campaign. Obama spokesman Bill Burton claims that the campaign "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter." It is possible, of course, that Raines simply made up the conversations he described to the Post reporter. But it seems more likely, given the toxicity of Raines, that the Obama campaign would simply prefer that those conversations had never taken place.
Dobbs concludes: "I have asked both Raines and the Obama people for more details on these calls and will let you know if I receive a reply."
That's reassuring, since Dobbs has already decided that the McCain campaign has been dishonest. Two things are clear with six weeks left in the presidential race. Barack Obama will practice the old-style politics that he lamented throughout the Democratic primary. And the media will give him a pass.
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My High School (La Canada) has a Class reunion site. Most of my classmates are misguided Republicans, although I enjoy them all. :-D
I thought since I have been a bit "serious" lately, I thought a fun light post might be appropriate. It was forwarded from one of my classmates. By the way, he is a newscaster, at one time he worked in Alaska has nice things to say about Palin.
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so
many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal
Democrat,and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes
to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
>
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch
Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had
participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt
that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he
thought should be his.
>
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher
taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The
self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she
indicated so to her father.
>
He responded by asking how she was doing in school. Taken aback, she
answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was
tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was
constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew.
She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends
because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, 'How is your friend Audrey doing?'
She replied, 'Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are
easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular
on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the
parties and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because
she's too hung over.'
>
Her wise father asked his daughter, 'Why don't you go to the Dean's
office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your
friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly
that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.'
>
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion,
angrily fired back, 'That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair?
I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of
hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I
worked my tail off!'
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently,
'Welcome to the Republican party.'
-
McCain at His Worst
What is John McCain thinking? First, Mr. McCain takes a wild swing by saying as president, he would have fired Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for "betraying the public trust." It turns out a president doesn't have the statutory authority to do that, and Mr. Cox has been a political asset in dealing with the financial meltdown of last week. Indeed, the day after his call for Mr. Cox's firing, Mr. McCain retreated and called him "a good man."
Now Mr. McCain has compounded his error by floating the name of Andrew Cuomo, the pugilistic Democratic New York attorney general, as his possible nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. McCain told CBS's "60 Minutes" that Mr. Cuomo had "respect" and "prestige," praising his tenure as secretary of housing and urban development in the Clinton administration.
Mr. McCain must be looking at a different record than I am. Mr. Cuomo was a political grandstander at HUD, ranging far afield to file frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers. He also spent taxpayer money to hire such firms as Booz Allen Hamilton, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young to paper over snafus at his agency.
Among the problems created by Mr. Cuomo while at HUD were what the liberal Village Voice called last month "a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis." A Voice investigation found that Mr. Cuomo "took actions that -- in combination with many other factors -- helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments. He turned the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program into a sweetheart lender with sky-high loan ceilings and no money down, and he legalized what a federal judge has branded 'kickbacks' to brokers that have fueled the sale of overpriced and unsupportable loans. Three to four million families are now facing foreclosure, and Cuomo is one of the reasons why."
Most egregiously, Matthew Rees of the Weekly Standard documented how Secretary Cuomo used the power of his office to declare war against Susan Gaffney, the HUD inspector general who was investigating charges of self-dealing by Cuomo aides. The Government Accountability Office later concluded Mr. Cuomo had used underhanded tactics to pursue spurious charges of racial discrimination against Ms. Gaffney.
The GAO found that HUD's decision to handpick two lawyers to investigate the discrimination charge, and award them contracts totaling $100,000 (the normal cost is about $3,000), represented "significant deviation" from the standard process of investigating discrimination complaints.
Ms. Gaffney, a classic whistleblower in the maverick tradition John McCain claims to embody, was an innocent victim of Mr. Cuomo's smear machine. Mr. McCain needs to go back and look at the Cuomo record at HUD -- and at the New York Attorney General's office for that matter -- before he so loosely and recklessly promotes Mr. Cuomo as someone to oversee the nation's securities regulation.
PD WSJ
-
http://www.theroot.com/id/48123 (http://www.theroot.com/id/48123)
Sept. 18, 2008--The Republican Party has finally found the outer edge of political cynicism; it's located in Macomb County, Mich. Operatives there have figured out an upside to the foreclosure crisis roiling black neighborhoods: It enables mass voter-registration challenges and thereby offers a powerful opportunity to suppress the vote in Democrat-leaning districts.
An enterprising journalist for the independent-media site Michigan Messenger exposed the party's plan to exploit foreclosures last week, prompting local leaders to feign outrage, claim to have been misquoted and threaten a libel suit. Those denials notwithstanding, the Obama campaign has asked a federal court to issue an injunction against any use of foreclosure filings in registration challenges, just in case. As general counsel Bob Bauer put it, "They can tell it to the judge."
But while the details of the Michigan plot may be uniquely noxious, the broader tactic—known as voter "caging"—is a 50-year-old Republican dirty trick that is rooted in century-old voting laws designed to skirt the 15th Amendment. A series of legal challenges had finally driven voter caging into remission by the 1990s. But in 2004, desperate Republican operatives facing a huge Democratic turnout revived it with great success. And they're redeploying it widely in 2008.
The scam is as convoluted as it is craven. It starts with a list of potentially ineligible voters. The Macomb County gang planned to create its list from recent foreclosure filings, according to the Messenger, based on the notion that people who have lost their homes are likely to be registered under incorrect addresses. The more traditional route is to simply flood largely non-white districts with mailers marked "do not forward," then compile the names that are returned undeliverable.
Most states maintain stunningly broad rules governing registration challenges, so this sort of flimsy evidence is enough to make sweeping claims of voter fraud. Armed with their lists, Republican operatives file mass challenges to thousands of registrations, charging that the listed residents are cheating the system by polling in the wrong precinct. At the polls, they then challenge individual voters, which often means those voters only get a provisional ballot.
The challenge itself isn't the point, however. A 2007 Project Vote study outlines voter caging’s history and notes that most mass registration challenges are filed just under the deadline and are rarely pursued meaningfully. Rather, the goal is to gum up the democratic process by creating chaos, both at the point of registration and on Election Day.
By holding a breathless press conference trumpeting widespread voter fraud, Republicans busy election boards with responding to nonsense rather than serving voters and, worse, justify sending ranks of operatives to polling stations to harass voters in the name of "monitoring." Each Election Day challenge occupies a poll worker, creating long lines and disorder that discourages all would-be voters. And if they're lucky, they scare new voters away from showing up at all.
The tactic has been so wildly successful that Republicans have solidified the myth of voter fraud in both the popular mind and the law. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law that requires voters to show a state-issued ID at the poll. The court ruled that the specter of voter fraud justified the imposition on democracy. It ignored research showing voter fraud to be extraordinarily rare and dismissed evidence that blacks, youth and low-income people are all far less likely to have state IDs.
Republican operatives set the stage for that ruling in 2004. They challenged half a million voters in targeted campaigns across nine politically strategic states, according to Project Vote. Prior to the election, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio all made voter challenges even easier than they had already been; all three states had Republican-controlled legislatures. In Ohio's Cuyahoga County—which includes Cleveland and is reliably Democrat—Republicans flooded polling stations with operatives to challenge 14,000 voters; 45 percent of them lived in majority black communities. They hit 31,000 voters statewide.
And as registration deadlines approach this fall, the same process is gearing up all over the country.
In Wisconsin, Republican Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen filed suit last week—a month before the registration deadline—demanding election officials check individual records of thousands of voters who registered before the state's new voter ID system went into effect. In Madison, City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl complained that the last-minute demand will make other necessary preparations for the largest-expected voter turnout impossible. "It will disenfranchise voters," she told Wisconsin's Capital Times.
In Louisiana, the secretary of state is busy purging thousands of "inactive" voters from the rolls. According to the Louisiana Justice Institute, the only way you'd know you're on the inactive list is if you saw the state's ad in a newspaper, which thousands of still-displaced Orleans Parish residents couldn't do. The Justice Institute has published a searchable database of the names here, to help displaced residents who want to vote in their hometown make sure they stay registered.
Meanwhile, at least one Virginia county has targeted college students with plain scare tactics. In Montgomery County, home to Virginia Tech, the registrar warned Virginia Tech students that listing their campus address for voter registration could jeopardize everything from their parents' tax returns to their own driver's licenses. "If you have a scholarship attached to your former residence, you could lose this funding," the ominous but vague memo declared, according to Inside Higher Ed.
And Michigan's not the only place where losing your home could mean also losing your vote. The Columbus Dispatch reported this summer on state election officials' concerns that Ohio's new voter ID law will collide with foreclosures to create chaos at the polls. Voters who are registered at their old homes but have new addresses on their IDs, for instance, will be turned away. Ditto in several other states with both new voter ID laws and waves of foreclosure.
None of this is new. Republicans first used the myth of voter fraud to justify vote-suppression tactics in an Arkansas race in 1958, deliberately exploiting Reconstruction-era laws that made voter challenges easy enough to keep newly franchised blacks out of the process. It worked so well in '58 that in 1964 they launched "Operation Eagle Eye," which targeted 1.8 million voters nationally.
The game proceeded with impunity until 1981, when the Democrats sued over a voter-caging campaign in New Jersey, arguing that the effort deliberately disenfranchised minority voters. That case, along with a subsequent one in 1986, generated a consent order that barred the national party from launching mass voter challenges without getting court approval. The order, however, does not bind state party officials.
Nor can we count on the network of federal law enforcement that mobilized to block just this sort of chicanery in the Jim Crow days. The Bush administration's politicized firings of U.S. attorneys were, in no small part, driven by its effort to stymie the protection of voter rights Three of the eight U.S. attorney firings being investigated by Congress involved officials who refused to go after supposed voter-fraud cases in the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections.
Which leaves it to us to protect ourselves from this cynical but deeply effective manufactured chaos. A growing number of watchdog groups are trying to mobilize citizens to do the Justice Department's job. This week, a coalition under the banner Election Protection launched a Web site and a hotline (1-866-OUR-VOTE) where voters can learn how to make sure their own registration is secure and report problems in their districts. The Advancement Project has set up a similar site here.
Jurisdictions facing registration irregularities, backlogs and confusion now will certainly face the same on Nov. 4. Neither situation will be accidental, and the best tool left for identifying them in advance is through would-be voters. An ounce of prevention, watchdogs stress, is worth a pound of post-election litigation and outrage.
Kai Wright is a regular contributor to The Root.
-
"The Republican Party ...mass voter-registration challenges and thereby offers a powerful opportunity to suppress the vote in Democrat-leaning districts."
A challenge to my voter registration would be met swiftly with proof of identity, eligibility and residency to vote. I don't know Macomb County, but the story also refers to Wisconsin which has been victim of massive voter fraud operations and razor thin Democratic victories. What is cynical about attacking known fraud.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=324933 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Inquiry finds evidence of fraud in election
Cast ballots outnumber voters by 4,609
Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.
Officials said charges will be filed in coming weeks, as individual cases are reviewed and more evidence is gathered.
Nonetheless, it is likely that many - perhaps most - of those who committed fraud won't face prosecution because city records are so sloppy that it will be difficult to establish cases that will stand up in court.
And even now, three months after the investigation, officials have not been able to close a gap of 7,000 votes, with more ballots cast than voters listed. Officials said the gap remains at 4,609.
-
ACORN, with which BO has heavy connections, is notorius for massive voter fraud.
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I am on a really crummy computer in Switzerland with no audio, but this clip comes recommended to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiEWCnpNnBQ
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The WSJ rips McCain another butthole again:
The Candidates Vote 'Present'
Last we checked, the President of the United States was still George W. Bush, the Secretary of the Treasury was still Henry Paulson, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was still Ben Bernanke, and Congress still had 533 members not running for President who are at least nominally competent to debate and pass legislation.
So count us as mystified by Senator John McCain's decision yesterday to suspend his campaign and call for a postponement in Friday's first Presidential debate so that he and Barack Obama can work out a consensus bill to stabilize the financial system. This is supposed to be evidence of leadership?
Mr. McCain's decision follows an equally odd suggestion from Mr. Obama yesterday morning that the two candidates issue a joint statement of principles and conditions for the financial rescue package. As a purely political matter, we understand why Mr. Obama would just as soon say "present" on a tricky Senate vote. He probably figures the current economic mess plays into his argument for "change," so why not minimize any differences with Mr. McCain on the Paulson plan as he heads to Election Day?
We also understand Mr. McCain's desire to further dress his campaign in "Country First" gilding, as if patriotism and consensus are one and the same, or that getting something done is more important than getting it right.
Whatever the motive, this is not what the country expects from its Presidential candidates. The Administration and the Congress have a responsibility to negotiate legislation, and we can only hope it isn't carbuncled to a point that makes it impossible for Treasury to hold a decent mortgage-backed securities auction, or allow markets to clear. As Senators, Messrs. Obama and McCain also have a responsibility to give us their up-or-down verdict on the bill as it emerges. If they have specific differences or suggestions, they certainly have a large megaphone to broadcast them.
As candidates, however, they are not serving the public by hiding behind a fog of faux bipartisanship that obscures their core economic principles and their approach to governance in times of crisis. Far from being an issue that is above electoral politics, the financial panic is too serious not to have a serious discussion about. President Bush gave both candidates a hand last night by inviting them to a White House meeting on the legislation today, but this looks more like political theater than it does actual governing. Both candidates are angling to get some credit for being in on the deal, whatever it might be.
Nor does it stanch a panic when Mr. McCain issues a statement warning that "I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time," or comparing the current situation to September 11. No plan passes without going through Congressional hazing, if not modification, and predicting doom does nothing to reassure Americans that our political system is able to manage amid turmoil.
Mr. Obama was right on the merits, and politically shrewd, to respond to Mr. McCain's suggestion to postpone Friday's debate by saying that "Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time. It's not necessary for us to think that we can only do one thing and suspend everything else." He added that he planned to be at the debate.
The behavior of both candidates has an air of running for political cover. Neither of them need master the subtleties of credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities in time for their debates. But it would be reassuring to know that they are at least capable of holding, and sticking to, a coherent position on what is now the most important issue of the campaign. When one of them becomes President, he won't have the luxury of pressing the "pause" button at the next crisis.
´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´
Rove:
The First Debate Could Be Decisive
By KARL ROVE
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Presidential debates are important -- and the first debate is the most important of all, establishing an arc of opinion that persists unless jarred loose by big mistakes or dramatic events.
So whether this year's first presidential debate between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain is Friday night or postponed a few days, it may be the fall's most critical event. In the nine first debates since 1960, the perceived winner of the debate averaged a 4.2 point net swing in the Gallup poll.
[The First Debate Could Be Decisive] Martin Kozlowski
Mr. Obama fought hard to have the first clash devoted to foreign policy and the last on the economy. It may be smart to end the series on his strongest turf. But that means the debates start on ground where Mr. McCain is more comfortable, having a sizable poll lead on who'd be a better commander in chief.
Here's the advice some experts I consulted offered the candidates:
First, do no harm. Persistent proficiency is better than big mistakes. Remember Al Gore's sighs in 2000? President George H.W. Bush glancing at his watch in 1992? Michael Dukakis's botched answer to Bernie Shaw's death-penalty question in 1988?
Know what you want to achieve and have that narrative down cold, for yourself and for your opponent. How do you want potential defectors and converts to see and feel about you and your opponent when it's over? How do you accentuate your strengths and his weaknesses?
Answer the questions. Voters don't like it when candidates are not responsive. Mr. McCain shone so much brighter at Rev. Rick Warren's Saddleback conversation because he answered with plain talk and simple declarative statements.
People want to see candidates operating without a script. They are clamoring for spontaneity. So avoid hyper-repetition. For example, Mr. Gore's repeated robotic invocation of the phrase "risky scheme" backfired.
Spend time describing problems. In the '92 debates, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot established personal links with voters as much from how they portrayed the nation's challenges as from their proposals to address them.
Humor is a powerful weapon, but only if it is not canned or forced. Ronald Reagan demolished Walter Mondale with this self-deprecating line: "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
The counterpunch is better than the punch. The first person to attack generally suffers, especially if the attack comes across as exaggerated or unfair. Attack sparingly and then by inference and obliquely. Rather than a frontal assault on Mr. Obama's inexperience, Mr. McCain could say America's adversaries will test any new president, and only he has the skill and leadership the country will need in that crisis.
Mr. McCain needs to come across as optimistic, loose and likable. He must guard against revealing his lack of respect for Mr. Obama. And he must grab the "change" banner from Mr. Obama by describing a few things he'll do internationally that are new and different.
Mr. McCain should remind voters the surge in Iraq was the most vital decision in the War on Terror. Mr. Obama opposed it and even continued to oppose it after it was an undeniable success. And Mr. McCain should frame energy as a security issue with large implications for jobs and our economy.
Mr. Obama's task is to look like a credible commander in chief. Right now, too many people lack confidence that he's up to the most important of presidential responsibilities.
Mr. Obama must avoid the pervasive sense of nuance that weakened his performance at the Saddleback Forum. He should attack less. If Mr. McCain is condescending, Mr. Obama should call him on it. If Mr. McCain launches a full-out assault, Mr. Obama should rebut it. Otherwise, he should aim for firmness, seriousness of purpose and clarity in his views.
In criticizing President Bush's foreign policy, Mr. Obama must be careful not to sound like he's running down America. Breaking with someone in his party on a vital issue would show leadership and independence.
The story line of the coverage afterward can do almost as much to shape perception as much as the debate itself. Mr. Gore was on defense for weeks after his '00 sighing fit.
Mr. Obama has more recent debate experience, and he's wise to have spent three days in Florida resting. Mr. McCain, by contrast, has campaigned with little rest and rehearsal. This is dangerous. Mood and countenance matter as much as command of issues.
A debate tie goes to the frontrunner. With that now being Mr. Obama by a slim margin, Mr. McCain must emerge the clear winner, or his prospects of being the next president will dim.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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I'm in Switzerland for the DB Swiss Gathering at the moment and missed the debate. Does anyone have a URL where I can see it?
========
WSJ
Des Moines, Iowa
One lingering fear for Democrats has been that the prolonged primary fight might have weakened Barack Obama for the general election. That fear seemed to be realized when Hillary Clinton's supporters initially appeared slow to rally behind him before the party's national convention in Denver last month.
APBut here in Iowa, one of the most tightly contested states in the country, the drawn-out campaign season is proving to be a boon for the Democratic candidate. Sen. Obama has enjoyed an average nine-point lead in state polls over the past three weeks, according to RealClearPolitics.com, which aggregates poll data.
One reason is that for much of 2006 and most of 2007, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic presidential candidates crisscrossed the state, organizing precincts, personally meeting voters and buying ad time -- all in record amounts and at levels far greater than anything John McCain and the other Republicans did.
According to Washington, D.C., political analyst Eric M. Appleman, who tracks such things, Mr. Obama made 44 visits and spent all or part of 89 days in Iowa during the two-year period leading up to the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 of this year. Mr. McCain, by contrast, clocked half that -- 22 visits over 43 days during the same period.
More Iowans have had the chance to see Mr. Obama in their hometowns, watch him speak in forums, and view his advertising than those who've met or seen Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama's rallies routinely produced huge crowds, and his campaign organization did a superior effort at locating, registering and turning out supporters on caucus night, when he won a plurality of the vote. That organizational infrastructure remains in place, and is now augmented with the supporters of other Democratic presidential candidates.
One benefit of all the Democratic attention on Iowa has been increased voter registration. Four years ago, Republicans had a 9,026 edge in registered voters. Today, there are over 100,000 more Democrats registered to vote than Republicans.
Iowa has just seven electoral votes, making it a smaller prize than Florida or Ohio. But both parties fight hard to win here, because it is a closely divided state that could tip the balance in a closely divided election. In 2000, Al Gore carried Iowa by a mere 4,144 votes, less than 1% of the vote. In 2004, George W. Bush put the state back in the Republican column, carrying it by a margin of 10,059 votes.
For Mr. McCain, however, the state is a steeper climb than it has been for other Republicans. He doesn't profit much from his military background here. Iowa has some of the lowest levels of per capita spending on the military, there are no large military bases in the state, and no large communities of military retirees. The Almanac of American Politics calls Iowa "one of the most dovish, isolationist-prone states" in the nation.
According to the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll, 74% of the state's voters say the country is on the wrong track. And it found that voters think Mr. Obama "best understands people like you" by a margin of 55% to 37% over Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama is also seen as best able to fix the economy, bring down gas prices, win the respect of world leaders, and inspire the country. Mr. McCain is seen by more voters as having the experience to lead and being best able to keep America secure.
Iowa has also been trending Democratic. In the 2006 elections, Democrats picked up two congressional seats, the governorship and control of both houses of the state legislature.
One thing to watch in all of these battleground states is what the rural vote is doing. In past elections, Republicans have carried small towns and farm and ranch country by hefty margins. If Democrats can limit those margins, they can win close states by piling up votes in urban areas.
According to a Center for Rural Strategies poll of rural voters in 13 battleground states, Mr. McCain holds a 10-point lead with rural voters, slightly less than the 13-point lead Mr. Bush had at a similar point in the 2004 elections.
That shows that all is not lost for Mr. McCain in Iowa. He and his running mate Sarah Palin staged a rally recently in Cedar Rapids that attracted an impressive crowd of 6,000. She is energizing social conservatives, and those activists are one reason why Iowa flipped to Mr. Bush four years ago.
The GOP has also shown the ability to close fast in the final days of presidential elections. In 2000, Mr. Gore led by seven points in early September. Yet Mr. Bush nearly won the state. In 2004, John Kerry held a seven-point lead and lost by a point.
A big unknown is how independents will break. Voters who declined to affiliate with a political party when they registered to vote make up 35.1% of the state's electorate, which is a larger percentage than registered Democrats (34.6%) or Republicans (30%).
When you consider how rapidly GOP voters "come home," and how their organizers turn out Republican voters in the last few days of a campaign in Iowa, Mr. Obama's nine-point lead may not be much of a firewall. And if there is any hidden racial prejudice in a state that is 96% white, his lead could evaporate quickly.
Mr. Yepsen is the Des Moines Register's political columnist.
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http://michaelsavage.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=1875
Prepare him for the stabbing, just like Mike Tyson in the fourth, homeboy be jabbing!
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Crafty:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/09/26/debate.entire.part1.cnn
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/09/26/debate.entire.part2.cnn
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/09/26/debate.entire.part3.cnn
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Thank you SB.
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I've seen this on a couple RSS feeds, but haven't liked the sourcing so didn't post. Now its coming out of the MO Governor's office. . . .
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Contact: Jessica Robinson, 573-751-0290
Gov. Blunt Statement on Obama Campaign’s Abusive Use of Missouri Law Enforcement
JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.
“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.
“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.
“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.
“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts - not a free society.”
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Specifically what are the accusations?
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That select (Democratic) law enforcement officials have been tapped to go after those who disseminate campaign material the Obama campaign deems false. I note there is currently a fight over ads and mailings the NRA is sending out; MO is a state with a significant hunting heritage; so I wonder if this is part of the brouhaha. Bottom line is that there is the taint of prior restraint in this effort.
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Thursday's VP debate will be moderated by Gwen Ifill who according to Michelle Malkin is a bit invested in an Obama victory. http://michellemalkin.com/
The title of Ifill’s book “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.”Release date: Inauguration Day. Nonpartisan my foot.
Ifill’s publisher, Random House, is already busy hyping the book with YouTube clips of Ifill heaping praise on her subjects, including Obama and Obama-endorsing Mass. Governor Deval Patrick. The official promo for the book gushes:
“In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power…Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the ‘black enough’ conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.”
Ifill and her publisher are banking on an Obama/Biden win to buoy her book sales. The moderator expected to treat both sides fairly has grandiosely declared this the “Age of Obama.” Can you imagine a right-leaning journalist writing a book about the “stunning” McCain campaign and its “bold” path to reform timed for release on Inauguration Day – and then expecting a slot as a moderator for the nation’s sole vice presidential debate?
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Hey Doug,
I didn't see your post till just now and posted on the "media thread" a similar article about the moderator for the VP debate.
I coulldn' t agree with you more. Of course she is a major BO fan. She is not going to have a book about him if she dislikes him.
The media bias is so depressing as is the prospect of the far left controlling all three houses.
I just don't see McCain as having the persuasion skills to turn this around in the face of an obvious leftist and pro-BO media onslaught and unless Palin can come through as some sort of genius.....it looks like BO is our next President. :cry: :x :-o :-(
As soon as he wins he will move left - far left.
Funny thing, I don't blame W as much as the corrupt and totally failed recent Republican majority in the House and Senate for this debacle. I don't know if the Republicans can ever win back trust and respect of the majority. Too many of them on the take, bought out, just like the crats.
I don't even know who could have stopped the credit crises. Even those who spoke up about FannieFreddie were up against a whole oraganized gang of theives bought out by the lobbyists that no regulation could have gotten enough wide spread support to pass it seems.
To watch Frank, Dodd, BO getting taking credit (the new talking points is that the newer versions of the bailout plan meet the criteria as set forth by BO - as if he had anything to do with it) is just nauseating. Why Dodd had a sweetheart mortgage deal as did BO who became a millionaire after he became a Senator! Yet the media is silent.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/01/mckinney-dod-shot-5000-prisoners-during-katrina/
What crazy looks like. She'll probably get a cabinet position under the Obama administration.
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A small story:
We live in a two-on-a-lot in the front unit. Our neighbor in back is a very active and very committed feminazi liberal. She is running for reelection on the local Health District Council or something like that and so we let her post her yard sign in front of our house (four years ago there had been words over her effort to place a Kerry sign :lol: ), Anyway, today she is hosting a BO party and people came looking for her house. My wife happened to be out front chatting with a friend. One by one they came and stopped in front of our house, and one by one my wife pointed them to the house in the back. One fella stopped and looked at the McCain sign and said, "She... lives... in... this... house...?" My wife said, "NO, she lives in the house in the back". Then my wife leaned in and half whispered, "The people who live in the front are conservatives." They man crumpled his nose and said, "Ewwwwe". As he walked off my wife said, "They're conservatives, but they're reeeeeeeeeeeeal nice!"
:lol:
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In the popular media wisdom, Sarah Palin is the neophyte who knows nothing about foreign policy while Joe Biden is the savvy diplomatic pro. Then what are we to make of Mr. Biden's fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?
APStart with Lebanon, where Mr. Biden asserted that "When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel."
The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn't do that. The Lebanese ousted Syria's military in 2005. As for NATO, Messrs. Biden and Obama may have proposed sending alliance troops in, but if they did that was also a fantasy. The U.S. has had all it can handle trying to convince NATO countries to deploy to Afghanistan.
Speaking of which, Mr. Biden also averred that "Our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan." In trying to correct him, Mrs. Palin mispronounced the general's name -- saying "General McClellan" instead of General David McKiernan. But Mr. Biden's claim was the bigger error, because General McKiernan said that while "Afghanistan is not Iraq," he also said a "sustained commitment" to counterinsurgency would be required. That is consistent with Mr. McCain's point that the "surge principles" of Iraq could work in Afghanistan.
Then there's the Senator's astonishing claim that Mr. Obama "did not say he'd sit down with Ahmadinejad" without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club: "Would I make a blanket commitment to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected President? Absolutely, positively no."
Or how about his rewriting of Bosnia history to assert that John McCain didn't support President Clinton in the 1990s. "My recommendations on Bosnia, I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives. And initially John McCain opposed it along with a lot of other people. But the end result was it worked." Mr. Biden's immodesty aside, Mr. McCain supported Mr. Clinton on Bosnia, as did Bob Dole even as he was running against him for President in 1996 -- in contrast to the way Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders have tried to undermine President Bush on Iraq.
Closer to home, the Delaware blarney stone also invited Americans to join him at "Katie's restaurant" in Wilmington to witness middle-class struggles. Just one problem: Katie's closed in the 1980s. The mistake is more than a memory lapse because it exposes how phony is Mr. Biden's attempt to pose for this campaign as Lunchbucket Joe.
We think the word "lie" is overused in politics today, having become a favorite of the blogosphere and at the New York Times. So we won't say Mr. Biden was deliberately making events up when he made these and other false statements. Perhaps he merely misspoke. In any case, Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true.
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Who wants to bet if Gwen Ifill will point out the flaws in Biden's statements? :roll:
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It would appear that McCain's populist pandering on the economic crisis has doomed his campaign and has doomed America to a President Obama leading an unrestrained Dem Congress.
We are fcuked.
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October 7, 2008
Vol. 3, No. 41
Where We Find Ourselves This October:
The Bush-Paulson Economy is a Failure
Obama and the Left Would Be Worse
Can McCain Offer a Path to Economic Growth and Prosperity? By Newt Gingrich
America this October is like a patient who has barely avoided a massive heart attack. We have no strategy for recovery, no strategy for economic growth, and no strategy for holding accountable those who have created this mess.
We're also far from out of danger. If we do not create an economic recovery program, we will be facing another bailout next year.
To put it another way: We can mop up water all we want but if we don't fix the leak we will simply have to keep mopping. Similarly, we can pass a bailout, but if we don't fix the economy we will have more and more bailouts.
America Must Get Back to the Fundamentals to Be Healthy Again
If we don't develop an energy abundance plan, we will continue to send $500 billion or more a year overseas and our economy will continue to weaken.
If we don't focus on making it easier for small business and for entrepreneurial startups, we won't have the new jobs to replace the old ones that are fading away under the pressures of science, technology and the world market.
If we don't get government spending, government regulations, government bureaucracy and government-mandated litigation under control, our economy will continue to weaken and we will be hit with rising inflation.
America has to get back to the fundamentals to become healthy again.
The Bush-Paulson Economic Strategy Has Been a Disaster
The Bush-Paulson strategy has been a disaster and has made things more difficult.
This spring, the $152 billion stimulus bill was wasted money. It should have been invested in science, technology, energy, infrastructure and pro-jobs, pro-savings tax cuts.
Imagine repealing the business killing Sarbanes-Oxley bill, eliminating the capital gains tax, going to 100 percent annual expensing for small businesses, and other practical steps to create jobs and generate wealth to mop up the bad debts.
Imagine half of the $152 billion invested in clean coal, biofuels, solar power, wind power, nuclear power, natural gas vehicles, hydrogen vehicles and drilling for oil and natural gas. Imagine the other half being invested in the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and in a space-based air traffic control system that would increase capacity in the Northeast by 40 percent. That would have been a long-term investment strategy instead of a wasted stimulus package.
Amazingly, the Housing Bailout Contained $500 Million for Radical, Anti-Free Market Groups
To give you a sense of how failed the current strategy has been, consider this: This summer a $300 billion housing bailout was passed with a $500 million a year payment to a radical, anti-free market group called ACORN and other left-wing organizing groups.
ACORN is a left-wing, political extortion racket. It's currently busy bussing people to vote early in Ohio and elsewhere - these are your tax dollars at work. You get taxed to send a left-wing group money to use to elect left-wing predatory politicians to raise your taxes to give more money to groups who help them get elected, etc.
It was suicidal for a Republican president to sign that housing bailout bill and any bill that contains funding for groups so radically opposed to the values and interests of the vast majority of Americans.
The Paulson Bailout a "Paradigm Shift" Toward Big Government and Big Cronyism
The Paulson bailout was initially bad and made worse by the Congressional Democrats. Then, John McCain and the House Republicans moved the bill from terrible to merely bad.
Still, lobbyists are already lining up to get their piece of the Paulson pie. They see a goldmine of new government regulation and involvement in private industry for them to exploit for their clients. One lobbyist told the Hill newspaper: "This will ripple through every piece of major legislation we are looking at next Congress. This is a paradigm shift."
Too Little Too Late: The SEC Moves Away From Mark-to-Market Accounting
Finally, the Bush Administration resisted for months modifying the mark-to-market accounting system which has been the source of many unnecessary bankruptcies.
The need to abandon the mark-to-market rule was the focus of my speech last Tuesday morning at the National Press Club. By Tuesday afternoon, to its credit, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) admitted the mark-to-market rule needed to be revised and announced a substantial change in its application. If the SEC had done this three months ago, it might have avoided $500 billion of the $700 billion in bad debt that Paulson wants to bail out with your money.
But If Bush-Paulson is Bad, Obama-Frank-Dodd-Pelosi-Reid Will Be Worse
Clearly, by any reasonable standard, the Bush-Paulson stewardship of the economy has failed. But the Barack Obama-Barney Frank-Chris Dodd-Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid-left-wing policies of big government, high taxes, more litigation, and insider deals for their left-wing special interests will be even worse.
We've heard a lot about predatory lenders in this current economic crisis. They deserve their share of the blame. But it's time to introduce a new term that gets us closer to the real roots of this crisis: Predatory politicians. Predatory politicians are much more dangerous than predatory lenders. Predatory politicians have the power of the government to coerce you. Government under Obama, Frank, Dodd, Pelosi and Reid will be government by and for predatory politicians. It will make dealing with predatory lenders seems like a walk in the park.
McCain and Palin Should Sound the Call Against Predatory Politicians
The elite media has desperately sought to avoid the guilt of the left for the current crisis. But this is a topic Senator McCain and Governor Palin should spend at least one-third of their time on for the next four weeks.
For more information on predatory politicians and their role in the making of the economic crisis, see my paper "Predatory Politicans, Destructive Leftwing Politics and the Roots of the Housing Crisis."
And if McCain and Palin find themselves in need of arguments against the left's all-purpose excuse that a lack of government regulation is all that is behind the economic crisis, they should read this conversation with Warren Buffet. The government had a 200-employee agency whose sole job was to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and yet Fannie and Freddie still managed to bring the economy to its knees.
The Questions Senator Obama Needs to Answer
Senator Obama is intimately tied to corruption, left-wing radicalism, and predatory politicians. But the elite media has done everything it could to avoid asking the key questions. For a list of the questions Senator Obama needs to answer before we can judge his fitness for office, see my paper "Why is Barack Obama Afraid to Answer These Questions?" Senator McCain and Governor Palin should spend another third of their time asking Obama and the elite media to answer these questions.
They could use the same technique that Senator Richard Russell used in 1936 to defeat populist Georgia Governor Gene Talmadge. Russell literally posted a list of questions on the podium in Macon and told the crowd "Don't let him leave until he answers them." It was the psychological turning point of that campaign because Talmadge refused to answer and the people knew it.
If everywhere Obama and Biden went for the next 28 days they were faced with these questions they would rapidly lose popular legitimacy.
The McCain Crisis: Danger and Opportunity
Senator McCain now faces the crisis of his career.
He is behind. He will not catch up on a state-by-state basis. He will either win the argument in the national media, suddenly growing stronger in many states or he will lose the national debate and gradually decline further in a number of states.
The Danger For McCain
If Senator McCain is not prepared to separate himself from the Bush-Paulson economic program, he has no opportunity to win.
The country is deeply fed up with the Bush presidency and angry about the Paulson bailout. If McCain is confused or uncertain about how bad this economic performance is, he will never get the country to listen to him.
The Opportunity for McCain
Just as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (as well as the House Republicans in 1994 with the Contract with America) created a large argument which led to a decisive result, so McCain has an opportunity to reach beyond the daily attacks and clever tactics and spend the last 28 days of this campaign making a large argument over America's future.
If McCain is prepared to declare that it is time for a fundamental change away from the failure of Bush-Paulson and away from the leftism of Obama (a "clean rupture" as French President Nicolas Sarkozy described it in breaking with President Jacques Chirac (watch my video on Sarkozy here) or "bold colors with no pale pastels" as Reagan described it in breaking with President Ford in 1976), then he has a huge opportunity on three levels:
First, small business and free markets are better than bureaucrats and socialism.
We know this as a matter of American values and polling confirms it. The margin isn't even close; it's about 70 -20 or better. Clinton pollster Doug Schoen and Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway recently did a survey for American Solutions which proves the American people hold the government responsible for much of our current economic pain. On other key issues like energy and taxes, the Platform of the American People proves that McCain could build a big majority.
Second, the vast majority of the American people are deeply fed up with the corruption, dishonesty, and arrogance of Washington and of many of their state capitals.
A candidate with the courage to tell the truth about Franklin Raines, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, the Carter and Clinton-era pressures for bad loans, the ACORN pressure for bad loans (trained in Chicago by Barack Obama in his community organizer days) would have an enormous response from a country which is sick of predatory politicians, arrogant bureaucrats, and elitist reporters.
In short, the elites would be enraged but the American people would be enthusiastic.
Third, there are huge groups of Americans eager to have someone address their concerns and offer them hope.
Millions of small business owners would like a program that cut spending in Washington and taxes on their businesses and reduced regulations and red tape. Millions of drivers would like an energy program that offered them hope. They believe in drilling here and drilling now. Every person who uses electricity is eager for a determined effort to develop clean coal. Millions of retirees or soon to be retirees would like a program that would strengthen the economy and increase the value of their investments. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists would fight for a program that abolished Sarbanes-Oxley, eliminated the capital gains tax, and expanded H-1B visas for talented workers.
A bold program of the right changes would rally a massive number of activists and donors to fight for a better future.
"Action This Day"
That was the slogan Winston Churchill used to focus and energize the British Government when he became prime minister in the darkest days of World War II.
If Senator McCain is prepared to be as bold as Winston Churchill and as aggressive as Theodore Roosevelt, this is an election that can be won and might be won by a shocking margin (like Harry Truman in 1948).
The choice is his. As for myself, I know of no other path that will work.
Your friend,
Newt Gingrich
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Voters Haven't Decided Yet
Now it's up to the candidates to drive home their message.By KARL ROVEArticle
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Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. Mr. McCain was more focused and sharp than in the first debate, though the cameras above him made his balding pate more prominent.
APTom Brokaw was often a distraction: Did he really need over a hundred words -- including the name "Sherard Cowper-Coles" -- to ask about Afghanistan?
Mr. McCain's advocates were cheered by him advancing the theme that Mr. Obama lacks a record of accomplishment or bipartisanship in the Senate. Mr. McCain also described how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac constituted "the match that started this forest fire" that's engulfed our economy, and nailed Mr. Obama and Democrats for being AWOL on GSE reform.
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown?
What about swing voters? There are probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
For those open to Mr. McCain, it is unclear how they will respond to his plan to order the Treasury secretary "to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes." It came across as both impulsive and badly explained. No experts were ready to defend it. No explanatory paper was flung at journalists. Nor were surrogates like Mitt Romney briefed. But the campaign did admit it borrowed the idea from Hillary Clinton.
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :cry: :cry: :cry:
While it was good Mr. McCain engaged on health-care reform, his explanations were not crisp or powerful. And he failed to defend his proposed corporate tax cut. Why not say America has the world's second-highest corporate tax rate, putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in creating jobs?
For those leaning to Mr. Obama, there was no evidence of bipartisanship. There was no talk of accomplishments. Did he really think it was smart to answer Mr. McCain on Fannie by dismissing the GSE reform bill and pointing to a letter he wrote? In the Senate, is the pen mightier than legislation? And Mr. Obama's say-one-thing, do-another approach was apparent. Blast Mr. McCain for talking up the economy, then say, "I am confident about the American economy." Blame Mr. McCain for the credit meltdown, and end the assault with "you're not interested in hearing politicians pointing fingers." Say "only a few percent of small businesses" will get taxed when 663,000 small enterprises are in the top 5%.
There were no knockouts. What matters now is how well the candidates prosecute the themes they have laid out in the election's remaining 26 days. Interest is high. People are paying more attention than usual.
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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October 10, 2008
A Buckley endorses Obama
Posted: 11:08 PM ET
From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney
Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, is backing Obama.
(CNN) — No, hell has not frozen over, but a Buckley is backing a Democrat for president.
Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.
“It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.
Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the “real” and “unconventional” man he once admired.
"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?
"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"
But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect."
"Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley wrote.
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Report:
121008-255
Location: SCG HQ
Situation: Election drawing close, Obama still an enigma
Date: Sunday, 12 OCT 2008
SCG International is a non-partisan organization providing private intelligence, security and training services.
We seem on the verge of putting into the Oval Office a man who, less than a month before the election, remains an enigma.
Is he, despite having the most liberal voting record in the Senate, the moderate politician he presents himself as in the debates and on the stump? Or is he, if not a leftist radical himself, someone perfectly comfortable in the company of such?
If the latter, has he been not just misleading, but lying about his past? If so, what else has he been lying about, and what other lies might he tell us if elected?
We went through a presidency with many unsavory associations, and serial fabrications about them, in the 1990s. Do we want to repeat the experience?
Lessons Learned
In 1992, the Democrat's presidential nominee had a long history of questionable acquaintances, shady real estate deals, and multiple infidelities to both his wife and many of his political associates.
He also had a long-standing abusive relationship with the truth, which had earned him the sobriquet in Arkansas of "Slick Willy."
While not every charge flung at him was true, many were. He truly was the most corrupt president since Warren Harding (in fact, there are a number of other eerie similarities between the two presidents), and perhaps in U.S. history.
That came as no surprise to those who had observed him as attorney general and governor of Arkansas.
The Whitewater problems were no secret before the 1992 election, nor were his dalliances, except to most of the public. The local press in Arkansas was quite familiar with this history, but the national media refused to either investigate or report it, instead going so far as to famously whitewash his marital problems on 60 Minutes.
While many of Clinton's scandals were for things that occurred during his administration, his Arkansas record should have been adequate to keep him out of national office, had it been known.
By cocooning him from the voting public, the media managed to get him into the White House, only to have all the old scandals revealed, and new ones created, after he became president.
The tragic thing about the Clinton presidency is that it didn't have to happen, and we could have been spared all of the scandals, including Lewinsky, had there been proper coverage and investigation of him before the election.
In fact, the media could have even gotten a different Democrat president, had they simply aired Clinton's dirty laundry during the primaries. It was, after all, a Democrat year, particularly with Ross Perot in the mix to siphon off votes from George H.W. Bush.
But they fell in love with Bill Clinton and, as we all know, love is blind. The problem, of course, is that when the major media wear blinders, the rest of us don't get the view. That was particularly the case in 1992 when the web had just been invented and the only people using the Internet were nerds.
Well, now the media have found a new paramour with a checkered past, and they (with a few exceptions) are once again lovingly carrying (or at least attempting to carry) the non-blushing bride across the electoral threshold.
Just as few bothered to go to Little Rock in 1992, the media haven't been able to spare any reporters from their vital duties in checking library records in Wasilla, Alaska, to take a trip to Hyde Park to see just what this new candidate is and was about.
Fortunately, this time there are a few individuals who have been doing so, and unlike 1992, they have their own printing presses, in the form of blogs and web publications. What they've found is potentially disturbing, and certainly information that the voting public should have a right to know before it buys another pig in a poke.
There is a disturbing pattern to revelations of Senator Obama's unsavory associations. Whenever one is uncovered, it is minimized both by denying the depth of the relationship, and by denying that there is anything wrong with the associate and this campaign spin is unfailingly reported by the media.
Let's examine a few of them.
First there was Tony Rezko, a now-convicted felon (and under investigation at the time) who helped the Obamas purchase their home in Chicago on strangely favorable terms. When confronted about it, Senator Obama told us that it "wasn't the Tony Rezko I knew."
Next came Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Barack and Michelle Obama were members of his congregation for two decades, sat in the pews on Sunday, were married by him, had their children baptized by him, were spiritually advised by him. The title of Senator Obama's self-aggrandizing book was taken from one of his sermons. Yet they professed surprise when his repeated bigoted and anti-American ravings were aired last spring, and then said that this was normal for an African-American church. He asks us to believe that he was unaware of his long-time pastor's inflammatory rhetoric.
Now, with the left-wing social activist organization ACORN in the news because its Nevada office was raided in an investigation of voter fraud, Senator Obama, who has been a trainer and legal counsel for the organization, is denying his relationship with it. Of course, there are other reasons to not want to be associated with it, given it (and his) at least partial responsibility for the current financial crisis. But there's abundant evidence to the contrary.
Now that the McCain campaign is exposing his long-standing relationship with terrorist Bill Ayers, former Weatherman and domestic terrorist (not to mention his wife Bernardine Dohrn, a founder of that group), the Obama campaign responds by saying that the bombings were something that happened when he was eight years old.
As if that's a defense of a close association with someone who has never expressed regret for his actions, and who remains unrepentant and defiant about it. Then they deny the relationship, claiming that he was "just a guy in my neighborhood."
Well, with all of the Rezkos, Wrights, Ayers and Dohrns, it's starting to look like a pretty rough neighborhood. Perhaps he should consider moving.
Except the denials don't hold up.
Senator Obama has claimed that the fact that his initial campaign kickoff for a State Senate seat in 1996 was hosted at the home of Ayers and Dohrn was just a happenstance - that they had nothing to do with his career. But this week, that fact was exposed as a lie.
When people tried to investigate their relationship in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, in which hundreds of millions was spent to radicalize schoolchildren while contributing nothing to their actual education, the University of Illinois attempted to prevent access to the relevant history.
At whose behest? If it was the Obama campaign behind the scenes, it wouldn't be inconsistent with their recent attempts to shut down free speech in Missouri.
The latest revelation is that Senator Obama was a member of the leftist "New Party," an offshoot of Democratic Socialists of America. If history is a guide, he'll deny it, despite the evidence (an unsuccessful attempt has been made to scrub all references to Obama from the website). Or else simply say "Hey, we could use a little socialism now, given the state of the economy."
Given this history, it is long past the time that Senator Obama should be given the benefit of the doubt.
At this point, the question should be: why should we believe anything that he or his campaign tells us?
Leave aside the ideological question of whether or not we want someone with such an apparent radical leftist history running the country. Is this kind of spin and prevarication that we want to deal with for the next four years?
Contact SCG at info@scginternational.com for more information.
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Commentary: McCain campaign following in Hillary's footsteps
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Rollins: An internally divided campaign can't successfully confront opponent
John McCain is following Hillary Clinton in running a divided campaign, he says
Rollins says Obama is running a disciplined and focused campaign
Rollins: McCain needs to address the economic crisis, which scares Americans
Next Article in Politics »
By Ed Rollins
CNN Contributor
Editor's Note: Ed Rollins, who served as political director for President Reagan, is a Republican strategist who was national chairman of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's 2008 presidential campaign.
Ed Rollins says internal divisions are preventing McCain's campaign from getting out a clear message.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A campaign at war with itself cannot fight its opponent effectively.
We have seen two major campaigns this year that could be described as internally divided -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's losing primary campaign and now Sen. John McCain's general election effort.
And while chaos and disarray reigned supreme in Sen. Barack Obama's opponents' campaigns, the steady, disciplined and strategically driven Obama campaign marches forward toward likely victory.
Clinton's campaign had several different groups setting and implementing strategy. They include the first campaign team led by pollster Mark Penn, her loyalists from the White House days led by eventual campaign manager Maggie Williams and campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe, and a rump group led by her husband. Prior to this year and his efforts on his wife's behalf, President Clinton was viewed as one of the best political strategists around.
All that brain power couldn't come together and agree on a consistent strategy to beat a young inexperienced outsider. There will be second guessing and finger pointing for years to come.
We now see something similar in the McCain campaign. There have been at least three major managerial changes or overthrows in the past 18 months.
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In Depth: Commentaries
The first was the Rick Davis/John Weaver battle. Weaver and Mike Murphy, one of the best media strategists in the business, were the key players in the 2000 McCain effort and Weaver was the political guru who guided McCain's efforts since then. Davis, with a major assist from Cindy McCain and his former lobbying partner, Charlie Black, ousted Weaver.
Davis and Black, who masterminded Bob Dole's unsuccessful 1996 campaign and Phil Gramm's aborted presidential effort before that, are super lobbyists, and they opened the doors to their K Street allies.
Davis was then replaced -- in reality if not in title -- by Steve Schmidt, part of Karl Rove's operation. Schmidt is a first-rate tactician but new to McCain's world, and he still shares power with Black and Davis. This campaign would have been a much different operation if Weaver and Murphy had been brought back; but that was never going to happen with Davis and Black.
In the end, it's not relevant who holds what title in the McCain operation, because it is not being run by campaign professionals, but by the Washington lobbying class.
And no one seems to be in charge, least of all the candidate. The end result is a campaign suffering from "schizophrenia."
John McCain is saying one thing on the stump, his running mate another. But the worst sin is that his advertising campaign is incoherent and putting out multiple and inconsistent messages.
What McCain and his campaign need to understand is that whatever happened in the past is no longer relevant. James Carville's famous slogan in Bill Clinton's 1992 victory over the first Bush: "It's the economy stupid!" can now be replaced with "You morons, what have you done with my money, my life and my kids' future?"
If John McCain wants anyone to pay attention to him in the last three weeks of this campaign, he must address those concerns.
Attacking Obama for his association with Bill Ayers -- the unrepentant Vietnam-era terrorist who should have been jailed four decades ago for bombing New York City Police Headquarters, the United States Capitol building, and the Pentagon -- is a legitimate tactic. So is asking questions regarding the influence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's controversial pastor.
The problem is that few voters care about what happened 40 years ago when in the last few weeks they have seen their savings and retirements and possibly their jobs and homes going up in flames. If you don't talk to voters about their concerns they will not spend one minute listening to you in the closing days of a campaign.
Government is not working. President Bush's leadership has failed the country and Congress has not done much better. How are you going to be better? That's the question voters want answered.
With one debate remaining and less than three weeks of campaigning left, John McCain's 10-year quest to be president is coming to a close and -- as of today -- a dreadful one.
All I can advise is "Engage us, John!" You are an honorable man who has dedicated your life to serving this country. Quit the name calling and make the last weeks about leadership and solutions.
Accept Obama's challenge issued last week: "The American people aren't looking for someone who can divide this country. They're looking for somebody who will lead this country."
Tell us how you will lead this country through the greatest crisis we have faced in modern times.
And Sen. McCain, remember your own words of last week about Obama: "He's a decent family man -- citizen -- that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues."
Tell us what those disagreements are. Then, at least voters can make their final choices on things that matter to them now.
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I'm thinking today's move in the market should lessen the damage to McC.
Here's PD WSJ:
Correction
Like Nixon, Obama Won't Be Satisfied Unless He Wins Ugly
An Alaska Scandal That Wasn't
Just Pray the Election Doesn't Come Down to Ohio
Obama's Ghostwriter? (Quote of the Day)
Another Lehman Lesson
Correction
A PD item on Massachusetts politics should have made clear that no woman had been elected to its governorship or U.S. Senate seat. Lt. Gov. Jane Swift became Acting Governor in 2001 when Gov. Paul Cellucci resigned to become U.S. Ambassador to Canada. Sorry for the error.
-- The Mgmt.
If You Don't Have a Race Card, Invent One
Georgia Rep. John Lewis has decided that the McCain campaign is channeling Southern segregationist George Wallace. The civil rights icon issued a statement over the weekend saying, "What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history." He accused Team McCain of "hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."
New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis followed up by accusing the McCain campaign of using Willie Horton tactics, referring to a 1988 ad by an independent group supporting George H. W. Bush against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, involving rapist and murderer Willie Horton, who was released from prison on a furlough program supported by Mr. Dukakis. On one of his furloughs, Horton raped a woman in front of her husband. Even Mr. Louis acknowledges the incident was "fair game, to a point." But the use of Horton's image in a single commercial "became the worst kind of racial scare-mongering, a low point in modern politics," he says, before sliding into an unexplained parallel to the fact that "McCain has begun harping on Obama's tenuous connection to William Ayers, an ex-radical who served with Obama on the six-member board of a Chicago charity."
What is curious about these attacks is that there are almost no specific examples. Congressman Lewis cites no examples and Mr. Louis only refers to Mr. McCain's attacks on the Obama-Ayers connections without saying how they implicate racism. Mr. Ayers is white and investigations by both the New York Times and CNN have found that Mr. Obama appears to have obscured the extent of his relationship with the unrepentant Weather Underground bomber.
Last week, Mr. McCain responded to a woman at a rally who called Mr. Obama "an Arab" by saying she was wrong and that his opponent was a decent man whom he had disagreements with. To date, Mr. McCain has never used the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 20-year association with Barack Obama against him -- a forbearance that was nonetheless rewarded with the kind of attacks that Rep. Lewis and Mr. Louis launched over the weekend. Just imagine the reaction from Obama supporters if Mr. McCain had even dipped his toe into the Rev. Wright controversy.
Claiming that race has been injected into a campaign when it clearly hasn't is cheap demagoguery and does nothing to improve race relations in this country.
-- John Fund
The Old-Boy Network Strikes Back
Gov. Sarah Palin has been asking reporters to actually read the Alaska state government report issued over the weekend that supposedly found she had abused her power in seeking the dismissal of Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten. And indeed, the report is more favorable to Mrs. Palin than much of the reporting has suggested. Mrs. Palin and her husband Todd did likely push for Mr. Wooten to be fired. But Special Prosecutor Stephen Branchflower was originally asked to look into whether Mrs. Palin violated state laws by firing her Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who claimed that he was let go for refusing to oust Mr. Wooten. Mr. Branchflower determined that, in fact, the governor was within her rights to fire Mr. Monegan.
What's more, the recommendations Mr. Branchflower makes are largely favorable to Mrs. Palin. She had warned that Mr. Wooten, her ex-brother-in-law, was too unstable to be a police officer and had posed a threat the Palin family. Mr. Branchflower discounts the family's personal safety concerns, but recommends that the legislature create procedures so those who file complaints about police officers are informed about what steps are subsequently taken. Throughout the Wooten affair, the Palins had expressed frustration that no one could tell them what disciplinary action had been taken against Mr. Wooten (which likely led to the impression they were pressuring state officials). The report also notes that the original complaint filed against Mr. Wooten came from Chuck Heath, Mrs. Palin's father, who reported being concerned about an alleged threat by Mr. Wooten to kill him.
The report is a compilation of sordid details surrounding a messy episode in Alaska. Democrat Sen. Hollis French, who oversaw the special out-of-session legislative committee that ordered the investigation, insisted it be completed and released before Election Day. The report seems to rely on an assumption that Mrs. Palin wasn't really concerned about her personal safety, because she had reduced the size of her security detail -- never mind that she had campaigned partly on trimming back gubernatorial perks and pomp and had acted on those promises in other ways too. The report is available online (http://media.adn.com/smedia/2008/10/10/16/Branchflowerreport.source.prod_affiliate.7.pdf). It's hardly the smoking gun her opponents would like it to be.
-- Brendan Miniter
The War for Ohio
The seesaw court battle in Ohio over "Golden Week," a seven-day period earlier this month when state residents could register and immediately cast an absentee ballot, continues.
First, a federal judge slapped down Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's controversial Democratic Secretary of State, for failing to allow counties the information they need to verify the identity of hundreds of thousands of newly-registered voters signed up by outside groups such as the housing lobby ACORN. A lawsuit asking Ms. Brunner to follow the federal Help America Vote Act's provisions mandating that new registrations be matched with government databases to confirm their validity was brought by the Ohio Republican Party.
"Plaintiffs assert, and the court agrees, that it is hard to imagine a public interest more compelling than safeguarding the legitimacy of the election of the president of the United States," Federal District Judge George C. Smith, who was appointed to the bench by President Reagan, wrote in his ruling.
The Associated Press reports that Ms. Brunner claims HAVA "provides no requirements regarding what to do if a mismatch is discovered, and it is up to Ohio's counties to check the system for flagged registrations and investigate if warranted." But until the judge's order, Ohio's counties had not been allowed full access to the necessary records to do the job.
Ms. Brunner responded with an immediate appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Over the weekend, a divided three-judge panel vacated Judge Smith's order, siding with Secretary Brunner. Today, the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to take up the case and issue a final ruling.
Democrats, who had expressed keen interest in making the position of Secretary of State a non-partisan office when Republican Ken Blackwell held the post in 2004, have been largely silent on the issue since Ms. Brunner won election in 2006.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day
"Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write 'Dreams From My Father,' he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- 'the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.' The public is asked to believe Obama wrote 'Dreams From My Father' on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. . . . [T]here are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter. The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is" -- author Jack Cashill, writing at americanthinker.com on why he suspects former Weather Underground fugitive William Ayers ghostwrote Mr. Obama's memoirs.
Have We Found the Real 'Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction'?
Barack Obama and Joe Biden and just about anybody else with a "D" stumps on "restoring America's standing in the world," while generously throwing around the damnation "unilateral" in relation to George W. Bush's administration.
Whatever the errors of the Bush team, this critique mangles the real issue -- which was never "unilateral vs. multilateral" (a distinction that resolves into meaninglessness when you really think about it) but "isolationist vs. engaged." President Bush engaged the U.S. in the world in extraordinarily controversial ways -- but we're certainly engaged. The message of the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions: The march toward a more interdependent globalized economic society will not be stopped by chaos arising from lagging regions and failing nations.
This weekend's coordinated actions by First World governments to repair the financial system may be even more significant. Message: We're doubling down on interdependence, not throwing up our hands and running away from globalization.
What's more, Mr. Bush and his fellow world leaders got some good news with the successful netting out of $400 billion in Lehman default insurance trades on Friday. These unregulated instruments (known as credit default swaps) raised fears of potential domino-like consequences because no regulatory overseer was in a position to know whether 350 banks and hedge funds had used them responsibly or recklessly committed one-way bets on Lehman's solvency. Well, it turns out big financial players aren't crazy. In a new market created outside the established regulatory apparatus, it appears they didn't take suicidal, "unregulated" risks after all.
Keep this in mind as the post-mortems of the global panic start to come in. More and more the relevant question will be why firms took exactly such unhedged risks in the market for housing-related financial instruments -- a market created by government, dominated by government, and subject to never-ending solicitude and subsidies from Congress and the White House regardless of political party.
-- Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
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Not sure where to post this, but on this Subject and many others on this forum Islam in general has been badly maligned.
Yes, we are are war. And yes, there are some very bad Muslims as there are bad Christians, Jews, and Buddhists although
bad Muslims seem to rank near the top. Yet, we seem to paint all Muslims as being bad; I don't think it's true. I think we
need to stop being racists and simply be human and try a little tolerance and understanding.
updated 2 hours, 30 minutes ago
Commentary: So what if Obama were a Muslim or an Arab?
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Campbell Brown says McCain right to set the record straight about Obama
We've all been too quick to accept that calling someone Muslim is a slur, she says
Brown asks why being an Arab-American should be a disqualifier for higher office
We need to distinguish between radical Muslims and the rest, she says
Next Article in Politics »
By Campbell Brown
CNN
Editor's note: Campbell Brown anchors CNN's "Campbell Brown: Election Center" at 8 p.m. ET Mondays through Fridays. She delivered this commentary during the "Cutting through the Bull" segment of Monday night's broadcast.
Campbell Brown says it's on the record that Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, but why should that matter?
NEW YORK (CNN) -- You may find it hard to believe that this remains an issue in this campaign, but it does.
The candidates, both candidates, are still getting questions about Barack Obama's ethnicity and religion. If you are even semi-informed, then by now you already know that of course, Barack Obama is an American.
Of course, Barack Obama is a Christian. Yet just a few days ago, there was a woman at a rally for John McCain incorrectly calling Obama an Arab:
Woman at rally: I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's an Arab.
Sen. John McCain: No ma'am, no ma'am. He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about. He's not, thank you.
'No bias, no bull'
Get the latest on the presidential race on "Campbell Brown: Election Center."
8 ET Monday through Friday on CNN
see full schedule »
Now, I commend Sen. McCain for correcting that woman, for setting the record straight. But I do have one question -- so what if he was?
So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter?
When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?
Whenever this gets raised, the implication is that there is something wrong with being an Arab-American or a Muslim. And the media is complicit here, too. Watch Campbell's commentary »
We've all been too quick to accept the idea that calling someone Muslim is a slur.
Don't Miss
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Brown: Sheriff's actions show desperation
In Depth: Commentaries
Campbell Brown: Election Center
I feel like I am stating the obvious here, but apparently it needs to be said: There is a difference between radical Muslims who support jihad against America and Muslims who want to practice their religion freely and have normal lives like anyone else. iReport.com: iReporter pleads with voters to 'stop the racism'
There are more than 1.2 million Arab-Americans and about 7 million Muslim-Americans, former Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, successful business people, normal average Americans from all walks of life.
These are the people being maligned here, and we can only imagine how this conversation plays in the Muslim world. We can't tolerate this ignorance -- not in the media, not on the campaign trail.
Of course, he's not an Arab. Of course, he's not a Muslim. But honestly, it shouldn't matter.
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The only outrage is from the RNC. Silence from BO that has paid an organization to round up voters for Democrats.
You want to talk about "disenfranchised" voters. What a joke.
Vote drives defended, despite fake names
By Richard Danielson, Times Staff Writer
In print: Tuesday, October 14, 2008
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer, but Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which had an ACORN stamp on it.
Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.
Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.
Tow truck driver Newton Bell did register to vote in Orange County this summer. In the hands of ACORN, his paperwork went through without a hitch.
Two cases, two outcomes, each with a connection to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
Nationwide, ACORN is a favorite GOP target for allegations of voter registration fraud this year.
That's not new. Similar complaints followed the 2004 elections. A criminal investigation in Florida found no evidence of fraud. ACORN even has a cameo role in the scandal over the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department.
Under attack again, ACORN leaders defend their work. Often, they say, things are as not simple as they're portrayed.
Take Mickey Mouse.
Yes, that's their logo. But they say their workers routinely scanned all suspicious applications.
"We don't think this card came through our system," said Brian Kettenring, ACORN's head organizer in Florida.
With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.
Bell, the truck driver, certainly, is more representative of ACORN's work in Florida than the cartoon mouse is.
This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.
That's enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.
Brevard County elections officials have turned over 23 suspect registrations from ACORN to prosecutors. The state Division of Elections has received two ACORN-related complaints, in Orange and Broward counties.
ACORN wasn't active in the Tampa Bay area. Last week, however, Pinellas County elections officials gave local prosecutors 35 questionable registrations from another group, Work for Progress.
The GOP accuses ACORN of registration fraud all over the country. In Las Vegas, authorities said the group's petitions included the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
"This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process," says Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross, who describes ACORN as a "quasicriminal organization."
No, Kettenring said, it's more like Wal-Mart.
"Some percentage of Wal-Mart workers try to get paid without doing their work or steal from their employer," he said.
Some ACORN workers, he said, have simply made up names.
Maybe, elections officials say, but it's still annoying.
"We did experience a significant amount of problems, enough that we did contact the group to express some of our frustration with their work," said Linda Tanko, Orange County's senior deputy supervisor for voter services.
ACORN's problems included applications with unreadable handwriting, missing information, signatures that didn't match those on file, altered dates of birth or Social Security numbers, applications for people already registered to vote and names that appeared repeatedly, often with different addresses.
ACORN said it terminates canvassers who forge applications. In Broward County, it fired one worker after he turned in applications with similar handwriting and brought the matter to the attention of the Supervisor of Elections Office.
Pay to gather registrations started at $8 an hour, and the goal was 20 signups per day. The organization did not pay by the signature or pay bonuses for volume. The organization also tried to follow up on each registration, calling the person listed to confirm that the form is accurate.
In most states, ACORN must turn in every form that is filled out. "We must turn in every voter registration card by Florida law, even Mickey Mouse," Kettenring said.
Well, not yet, said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State.
Florida does have a law saying third-party voter registration groups must turn in every form without regard to things like party affiliation, race, ethnicity or gender. So far, however, the state has not written the rules to implement it.
In Florida, ACORN is best known for its 2004 effort to lead a petition drive to raise the minimum wage. The FDLE looked into voter fraud allegations then and found no laws were broken.
ACORN also played a role in the firing of one of nine U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006.
In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired "because of complaints by elected officials who had a political interest in the outcome" of, among other things, a Republican voter fraud complaint against ACORN, according to an internal Justice Department report last month.
This year, 39 members of the House of Representatives have asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate ACORN.
One of those, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, also has written to supervisor of elections offices in Central Florida seeking "all ACORN-related registration of voters within the last two years."
Republicans also accuse Sen. Barack Obama of trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he represented in a federal lawsuit in 1995.
ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Obama, but the group says its voter registration efforts are nonpartisan.
And the McCain campaign's complaints now are puzzling, ACORN says, because two years ago McCain was the keynote speaker at an immigration reform rally ACORN co-sponsored in Miami. "In 2006," Kettenring said, "we were working together."
Richard Danielson can be reached at danielson@sptimes.com or (813)269-5311.
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JDN wrote:
"Not sure where to post this, but on this Subject and many others on this forum Islam in general has been badly maligned.
Yes, we are are war. And yes, there are some very bad Muslims as there are bad Christians, Jews, and Buddhists although
bad Muslims seem to rank near the top. Yet, we seem to paint all Muslims as being bad; I don't think it's true. I think we
need to stop being racists and simply be human and try a little tolerance and understanding."
Ummm , , , I invite you to name us some "bad Buddhists". Any terrorist bombings? Any fatwas? Any beheadings? Any beatings of women by purity police? Any destruction of the symbols of other religions? Any thing at all? :roll:
I challenge you to show where this forum is about maligning Muslims and Islam. This forum is about TRUTH. To speak the Truth is not to malign- and to conflate the two is , , , a malignment of its own.
Where do we "paint all Muslims as being bad"?
For example, I have repeatedly made the point here that we need to define this war with Islamic Fascism as being between Civilization and Barbarism, not against Islam when Islam respects "Pursuit of Happiness enabled by Freedom of Choice, informed by Freedom of Speech, and guaranteed by Separation of Church and State". The very purpose of this formulation is to leave it up to Muslims to decide what their religion is to be!
There was a time (one thousand years ago) when Islam led the world in science and shone in many ways. Then it decided to freeze itself in its understandings (I forget the name for this decision) and with this decision, things began to go downhill and now we have a situatiaon where intellectually brave and honest people are left to fairly wonder if they can respect "Pursuit of Happiness enabled by Freedom of Choice, informed by Freedom of Speech, and guaranteed by Separation of Church and State".
If they cannot, then there is a fundamental problem unique to Islam and Islam is fundamentally seditious to the American creed in a way that has nothing to do with freedom of religion and everything to do with self-defense. If they DO respect and support "Pursuit of Happiness enabled by Freedom of Choice, informed by Freedom of Speech, and guaranteed by Separation of Church and State", then we will see it in support from American Muslims (e.g. with language skills, as well as politically) for efforts to deal with Islamic Fascism.
As for Muslims outside of America, for them too it is for them to decide what their religion is to be. If the relgion is about fatwas for books and cartoons, then there is a fundamental problem. If the religion is about death to apostates (see e.g. yesterday's post about Iran in Islam in Islamic Countries) then it is silliness incarnate to blather about racism. (Indeed, in that Islam is not a race, it IS silliness, but that is a separate point.)
In this forum we are ALL about understanding-- WE SEEK TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS TRUE, not to find ways to believe that avoid the search for Truth. As for "tolerance", tolerance begets tolerance. OTOH tolerance of that which seeks to destroy one's tolerance is simply , , , the path of those who fear to speak truth to religious fascism.
"Tere are more than 1.2 million Arab-Americans and about 7 million Muslim-Americans, former Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, successful business people, normal average Americans from all walks of life."
I have seen articles suggesting that these numbers have been puffed up, but putting that point aside I will agree. There ARE many American Muslims who are fine people and good Americans. (I'm not wild about that Muslim congressman from MI though). Indeed we do not see here in America analogs of the Paristinian Revolt that we see in Paris and elsewhere in France. America has been good to them, and many of them seek to be good to America. There are some (far too few in my opinion) who help OUR country with their language skills. There are some (far too few in my opinion) who sign up to serve our Armed Forces. I have a doctor who is a Muslim.
JDN, I have complete confidence that you are a good person of a good heart and I am sorry that I feel the need for such vigorous words in this post-- but I utterly reject your charge that this forum is about racism and intolerance.
TAC,
Marc
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Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Often shortened to "Tamil Tigers" of "Tamil Eelam."
Tamil refers to the predominant ethnic group of northeastern Sri Lanka (other substantial Tamil communities live in India, Malaysia and Singapore.) Eelam means homeland in the Tamil language.
Tamil Eelam is the name that the LTTE gives to the northern and eastern part of Sri Lanka that they would like to claim as independent.
Founded In:
1976.
The group began armed actions against the Sri Lankan government in 1983.
Home Base:
Sri Lanka
Backing & Affiliations :
The group finances itself and arms purchases in Europe, through a variety of illegal and legal means.
According to homeland security and counterterrorism expert Frank Cilluffo in House testimony in 2000, the Tamil Tigers used funding methods that included soliciting funds from expatriates in the West on false humanitarian grounds; narcotics trafficking and dealmaking with Indian organized crime:
"Indian traffickers supply drugs and weapons to the LTTE, who in turn sell the drugs. The profit garnered from the drugs are then used to repay the Indians for the weapons."
Objectives:
The establishment of an autonomous Tamil entity in Sri Lanka.
Tactics:
The Tamil Tigers are best known for their suicide bombings, which are carried out by elite squads called Black Tigers. They have committed about 200 attacks so far. Tamil members wear a "vest" filled with explosives to attack, a tactic that has been adopted by Hezbolla and Hamas, among other groups.
Fighters wear cyanide pills around their necks and are trained to take them if they are captured.
In addition to suicide attacks, the LTTE make use of surface-to-air missiles and rocket propelled grenades.
Their targets include military and political figures, civilians, and competing militant Tamil groups.
Notable Attacks:
The assassination of Indian Prime Minister Sri Rajiv Gandhi in 1991;
The assassination of Sri Lankan president Premadasa in 1993
Prospects for Peace:
In 1985, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government began peace talks, but no headway was made until 2002, when they negotiated a ceasefire. The ceasefire was meant to last four years, and was reaffirmed by both sides in February 2006. Nevertheless, the LTTE resumed attacks in the spring of 2006. The situation rapidly deteriorated, and although neither side called off the truce, there was consisted fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Tamil Tigers in the fall of 2006.
Most observers of the situation are pessimistic about the prospects for a peaceful settlement in the near future, in a government dominated after 2005 elections by hard line Sinhalese nationalists. Jihan Perera, an Sri Lanka based analyst, said that "There is a question mark about the government's willingness to put forward a realistic proposal that would at least go halfway to meeting the Tamil people's aspirations, let alone LTTE aspirations" (in "Resumption of Sri Lanka War Tests Civilians' Endurance," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times,September 18, 2006).
Historical Context:
Sri Lanka, an island in the Indian Ocean off the southeast coast of India, gained its independence in 1948. Ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists make up about three-quarters of the island's population; Tamils, both Indian and Sri Lankan, are the next largest ethnic group. Most are Hindu. Tamil terrorism is rooted in conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, who predominate in government.
The Tamil population began to agitate for secession in the early 1970s, following Sinhalese measures to establish their cultural and political dominance. For example, Sinhalese was made the only official language and Buddhism was decreed the official religion. In the 1970s, student groups and others turned to armed protest to press their case with the government.
The conflict escalated in 1983, when anti-Tamil riots in the capital, Colomo, killed thousands and displaced almost 100,000 residents. The moment was decisive for many Tamils, who lent large scale support to independence movements.
According to some estimates, about 65,000 people died in the conflict between 1983 and 2002.
Role of the Tsunami
There were hopes following the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004 that the humanitarian tragedy might help reduce the friction between the government and the Tamils. The northwestern Tamil areas of the island were among the hardest hit.
Instead, disputes between the government and the Tigers over the distribution of international aid soon arose, as did accusations from UNICEF and elsewhere that the group was recruiting child soldiers from among those orphaned by the tsunami
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What's the body count of the Tamil Tigers vs. the global jihad ?
Name for me the school of islamic theology that rejects violent jihad and islamic supremacism.
Why is it that JDN can't deal with reality and can only parrot politically correct talking points?
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Actually GM that is Rachel taking me to task for my comments on Buddhism. :lol:
Very good Rachel! :lol:
But let us be clear, If I read correctly the terrorist Tamils are not the Buddhists here:
"Ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists make up about three-quarters of the island's population; Tamils, both Indian and Sri Lankan, are the next largest ethnic group. Most are Hindu. Tamil terrorism is rooted in conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, who predominate in government."
i.e.the Buddhists are the government/majority population, NOT the terrorist Tamils.
"The Tamil population began to agitate for secession in the early 1970s, following Sinhalese measures to establish their cultural and political dominance. For example, Sinhalese was made the only official language and Buddhism was decreed the official religion. In the 1970s, student groups and others turned to armed protest to press their case with the government."
Armed resistance to English being the official language of the US would certainly tick me off more than a little. As for ANY religion being an official religion, that strikes me as a really bad idea-- which is a fundamental problem I have with Sharia by the way. That said, from this article we do not know what practical consequences resulted from this declaration.
"The conflict escalated in 1983, when anti-Tamil riots in the capital, Colomo, killed thousands and displaced almost 100,000 residents. The moment was decisive for many Tamils, who lent large scale support to independence movements."
Coincidentally enough the DBMA Ass'n has a representative in Sri Lanka named Prasad and I will ask him about this. He is Christian, which may put him in a good position to comment from a relatively impartial point of view.
That said, I think my larger point remains valid and essentially uncontested by this piece. So far it appears that we have an ethnic conflict. There's nothing here about Buddha saying that the Sinhalese must submit cut off the heads of the Tamils if they do not submit to Buddha.
I look forward to Prasad's input.
TAC,
Marc
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The majority of arabs in the US aren't muslim. Many had to flee here because of muslims. The majority of muslims in the world aren't arab. Islam is a religion/political movement. It isn't a race or ethnicity.
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Is there any examples of International terrorism that was not done in the name of Islam ? I can only think of one Air India 1985, and even that you can conceivable argue was an internal affair Indian Sihk v. Indian Hindu).
anyways back to to election
Vince
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GM,
I have met Egyptian and Lebanese Christian Arabs who agree with what you say. They tell me the Muslim Arabs are not tolerant of them.
Many hate the Hamas Hezballah and the Palastinians who are intent on making trouble for everyone. They dislike the Arab Muslims in their own countries who are intolerant and control the Christian minority.
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See my entry today in the Iraq thread-- it mentions that recent attacks on Christians may have been the work of AQ.
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Is there any examples of International terrorism that was not done in the name of Islam ? I can only think of one Air India 1985, and even that you can conceivable argue was an internal affair Indian Sihk v. Indian Hindu).
anyways back to to election
Vince
Could you define "International Terrorism" please.
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What's the expression; three strikes and you're out?
It looks like McCain lost again albeit at least this time he went down fighting.
And you got to love it, when asked about Palin, even McCain could not say that his
own running mate is qualified to be president. Now that's reassuring... And yet McCain did
say Biden is qualified. He's finally figured out what most of America already knows.
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Well, running on Hillary's solution to the Wall Street meltdown of buying up the bad mortgages certainly wasn't a great way to start out the evening , , , :-P
============
Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale
Both candidates continue to tinker with their strategies.By KARL ROVEArticle
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In the campaign's final two weeks, voters will take a last serious look at both presidential candidates. The outcome of the race isn't cast in stone yet.
Barack Obama holds a 7.3% lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, but the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election. The Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll (which was closest to the mark in predicting the 2004 outcome -- 0.4% off the actual result) now says this is a three-point race.
APThis week also brought a reminder that Sen. Obama hasn't closed the sale. The Washington Post/ABC poll found 45% of voters still don't think he's qualified to be president, about the same number who doubted his qualifications in March.
This is seven points more than George W. Bush's highest reading in 2000 and the worst since Michael Dukakis's 56% unqualified rating in 1988. It explains why Mr. Obama has ignored Democratic giddiness and done two things to keep victory from slipping away.
First, he is using his money to try to keep John McCain from gaining traction. The Obama campaign raised $67 million in September and may be on track to raise $100 million in October. Sen. McCain opted last month for roughly $85 million in public financing, giving him less than half of Mr. Obama's funds for the campaign's final two months. Even with robust Republican National Committee fund raising to augment his spending, Mr. McCain is at a severe financial disadvantage.
So Mr. Obama is spending $35 million on TV this week versus the McCain/RNC total of $17 million. Mr. Obama is outspending Mr. McCain on TV in Virginia by a ratio of 4 to 1, in Florida by 3 to 1, and in Missouri and Nevada by better than 2 to 1. The disparity is likely to grow in the campaign's final weeks.
Money alone, however, won't decide the contest. John Kerry and the Democrats outspent Mr. Bush and the GOP in 2004 by $121 million and still lost.
Mr. Obama's other strategy is to do all he can to look presidential, including buying very expensive half-hour slots to address the country next week. He wants to give a serious, Oval-Office type address. This is smart. People appreciate Mr. Obama's empathy on the economy, but as they take a long look at what he wants to do about it, they will be less impressed, especially if Mr. McCain draws sharp contrasts with clear policy proposals.
Mr. Obama is trying to make the case that his lack of experience or record should not disqualify him. But in doing so, he seems to recognize that the U.S. is still a center-right country. His TV ads promise tax cuts and his radio ads savage Mr. McCain's health-care plan as a tax increase. It's a startling campaign conversion for the most liberal member of the Senate. We'll know on Election Day if he is able to get away with it.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
Similarly, Mr. McCain appears to be making three important course corrections. First, he and Gov. Sarah Palin are sharpening their stump speeches so their sound bites come off well on TV. Gone are offhand remarks and awkward comments read from notes perched on a podium. In are teleprompters and carefully crafted arguments. Mr. McCain is also more at ease than before and has an ebullient, come-from-behind underdog optimism that will serve him well in the final weeks.
Second, Mr. McCain is shaping a story line that draws on well-founded concerns about Mr. Obama's lack of record or experience. Mr. McCain is also bowing to reality and devoting most of his time to the economy. His narrative is he's the conservative reformer who'll lead and work hard to get things done, while Mr. Obama is the tax-and-spend liberal who's unprepared to lead and unwilling to act.
Mr. McCain is hitting Mr. Obama for wanting to raise taxes in difficult economic times, especially on small business and for the purpose of redistributing income, and for having lavish spending plans at a time when the economy is faltering. He's criticizing Mr. Obama for lingering on the sidelines while Mr. McCain dove in to help pass a rescue plan, necessary no matter how distasteful. And he's attacking Mr. Obama for not joining the fight in 2005 when reformers like Mr. McCain tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Mr. McCain's other adjustment is his schedule. His campaign understands the dire circumstances it faces and is narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.
This task, while not impossible, will be difficult. By mid-September, the McCain camp was slightly ahead in the polls. Then came the financial crisis. The past month has taken an enormous toll on the McCain campaign.
Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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Is there any examples of International terrorism that was not done in the name of Islam ? I can only think of one Air India 1985, and even that you can conceivable argue was an internal affair Indian Sihk v. Indian Hindu).
anyways back to to election
Vince
Could you define "International Terrorism" please.
Acts of terrorism on foriegn soil to that of the the perpetrators. Basically acts of terrorism outside the conflict area.
For example:
To my knowledge the following well know terrorist groups have have never bombed in a land not in dispute in the name of there religion or cause:
Has ETA ( Basque separatist) ever commit acts of terrorism onside of Spain ?
Has Zapatist ever commit acts of terrorism outside of Mexico ?
Has IRA ever commit acts of terrorism outside of UK ?
Has the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) ever commit acts of terrorism outside of Sri Langka ?
The only example I can think of is (other than Islamic) is the bombing of Air India 182 (Montreal-London-Deli)in 1985 by Sihk extremist in the name of a Sihk homeland in India. Other than that, all acts of international terrorism are done in the name of Islam.
Vince
Sorry Crafty this response should probable be in another thread.
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No biggie, but if you want, do an Advanced Search for "Islam" and see what threads pop up-- maybe one of them will suit your purposes better than this one here.
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Thursday, October 16, 2008
JOHN MCCAIN, BARACK OBAMA, HORSERACE
Word From Obi Wan, Another Insider, and a Third Sign for Optimism
My mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, checked in, perhaps worried by this post, as a few other readers were. (Folks, I don't like sharing bad news, but what am I supposed to do when I hear it?)
Obi Wan was very positive about last night's debate.
"McCain won every question, looked like a leader and not the law professor that Obama looked like. McCain hit the themes of Joe the Plumber and big government as the basic difference and then hurt Obama's credibility on issue after issue.
The media types will try and take the win away. — they tried in 1980 to say Carter won or that the debate was a draw. But the voters thought otherwise. It may take more than a couple of days, but as people start making judgments and ending their mood swings, the numbers should really help McCain."
The second bit of good news for McCain is comes from a source in the Midwest, plugged into various GOP operations, who told me that “key metrics” in “bellweather areas” of Ohio are showing very favorable McCain numbers and that these indicators may also signal important metrics for Pennsylvania, esp. western Pennsylvania. This source has no illusions, and is worried about other states — the same ones you and I are worried about when we look at an Electoral College map — but those two states are looking surprisingly strong for McCain, with some evidence that the same folks who were skeptical of Obama in the Democratic primary are still not on board and may not ever be on board.
(Interestingly the Dayton Daily News released its own poll on Sunday showing McCain winning Ohio statewide by 2 percent.)
Finally, my third sign is a bit lighter, but interesting in measuring GOP enthusiasm for McCain, which I think had been waning in the past two weeks or so. I've got a reader who writes in regularity, reminding me that I am a gutless squish, that John McCain is just about indistinguishable from a Democrat, that it's up to real conservatives like him to keep fighting the good fight (which apparently consists mostly sending me e-mails reminding me that I am a gutless squish). He's never had a good word to say about John McCain that I can recall. And then, this morning, he writes:
IF, and that's a big if, McCain stays on the message that he had last night for the next two weeks, next year you won't even remember who "B.O." is.....for two reasons:
1. [Reagan Democrats] will not vote for a commie, liberal, anti-American, anti-military, anti-guns, baby killing, tax raising, al qaeda sleeper cell member from indonesia who pals around with and accepts $ from terrorists while his con men buddies in congress steal billions from the U.S. taxpayer.
2. Hillary Democrats do not want "BO" to win because "you know who" has only one more chance to become prez and that has to be in 4 years.
The undecided vote has increased and will break enough for McCain to put him over the top no matter what the [conservatives in name only] and liberals will be saying for the next two weeks.
(Lest there be any doubt, I remain unconvinced that Barack Obama is an al-Qaeda sleeper cell member.)
UPDATE: A fourth sign. Another state-level GOP guy I talk to regularly says that what he is seeing in internal polling lines up with the commentary you see in this RedState post, purportedly from an Obama campaign internal pollster, indicating that they are "very worried about how Palin appears to be energizing whole groups of people who don't typically get energized about politics, precisely because she appeals so strongly to the middle class, as well as women and dissatisfied republicans that stayed home in 2006."
http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmE1ODQyNWNjZjJkMTI3MzVlNTUzZjA0NTlkMjBmNTM=
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-eeWow_WU
Joe Biden: Ready to count?
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Shades of Dan Quayle :roll:
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Monday, October 20, 2008
HORSERACE
Obi Wan: 'Believe me, there is someone in the Obama campaign who is deathly afraid of the 'McCain pulls even or goes ahead' poll.'
My mentor - who goes by the nickname Obi Wan Kenobi - has reappeared again, and remains generally optimistic about McCain's chances. He felt the final debate had worked for McCain because he had finally found themes that he kept coming back to in answer after answer.
Obi-Wan particularly noted McCain's observation that Obama keeps saying he wants to "look at" drilling instead of doing it — implicitly raising the question of whether the most eloquent and melodious talker is better than a guy who actually gets things done. Even more importantly, the candidates spotlighted the clear and fundamental difference between the two on economics. Obama is clear that he will try to tax and spend his way out of a recession; McCain will cut both. Obama spoke to Joe the Plumber as if he was okay with raising taxes on those making $250,000, as if Obama presumed Joe thought he would never make $250,000.
Obi-Wan expected some sort of bump or goose for McCain after the debate, and thought we were seeing it with the Gallup poll's traditional model that had McCain only down by 2 percent. Today, that model now has Obama ahead by 5 percent. But just about every other tracking poll has shown a narrow Obama lead, too. (The RCP average has shrunk from 8.2 percent to 5.3 percent.)
Obi Wan is wondering about the timing of the Colin Powell endorsement, too. I had figured that Powell's nod would have been a bigger help to Obama earlier in the race - recall the rumors of Powell speaking at the Democratic Convention. Obi-Wan figures this was one of the best cards Obama had left to play, and he played it in the next-to-last weekend instead of the final weekend. He wonders if internal polling prompted the Obama camp to roll out Powell a bit earlier than planned.
"McCain had a very good week," he told me. "He looked presidential at Al Smith dinner and he had everybody talking Joe the Plumber and taxes the next few days. And the debate performance may have been as big as Kennedy in '60 — that important, because the undecideds were watching."
"We have just seen the greatest economic scare since the Great Depression and everybody is looking at polls as if they are business as usual. That's crazy."
I wondered aloud whether the media's day by day coverage could push people off those gut reactions - suspicion of "spreading the wealth around," relating to Joe the Plumber, etc.
"If so, the American people aren't the American people anymore," Obi Wan responded. "Believe me, there is someone in the Obama campaign who is deathly afraid of the 'McCain pulls even or goes ahead' poll." (And in Gallup, it was within 2 percent.) "That Obama strategist knows how much depends on the whole Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel approach —.work with the media to demoralize conservatives, and keep the perception of a juggernaut going. But a day or two of a few bad polls, and that strategy backfires. The conservatives know they've still got a shot at this."
10/20 06:10 PM
http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzU2MDg2MzVhY2EyY2U0NmFmODdmNmE4MTBmMTQ4ZTE=
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Biden's unintentionally candid comments today give McC a tremendous opening-- maybe even to the point of neutralizing or surpassing the foreign affairs credibility implied by the Powell endorsement.
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McCain Feingold and his very tepid support of the Second Amendment are two of the reasons I have a very hard time getting behind McCain. With that said, BHO has been turning campaign spending on its ear, with very little notice by the MSM.
Article follows:
October 22, 2008, 8:00 a.m.
Fake Donors, Phony Pledge
On campaign finance, Obama declared independence from his promises.
By David Freddoso
Starting in June, Barack Obama’s website stopped asking for donations. Instead, it began asking for citizens who would “declare their independence from a broken system by supporting the first presidential election truly funded by the people.”
Perhaps the campaign did not expect that among those “declaring their independence would be donors named “Doodad Pro,” “Derty Poiiuy,” and “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj.” (And you thought Barack Obama had a funny name.) They may not have known that at least four Missourians and one Virginian would declare their independence involuntarily and later find fraudulent donations to Obama’s campaign on their credit card statements. The Obama campaign cannot claim ignorance of “Good Will,” whose address is the Goodwill headquarters in Austin, and whose occupation is “Loving You.” The Goodwill office received a letter from Obama last month indicating that Mr. Will had exceeded the legal limit with his $7,000 in contributions, and asking whether part of the money could be directed to Obama’s general election campaign.
Such abuse of the system may just be the inevitable consequence of a political system driven by massive amounts of money — or at least, that’s what Barack Obama used to say, before he figured out how to use that system to his advantage.
Reporters now note dryly that Barack Obama promised to take public matching funds for the presidential election, which would have limited the amount he could spend, and that he then reneged on his promise in June. This narrative understates the case.
Obama actually went much farther than merely giving his word that he would accept matching funds. In February of 2007, he challenged all of the Republican candidates for president to pledge, along with him, that they would take matching funds. It was supposed to be a rare display of political courage on his part, for the sake of principles he believed in.
Sen. John McCain, who has long clashed with conservatives on issues of campaign finance, accepted Obama’s challenge on Obama’s terms. Obama would later write on a November 2007 questionnaire from the Midwest Democracy Network: “If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.” In February of this year, he wrote an op-ed stating again that he would “aggressively pursue” an agreement with McCain that would set “real spending limits.” He repeated this promise on FOX News on April 27.
Then, all of the sudden, Barack Obama announced in June that the public campaign-financing system was “broken” and so he could not participate in it. Presumably, someone went and broke the public campaign-financing system sometime between April and mid-June of this year.
Who did it? Barack Obama did. He broke the system as soon as it became clear to him that by rejecting public financing, he might be able to raise half a billion dollars and drown his opponent in money, as he is doing now.
It may all seem like a minor point now — just an occasion for a bit of Republican whining as Obama’s attack ads dominate the airwaves thanks to his broken promise. After all, Obama has raised quite a bit of money. But his donations from fake donors evoke the fake promise he made on principle just months ago to restrict campaign spending and limit the influence of special interests.
News reporters often assume, incorrectly, that the numbers in the FEC reports they scour each quarter are put on the Internet by magic. In fact, each one has to be recorded individually by a human being in what is really a painstaking process. This applies not only to the larger amounts contributed by Mr. Will and Mr. Jfggjjfgj, but also to amounts less than $200. A pair of human eyes has to check each one, even if amounts smaller than $200 are not required by law to be disclosed in any report.
Obama’s finance team missed quite a few obviously troubling large donations, from such unsavory individuals as Mr. Jfggjjfgj, “Mong Kong,” “Test Person,” and “Jockim Alberton,” who lives at a fictional address on a street that does not exist in Wilmington, Delaware. How many fictional characters might there be among the $220 million that Obama has collected in small, undisclosed contributions?
Obama’s small donors have all been recorded, and he could easily follow McCain’s lead by disclosing this major source of his campaign’s money. Hopefully the list of donors contains no one with Asdfjkl as a surname, and it bears no resemblance to an ACORN voter-registration list.
— David Freddoso is a staff reporter for National Review Online and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
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National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTllNTk2MDNmNDk1YmQ0OWEzOTZmMTVmODUwZTQwY2E=
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The increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008
If the prospect of Joe Biden sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency doesn’t give you palpitations, you are not paying attention.
Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance, and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness, and her intellect.
Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: Wear high heels, shoot caribou, and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.”
Team Obama is hammering John McCain as “erratic” in the closing days of the election campaign. There are now 615,000 Google hits and counting using the search terms “erratic McCain.” Last week, the New York Times devoted an entire article to the Obama-Biden line of attack, titled “In Friendly Region, Biden Cites McCain as Erratic.”
Who’s erratic? Throughout the primary and general election cycles, Biden has lurched from attacking Obama as not-ready-for-primetime (“The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training,” September 2007) to ready-to-lead (“Barack Obama is ready. This is his time,” August 2008) and back again. This week, Biden warned America that an Obama victory would invite a dangerous global showdown between tyrants and the naïf Obama. “Mark my words,” Biden said Sunday at a Democratic fund-raiser. “It will not be six months [after the inauguration] before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” In a follow-up appearance, he told followers to brace for the worst and “gird your loins.”
Out of Biden’s mouth, this is called candor. Out of anyone else’s mouth, it would be “fear-mongering,” “negative campaigning,” and a “distraction.”
Tooting his own horn while vandalizing his running mate’s, Biden bragged: “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know.” Yeah. Colleagues like that guy who had a mere 143 days of Senate experience before launching his presidential bid and choosing you to shore up his meager credibility, Joe.
In fact, Biden has spent the entire campaign questioning his running mate’s judgment. Last month, he mused out loud: “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more than I am to be vice president of the United States of America…She is easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me.” Biden assailed the campaign’s position on clean coal, openly criticized the campaign’s idiotic ad attacking John McCain for not using e-mail, and warned the pro-gun control Obama that “if he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem.”
Dan Quayle will have “POTATOE” etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden’s own spelling mishap last week while attacking John McCain’s economic plan?
“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.”
No, Joe. “D’-O-H” is a three-letter-word.
Nightly news shows still haven’t tired of replaying Sarah Palin’s infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Joe Biden’s botched interview with Couric last month – in which he cluelessly claimed: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
Er, here’s what really happened: Roosevelt wasn’t president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn’t available to the general public until at least ten years later.
During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Sarah Palin would never have been able to get away with: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” Biden said. “He has the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive — he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”
Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government – the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship – would know better.
Joe Biden’s erratic and gaffe-tastic behavior is the least of America’s worries. He’s worse than a blunderbuss. He’s an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He’s a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar, and wordly wise man. He’s a man who can’t control his impulses.
And he could be a heartbeat away. Now, back to your regularly scheduled Palin-says-“You Betcha” skit.
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My sister lives in Chicago and swoons for BO. Yesterday she expresssed concern about SP's readiness, especially on foreign affairs. I told her she was right, we'd much rather have a foreign affairs expert who knew that the US and France had driven the Hezbollah out of Lebanon. I agreed JB was an expert-- that's how he knew that BO will be tested. Had her sputtering-- very funny.
The big picture of course is anything but funny. It begins to look like McC is going to lose very badly-- no surprise considering his very badly run campaign and the badly dishonest media.
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WASHINGTON -- Sen. Barack Obama has opened up a double-digit lead in the presidential race, with a growing number of voters saying they're now comfortable with the Democratic nominee's values, background and ability to serve as commander in chief, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
New Poll: Data Drilldown
View Interactive
Review the demographic breakdown of voters backing each candidate.
Poll Results (PDF) | Poll ArchiveQuestion of the Day
Vote: At this point, do you think the presidential race is decided?For months, the race has rested largely on the question of whether voters could get comfortable with Sen. Obama, the first African-American to run on a major party ticket, and one who has been on the national political scene for just a few years. The Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, has worked to stoke concerns about Sen. Obama's past and his qualifications, raising questions about his rival's character and his association with 1960s-era radical William Ayers. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" Sen. McCain has asked at rallies. The new poll suggests that these attacks haven't worked.
Though most voters polled said that Sen. McCain is better prepared for the White House than the first-term senator from Illinois, there are increasing concerns about the readiness of Sen. McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
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Reuters
Sen. Obama places an order at a deli during a campaign stop in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Tuesday.
Overall, the poll found 52% of voters favor Sen. Obama versus 42% for Sen. McCain. That 10-point lead is up from a six-point Obama edge two weeks ago. The survey of registered voters, conducted from Friday to Monday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
It's the largest lead in the Journal/NBC poll thus far, and represents a steady climb for Sen. Obama since early September, when the political conventions concluded with the candidates in a statistical tie.
"Voters have reached a comfort level with Barack Obama," said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster who conducts the poll with Republican Neil Newhouse.
That comfort is reflected in the ground gained by Sen. Obama among some important voter groups in the weeks since the financial turmoil hit. The poll finds Sen. Obama now holds a 12-percentage-point advantage with independents, a group both sides have fiercely sought. Two weeks ago, Sen. Obama led this group by just four percentage points. In mid-September, independents favored Sen. McCain by 13 points.
Sen. Obama leads suburban voters by 12 percentage points, up from two points two weeks ago. He leads among older voters, those over 65 years old, by nine points, erasing a one-point McCain advantage from the last poll. And in the Midwest, home to a swath of battleground states, he is now favored by 25 points, up from a one-point advantage.
Some daily tracking polls have found a tighter race between Sens. McCain and Obama in recent days. Real Clear Politics, a Web site that averages major polls, shows Sen. Obama up by 7.2 percentage points. Others have found a larger spread, such as one released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a nonpartisan research group. That poll found a 14-point advantage for Sen. Obama among registered voters. Many polls also show Sen. McCain lagging in key battleground states, which hold the electoral votes that could decide the race.
Sen. Obama has also eaten into traditional Republican advantages, notably on taxes, despite Sen. McCain's attempts to make the issue a central economic theme of the campaign's closing days. In the mid-September Journal poll, Sen. McCain was favored 41% to 37% when voters were asked which candidate would be "better on taxes." This week's poll found Sen. Obama leading on the issue by 48% to 34%.
That may be partly due to Sen. Obama's argument that Sen. McCain would raise taxes on health-insurance benefits. While Sen. McCain's health plan does raise some taxes, the plan overall represents a net tax cut, according to independent estimates.
More Election Data
Electoral CalculatorNational, State PollsSen. McCain continues to pound Sen. Obama on taxes daily, adopting "Joe the Plumber" as his campaign's new everyman. Ohio voter Joe Wurzelbacher gained fame after challenging Sen. Obama on his tax plans at a campaign appearance earlier this month. Sen. McCain argues that Sen. Obama's willingness to "spread the wealth around" represents a brand of socialism. He suggests that vast numbers of Americans will see higher taxes, despite Sen. Obama's pledge not to raise them for families earning less than $250,000.
So far, voters don't seem to be persuaded by Sen. McCain's argument. A majority now disagree with the statement: "Barack Obama will raise taxes on middle-income people if he becomes president," with just 40% agreeing.
"Everyone knows Obama's only going to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000, and Joe the Plumber does not make more than $250,000," said Jeff Howard, a 20-year-old student from Bell, Ky., who told pollsters he was voting for Sen. Obama, and said he leans Democratic, but not strongly.
The Final Stretch
In the final stretch, Sen. McCain is also pressing his independence from President George W. Bush, whose job approval is at a record low in this poll. At last week's debate, Sen. McCain told Sen. Obama that he should have run four years ago if he wanted to challenge President Bush, a line he repeats on the trail. But the poll finds nearly six in 10 voters believe Sen. McCain's direction, agenda and policies would be mostly the same as President Bush's, down just slightly from those who said so a month ago.
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AFP/Getty Images
Sen. Barack Obama has gained with independents, suburbanites and older voters to increase his lead on Sen. John McCain in new polling.
It's a tough year to run as a Republican after eight years of Mr. Bush, said David Axelrod, Sen. Obama's chief strategist. "They're just on the wrong side of history," he said in an interview. "In an election that's all about change he simply doesn't represent it."
Sarah Simmons, the McCain campaign's director of strategy, said, "The environment is challenging, no doubt about it," but added that Sen. Obama has yet to take a lead big enough to ensure a win. Ms. Simmons said Sen. McCain is still viewed favorably by most voters. "That's a good sign for us that this race is far from over," she said.
Sen. Obama appears to be clearing some important thresholds with the electorate. Forty-eight percent of voters now say they would have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in Sen. Obama as commander in chief. That's up from 39%, in August, and just two points shy of Sen. McCain's standing.
Similarly, in July, 47% of all voters said that Sen. Obama had a background and set of values that they could identify with. That figure is now 55% -- just two points shy of Sen. McCain.
"At first, I didn't know who he [Obama] was, and I knew who McCain was, and in that respect, I was leaning toward McCain," said Judy Callanan, 58, of Tuscarora, Md., a payroll manager and registered independent, who told the pollsters she was backing Sen. Obama. "But just listening to Obama talk, he was much more down-to-earth and talked more about things I could relate to."
In a Positive Light
Forty-four percent of voters see Sen. McCain in a positive light, about the same as the last poll two weeks ago. But views of Sen. Obama have grown stronger, with 56% now reporting very or somewhat positive feelings about him.
The one candidate whose popularity has fallen is Gov. Palin: 38% see her positively, down from 44% two weeks ago; 47% see her negatively, up 10 points from the last poll. That's the highest negative rating of the four candidates. Fifty-five percent of voters say Gov. Palin is not qualified to be president if the need arises, up from 50% two weeks ago.
For his part, Sen. McCain holds a distinct edge on the question of experience needed to be an effective president. Asked which candidate is better on knowledge and experience needed to handle the job, 49% picked Sen. McCain and just 27% picked Sen. Obama.
The McCain campaign says it plans to continue pressing the experience question. "There is lingering doubt -- is he ready?" Mike DuHaime, the campaign's political director, said Tuesday.
Independent voters still harbor concerns about Sen. Obama's experience and readiness for the job, Mr. Newhouse, the Republican pollster, noted. But he said these voters have reservations about Gov. Palin's readiness, complicating any effort by the McCain campaign to focus on this issue.
"I don't think Palin is ready to take that office," said Lois Peterson, 83, of St. Peter, Minn., an independent who now favors Sen. Obama. "She doesn't seem very professional."
That point was underscored on Sunday when retired Gen. Colin Powell endorsed Sen. Obama, citing, in part, his concerns about Gov. Palin's readiness.
Nineteen percent of voters polled on Sunday and Monday -- halfway through the total polling period -- said the Powell endorsement made them more inclined to support Sen. Obama. The results from this question have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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Doylestown, Pa.
The Barack Obama campaign occupies a storefront on N. Main Street across from the county courthouse. A stream of people filters through to pick up buttons or leaflets. The bulletin board lists a dozen staffers in this office and another in Bristol.
APNow try to find a John McCain outpost in Bucks County. Armed with an address, you'd get an unmarked, low, stand-alone office building on a four-lane state highway 15 minutes' drive from here. On the front door a small sign directs visitors to the McCain campaign around the corner and down the stairs to the basement. Two volunteers man phones, McCain posters or signs aren't readily available. Three paid staffers direct the Republican's campaign from a single office in this critical battleground.
Mr. McCain probably can't win the election without Pennsylvania. And both campaigns think it will be decided in the four "collar counties" around Philadelphia. Of them, Bucks (pop. 625,000) is a microcosm of the state. Rural northern "upper Bucks" is socially conservative, clinging -- as Mr. Obama famously said this year -- to guns and religion; the center around Doylestown is fiscally conservative and socially liberal, once dominated by Republican "moderates"; and "lower" Bucks around Bristol is blue-collar, formerly industrial, depressed, and tends to vote Democratic.
The "maverick" John McCain was supposed to play well with the independents and middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans in places like Bucks County. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Obama by 34 points here, and carried 60 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties. President Bush did miserably in the Philly suburbs in 2004, yet lost the state by a mere 2.5 points. To make this state red, the McCain camp figured: Start with the burbs. "We don't need to turn collar counties. We need to do better than W. did," says Jon Seaton, the McCain campaign manager for Ohio and Pennsylvania.
It hasn't gone Mr. McCain's way. As Wall Street tumbled, Barack Obama expanded a two point lead into double digits -- 10.5 points as of yesterday, according to RealClearPolitics. The one available poll on suburban Philadelphia showed the Democrat up comfortably in all four counties.
McCain strategists insist Pennsylvania votes close and polls will tighten. Mr. McCain appeared at three rallies in the state Tuesday, beginning at a paper mill in Bensalem, down the road from Doylestown. He was in the suburbs twice last week. His wife Cindy campaigned for him in Bucks County on Monday.
Having opted out of public financing, Mr. Obama's money edge (a record $618 million raised so far) enables him to run a better-staffed and more vibrant ground organization as well as dominate the air waves. At rallies McCain surrogates insist that "the state isn't for sale." But the Democrats have registered over 200,000 voters since June 1. Their lead over Republicans statewide is 1.2 million, double the gap in 2004. This election "saw the biggest switch ever" from one party to another in Pennsylvania, says pollster Michael Young.
The political winds were changing before the Obama juggernaut came along. Within living memory, the "collar" counties were rock-solid Republican. No more. In 2006, Chester elected its first Democrat to Congress in 82 years, and Democrats are gaining strength in Delaware County. In the past year Montgomery and Bucks counties flipped, with registered Democrats now outnumbering Republicans.
You see the consequences first at the local level. Five years ago in Doylestown, the mayor and all nine borough councilmen were Republicans. Now the mayor and six councilmen are Democrats. A watershed came in the 2006 elections when Patrick Murphy, who served in Iraq, ended a decade-long reign of moderate Republicans in the 8th Congressional district, which covers all of Bucks County. Doing his campaign rounds in Bristol, Mr. Murphy, 35 and married to a Republican, says, "People here were Rockefeller Republicans, not Bush Republicans. Now they're Blue Dog Democrats," adding, "I'm a veteran, I'm a gun owner."
Some say the Bush era's profligate spending, wars and social conservatism alienated the Republican moderates. Pat Poprik, the Bucks County Republican chairman, offers another explanation: Newcomers from New York and Philadelphia brought their liberal politics.
Whether it is Bucks County or the national Republican Party that's changed, the GOP's problems here predated John McCain and will outlive him. Pollster Terry Madonna and Mr. Young think that 2008 may be "Pennsylvania's last hurrah" as a swing state. If it turns solid blue, "such a shift would have enormous political implications, radically altering future Electoral College maps, thereby making it ever more difficult for the GOP to win national elections," they wrote this month.
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
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"such a shift would have enormous political implications, radically altering future Electoral College maps, thereby making it ever more difficult for the GOP to win national elections,"
A good friend of mine is a professor of American history, and predicted 2 years ago that the party that loses this election is done in American politics. He foresees fractures among their base voters, more politicians turning true "independents", and the formation of two or more viable independent parties.
I'm starting to think he may be right. That's why I find the Obama "CHANGE" slogan to be a bit prophetic. We are going to see a massive change in American politics if he wins or loses.
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I'm pretty disgusted with the RNC, and I see no other party I can align myself with. I'd like to see a "Let's preserve what's left of western civilization" party.
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Fred Thompson sums things up:
http://www.fredpac.com/index.aspx
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I'd like to see a "Let's preserve what's left of western civilization" party.
:-D
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Commentary: Candidates should seek votes of Muslim-Americans
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Nafees Syed: Candidates are courting voters like Joe the Plumber
Syed: They should reach out to Muslim-Americans, who feel shunned
Obama may not be Muslim, but he should campaign for their votes, she says
Syed: I applaud Gen. Colin Powell for recognizing we are Americans, too
By Nafees A. Syed
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Nafees A. Syed, a junior at Harvard University majoring in government, is an editorial editor at The Harvard Crimson as well as a senior editor and columnist for the Harvard-MIT journal on Islam and society, Ascent. She is chairwoman of the Harvard Institute of Politics Policy Group on Racial Profiling. She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
Harvard University student Nafees Syed says both candidates should reach out to Muslims in the U.S.
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) -- During this election, we have seen the spectacle of two presidential candidates fighting over one voter while snubbing an entire segment of the American population worthy of their attention.
We in the Muslim-American community look wistfully at people like Joe the Plumber, wishing that we too could be courted for our vote by the presidential candidates.
At the same time, we look gratefully at figures like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who reassure us that there is hope for greater acceptance of Muslim-Americans.
Over time, we grew to expect standoffish treatment from the Republican Party. Almost a decade ago, many Muslims, my parents included, supported President Bush for his humble foreign policy stances, strong family values and reaching out to the Muslim-American community.
Things have obviously changed since September 11, 2001, and we have grown used to anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republican candidates. We have run like refugees to the Democratic Party, only to find reluctant tolerance and hope that we will go somewhere else.
American civil rights activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "[The American Negro] simply wishes it possible to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly on his face."
Over a century later, I and many other Muslim-Americans feel the same, hoping that we can be accepted in America as both Muslims and Americans.
As a college student voting in my first presidential election, I have been inspired by Barack Obama's call for change. My campus is full of Obama posters, and several of my classmates have taken time off to work for his campaign.
Don't Miss
Muslim-American voices heard in campaign
Commentary: So what if Obama were a Muslim?
In Depth: Commentaries
There is no doubt Obama has the Harvard vote, but my vote will not be cast as enthusiastically as others.
This campaign means to me what it means for my classmates. In the next few years, the economy and American foreign policy will affect my generation unlike any other, and those concerns are the primary influences on my vote.
However, as a Muslim-American, I see some issues as more personal. I don't blame Obama for clarifying that he isn't a Muslim; if someone misidentified my religion, I would likewise point out the facts, especially if it was part of a larger smear campaign. However, as the first Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison stated, "A lot of us are waiting for him to say that there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim, by the way."
Indeed, Obama's responses to accusations that he is Muslim should be more than just denial; they should be a condemnation of the prejudices that lace such accusations.
When I discuss this issue with fellow Muslim-Americans, especially ones who have dedicated significant time to his campaign, I immediately hear that he's just doing what he needs to do to win.
I respond skeptically to these arguments. Is it really politically necessary for Obama to avoid visiting mosques -- something that President Bush has dared to do -- while rallying support from churches and synagogues? Doesn't his careful distance from the Muslim-American community contradict his message of unity?
Still, others, my parents included, advise that it is best that we as Muslim-Americans avoid marring his campaign with our visible support at a time when any connection with Muslims would jeopardize his chances of winning. They reason that we have to politically isolate ourselves for the better candidate to win, a sacrifice we should make for our country.
I am unwilling to feign political apathy. All I want is for one of the candidates to assure me and the American public that "Muslim" and "American" are not mutually exclusive terms.
Colin Powell's recent interview with Tom Brokaw has left me with some hope. He highlights the flaw in the question of Obama's religion with the answer, "he is not a Muslim; he's a Christian. ... But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America."
To prove his point, Gen. Powell recounted the story of Purple Heart- and Bronze Star-winning Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, an American soldier in Iraq who sacrificed his life for his country. He represents a Muslim-American community that is dedicated to its country and worthy of the presidential candidates' attention and respect.
It is a tribute to Gen. Powell's own dedication to his country that he would take note of the treatment of Muslim-Americans during the elections.
Thanks, Gen. Powell. You said the words that Muslim-Americans around the country were waiting to hear.
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www.DiscoverTheNetworks.org Date: 10/24/2008 7:15:47 PM
KEITH ELLISON
Has Ties to Nation of Islam
Swore Oath of Allegiance to Allah on the Koran
At this particular time in history, it is a matter of note that Congress is about to receive its first Muslim member. Keith Ellison, currently a Minnesota state representative, is poised to succeed 14-term incumbent Democrat Martin Sabo in the Fifth District, which includes the city of Minneapolis. Ellison's endorsement by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is tantamount to his election in what is one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. Thus, at age 43, Ellison stands positioned not only to win that office but also to hold it as long as he chooses.
Ellison's Muslim faith has generated no controversy in the campaign. On the contrary, it has served to insulate aspects of his public record from close scrutiny in a city whose dominant news organ, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is a paragon of political correctness. With the exception of columnist Katherine Kersten, the Star Tribune has scrupulously avoided examining Ellison's long train of troubling associations, foremost among them his ties to the Nation of Islam.
Ellison's record also includes a multitude of embarrassments of the traditional kind. He fell afoul of the IRS after failing to pay $25,000 in income taxes; he ignored fines that he had incurred for parking tickets and moving violations so numerous that his driver's license was suspended more times than he can remember; he was fined for willful violation of Minnesota's campaign finance reporting law. It amounts to a striking pattern of lawbreaking since he undertook the practice of law in 1990.
But it was the link to the Nation of Islam that stood as the most serious impediment to Ellison's primary campaign. He addressed it in a letter to the local chapter of the Jewish Community Relations Council following his endorsement by the DFL in May. In the letter, Ellison asserted that his involvement with the Nation of Islam had been limited to an 18-month period around the time of the Million Man March in 1995, that he had been unfamiliar with the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic views during his in volvement with the group, and that he himself had never expressed such views. The Star Tribune has faithfully parroted these assertions as facts.
As a result, the three assertions have become the cornerstone of Ellison's campaign, securing him the support of prominent Minneapolis Jews and the endorsement of the Minneapolis-based American Jewish World newsweekly. Nevertheless, a little research reveals each one of them to be demonstrably false. Ellison's activities on behalf of the Nation of Islam continued well beyond any 18-month period, he was familiar with the Nation of Islam's anti-Semitic views, and he himself mouthed those views.
Ellison was born Catholic in Detroit. He states that he converted to Islam as an undergraduate at Wayne State University. As a third-year student at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1989-90, he wrote two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name "Keith Hakim." In the first, Ellison refers to "Minister Louis Farrakhan," defends Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and speaks in the voice of a Nation of Islam advocate. In the second, "Hakim" demands reparations for slavery and throws in a demand for an optional separate homeland for American blacks. In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) to speak at the law school on the subject "Zionism: Imperialism, White Supremacy or Both?" Jewish law students met personally with Ellison and appealed to him not to sponsor the speech at the law school; he rejected their appeal, and, as anticipated, Ture gave a notoriously anti-Semitic speech.
Ellison admits that he worked on behalf of the Nation of Islam in 1995. At a rally for the Million Man March held at the University of Minnesota, Ellison appeared onstage with Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who ran true to form: According to a contemporaneous Star Tribune article, "If words were swords, the chests of Jews, gays and whites would be pierced."
Even in 1995, Ellison's work on behalf of the Nation of Islam extended well beyond his promotion of the Million Man March. That year, he dutifully spouted the Farrakhan line when Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, was indicted for conspiring to murder Farrakhan. Ellison organized a march on the U.S. attorney's office in Minneapolis demanding that Shabazz be released and alleging that the FBI itself had conspired to kill Farrakhan. In a November 6, 1995, column for the Minneapolis periodical Insight News, Ellison wrote under the name "Keith X Ellison." He condemned a Star Tribune editorial cartoon that was critical of Farrakhan as a role model for blacks because of his anti-Semitism. Ellison argued to the contrary.
Then, in February 1997, Ellison appeared as a local spokesman for the Nation of Islam with the last name "Muhammad." He spoke at a public hearing in connection with a controversy involving Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism (MIAR). Jackson was alleged to have said, "Jews are among the most racist white people I know." Jackson denied making the statement or insisted that it had been taken out of context. Ellison appeared before the MIAR on behalf of the Nation of Islam in defense of Jackson's alleged statement. According to the Star Tribune and the full text of the statement published in the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder, Elli son said:
We stand by the truth contained in the remarks attributed to [Ms. Jackson], and by her right to express her views without sanction. Here is why we support Ms. Jackson: She is correct about Minister Farrakhan. He is not a racist. He is also not an anti-Semite. Minister Farrakhan is a tireless public servant of Black people, who constantly teaches self-reliance and self-examination to the Black community. . . . Also, it is absolutely true that merchants in Black areas generally treat Black customers badly.
The last sentence alluded to another of Jackson's alleged statements, providing a personal basis for characterizing Jews as "the most racist white people" she knew. Ellison's May 28 letter acknowledges only that others supported Jackson's alleged statement in that controversy while falsely denying that he himself did so.
Ellison first emerged as a candidate for public office in 1998, when he ran for the DFL nomination for state representative as "Keith Ellison-Muhammad." In a contemporaneous article on his candidacy in the Insight News, Ellison is reported still defending Louis Farrakhan:
Anticipating possible criticism for his NOI affiliation, Ellison-Muhammad says he is aware that not everyone appreciates what the Nation does and feels there is a propaganda war being launched against its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Ellison says now that he broke with the Nation of Islam when "it became clear to me that their message of empowerment intertwined with more negative messages." However, Ellison himself was the purveyor of the Nation of Islam's noxious party line in his every public utterance touching on related issues over the course of a decade. Moreover, Ellison's unsavory associations were not limited to the Nation of Islam.
Perhaps the lowest moment in Minneapolis's history was the September 1992 execution-style murder of police officer Jerry Haaf. Haaf was shot in the back as he took a coffee break at a restaurant in south Minneapolis. The murder was a gang hit performed by four members of the city's Vice Lords gang. The leader of the Vice Lords was Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison and who sought respectability as a responsible gang leader from gullible municipal authorities while operating a gang front called United for Peace.
The four Vice Lords members who murdered Haaf met and planned the murder at Willis's house. Two witnesses at the trial of one of the men convicted of Haaf's murder implicated Willis in the planning. Willis was never charged; law enforcement authorities said they lacked sufficient evidence to convict him.
Within a month of Haaf's murder, Ellison appeared with Willis supporting the United for Peace gang front. In October 1992, Ellison helped organize a demonstration against Minneapolis police that included United for Peace. "The main point of our rally is to support United for Peace [in its fight against] the campaign of slander the police federation has been waging," said Ellison.
Willis was the last speaker at the demonstration. According to a contemporaneous report in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Willis told the crowd that Minneapolis police were experiencing the same fear from young black men that blacks had felt from police for many years. "If the police have some fear, I understand that fear," Willis said. "We seem to have an overabundance of bad police. . . . [W]e're going to get rid of them," Willis said. "They've got to go." The Pioneer Press account concludes with Ellison's contribution to the demonstration: "Ellison told the crowd that the police union is systematically frightening whites in order to get more police officers hired. That way, Ellison said, the union can increase its power base."
Ellison publicly supported the Haaf murder defendants. In February 1993, he spoke at a demonstration for one of them during his trial. Ellison led the crowd assembled at the courthouse in a chant that was ominous in the context of Haaf's cold-blooded murder: "We don't get no justice, you don't get no peace." Ellison's working relationship with Sharif Willis came to an end in February 1995, when Willis was convicted in federal court on several counts of drug and gun-related crimes and sent back to prison for 20 years.
The various themes of Ellison's public commitments and associations all came together in a February 2000 speech he gave at a fundraising event sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the far-left National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he had served. The event was a fundraiser for former Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah after her apprehension in St. Paul (under the name "Sara Jane Olson") for the attempted murder of Los Angeles police officers in 1975.
Ellison weirdly referred to Soliah/ Olson as a "black gang member" (she is white) and thus a victim of government persecution. He described her as one of those who had been "fighting for freedom in the '60s and '70s" and called for her release. (She subsequently pleaded guilty to charges in Los Angeles and to an additional murder charge in Sacramento; she is serving time in California.) Still toeing the Nation of Islam line, he recalled "Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, [who] was prosecuted in retribution against Minister Farrakhan." He also spoke favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur. (Shakur has been on the lam in Cuba since 1984; last year she was placed on the FBI's domestic terrorists list with a one million dollar reward for her capture.)
Having spoken out over many years as an advocate of the Nation of Islam under guises including Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison, and Keith Ellison-Muhammad, Ellison might reasonably prompt Fifth District voters to wonder where he really stands. His recent account of the nature and extent of his relationship with the Nation of Islam cannot be squared with the public record. During his congressional campaign, Ellison has nevertheless held himself out as a friend of the Jewish people and of Israel. As if to shore up his identity as a Muslim activist, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad, flew to Minneapolis to appear as a featured guest (along with Ellison himself and Guantánamo chaplain James Yee) at an Ellison fundraiser in suburban Minneapolis on August 25. Awad is notable, among other things, for his past expressions of support for Hamas.
The Star Tribune didn't get around to reporting on the fundraiser until several days after Ellison won the September 12 primary. Ellison commented to the Star Tribune regarding issues raised by Awad's attendance at the fundraiser: "The Republicans are in a tough position. Iraq is a failed policy. They haven't done much for homeland security. We still have a health care crisis. The Earth is warming up, and they're not doing anything about it. What else are they going to do? They have to try to engage in smear politics."
Unfortunately, it won't be necessary for Ellison to come up with a more compelling response than that before he makes news in November as America's first Muslim congressman.
Ellison is a supporter of the Muslim American Society, at whose Fourth Annual Convention he spoke in May 2007. On June 16, 2007, Ellison was a featured speaker at the First Annual Banquet of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Minnesota chapter.
Most of this profile first appeared as an article titled "Louis Farrakhan's First Congressman," written by Scott W. Johnson and published by The Weekly Standard on October 9, 2006. It is reprinted here, with permission.
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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/020610/archive_021602.htm
Made in the U.S.A.
Hundreds of Americans have followed the path to jihad. Here's how and why
By David E. Kaplan
Posted 6/2/02
Fifteen thousand feet high in Kashmir and armed with a Kalashnikov--that was not how friends thought Jibreel al-Amreekee would end up. All of 19, the restless kid from Atlanta had grown up in a wealthy family attending Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. A soft-spoken youth with long dreadlocks, al-Amreekee had a passion for sky diving and reading books on the world's religions.
One religion that drew his interest was Islam, and while he was at North Carolina Central University, that interest grew into a calling. By 1997, he had converted and was spending his time at the modest Ibad-ar-Rahman mosque in Durham, where African-Americans mixed easily with immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan. He fell in with a group of fundamentalists who preached of how fellow Muslims were being slaughtered overseas and how jihad--holy war--was every Muslim's obligation. For al-Amreekee, it came as a revelation. He dropped out of school, read the Koran daily, fasted, and prepared for combat overseas. "He was into it, man," recalled a friend, Jaleel Abdullah Musawwir. "You know, Islam says when you get into something you go full ahead, and that's the way he did it."
In late 1997, al-Amreekee took off for Kashmir, where India and Pakistan have clashed for decades. Through friends in Durham, he hooked up with Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Righteous Army), a now banned militia blamed for December's terrorist attack on the Indian parliament. Lashkar leaders, closely allied with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, have announced plans to "plant Islamic flags in Delhi, Tel Aviv, and Washington."
After training at a Lashkar base in Pakistan, al-Amreekee got his chance: His unit began ambushing Indian troops in Kashmir. But the American didn't last long. After just 2 1/2 months as a jihadist, he was dead--killed while attacking an Indian Army post. "He got what he wanted," said Abdullah Ramadawn, a friend and fellow Georgian who used to drive him home after prayers. "He always said he wanted to be a martyr."
Americans are accustomed to thinking of the jihad movement as something overseas, inspired among the faithful in spartan Pakistani schools and gleaming Saudi mosques. But there is also an American road to jihad, one taken by true believers like al-Amreekee and hundreds of others. For 20 years--long before "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh--American jihadists have ventured overseas to attack those they believe threaten Islam. It is a little-known story.
They have left behind comfortable homes in Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco, volunteering to fight with foreign armies in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Their numbers are far greater than is commonly thought: Between 1,000 and 2,000 jihadists left America during the 1990s alone, estimates Bob Blitzer, a former FBI terrorism chief who headed the bureau's first Islamic terrorism squad in 1994. Federal agents monitored some 40 to 50 jihadists leaving each year from just two New York mosques during the mid-'90s, he says. Pakistani intelligence sources say that Blitzer's figures are credible and that as many as 400 recruits from America have received training in Pakistani and Afghan jihad camps since 1989. Scores more ventured overseas during the 1980s, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
U.S. News traced reports of more than three dozen American jihadists, many of them previously unknown. Unlike the 9/11 hijackers, who spent only months here, many are U.S. citizens, native born or naturalized. Most put down roots here, attended schools, ran businesses, and raised families. A majority appear to be Arab-Americans--Egyptian, Saudi, and Palestinian immigrants--or fellow Muslims from lands as far afield as Sudan and Pakistan. But a fair number are African-Americans, who make up nearly one third of the nation's Muslims. Still others are as varied as Lindh, a wealthy white kid from California's Marin County, or Hiram Torres, a Puerto Rican convert from New Jersey.
No records. Surprisingly--despite the key role some have played in terrorism --investigators have never tracked them as a group. Immigration agents keep no records on foreign travel by U.S. citizens and resident aliens. FBI and CIA officials say that fear of political spying charges has kept them from monitoring suspicious trips by U.S. citizens abroad. Nor does the State Department have files. "Why would we keep records?" asks one official. "These are people who are dropping out of U.S. society." With few such records, government files on al Qaeda backers here were woefully incomplete. Thus, after September 11, most of the 1,200 suspects arrested were found by combing immigration rolls for persons out of compliance--not by tracking those with jihadist ties or training in the jihadist military camps of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Those camps--once run freely by bin Laden and his allies--are the connective tissue binding together the international jihadist movement. To date, the United States and its allies have captured al Qaeda fighters from no fewer than 33 countries, including Australia, Belgium, and Sweden. Only two "American Taliban" are in custody: Lindh and Yasser Esam Hamdi, a Baton Rouge-born 22-year-old who spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia. But some counterterrorism officials are convinced dozens more remain active, including several who may play key roles within bin Laden's network. Their trails are difficult to track; dual citizenship and false passports are common, and they typically have Arabic names, either given or adopted, with multiple spellings. "God knows where the hell they are, because we never found them," says Blitzer. "It's always been a potential time bomb."
They are, to be sure, a tiny minority of the nation's 4 million Muslims. Law enforcement officials stress they see no evidence of a tightly organized "fifth column" among America's diverse Muslim communities. And many jihadists have fought in struggles that the United States either supported or was neutral in--against the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, for example, or against ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In fact, Americans have long fought in other nations' wars. Such actions may violate the Neutrality Act--which bans fighting against nations with which America is at peace--but the law is rarely enforced. During the late 1930s, for example, nearly 3,000 Americans fought the fascists in Spain's civil war.
But the international jihad movement is different, analysts say. It has become virulently anti-American, anti-Western, and steeped in the kind of absolutist religious fervor that is the hallmark of bin Laden's al Qaeda network. In that, American holy warriors resemble their brethren overseas: They tend to be young, smart, and motivated, often introverted and detached, and ready to risk life and limb. "These are the true believers," says Howard University's Sulayman Nyang, author of Islam in the United States of America. "You feel you are an instrument of God, or part of a historical force."
Call to war. Jihad--literally, "struggle" in Arabic--can also mean one's private spiritual quest. But today it is widely used to connote holy war. And for many, that journey begins in the mosques and Islamic centers of America. There young Muslims may hear imams full of fire and brimstone sermonizing on the persecution of Muslims abroad. They may be handed videos depicting a Muslim world under siege, filled with images of bloodied and broken corpses. Those same images beckon online. Since the mid-1990s, Web sites have spread the call to holy war at cyberspeed. Links like almuhaji roun.com and azzam.com now bring the faithful to harrowing displays of refugees and martyrs in faraway lands. In 2000, a Chechen jihadist Web site, www.qoqaz.net, directed recruits to network quietly: "Anyone interested in going to fight . . . should contact members of their own communities and countries who are known to have been for Jihad. You will know these people and they will know you."
Others proselytize less subtly. For years, the San Diego-based American Islamic Group sent its Islam Report to Internet news groups with its bank account listed. "Supporting Jihad is an Islamic obligation," read one report. Included were communiques from Algeria's terrorist Armed Islamic Group and war reports from Bosnia and Chechnya. In a 1995 Internet posting titled "First American Martyr in Chechnya," the group mourned the loss of Mohammad Zaki, an American killed in Chechnya that year. Zaki was a Washington, D.C., native who ran the group's Chechnya relief effort, his colleagues wrote. The father of four, he reportedly died in a Russian air attack while delivering aid to Chechen villages. U.S. and Russian officials in Moscow have no record of Zaki's death. (Kifah Jayyousi, who was then the San Diego group's head and later facilities chief for the Detroit and Washington, D.C., school districts, could not be located for comment.)
Some jihadists become radicalized overseas, as did Lindh. In the past 25 years, Saudi and Pakistani groups have targeted African-American Muslims, in particular, offering scholarships to study Islam and Arabic in their countries, according to Prof. Lawrence Mamiya, an expert on Islam at New York's Vassar College. "The first step is education, and then they're recruited by more militant groups," he says. "Being in those countries, they come across the oppression those people confront."
New recruits. Once recruited, the jihadists all but disappear. A rare window opened on their world at last year's trial of U.S. Embassy bombers, in which a half-dozen names surfaced of Americans allegedly tied to al Qaeda. Wadih el-Hage, an Arlington, Texas, tire store manager and top bin Laden aide, got some media attention, but others passed unnoticed. There was Mubarak al-Duri, an Iraqi native living in Arizona, who officials say worked with bin Laden's firms in Sudan; Mohamed Bayazid, a Syrian-American who allegedly bought weapons and uranium for al Qaeda; and Abu Osama, an Egyptian-American said to have trained al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Government witness L'Houssaine Kherchtou testified to knowing "some black Americans" who he believed were al Qaeda associates in Sudan and Pakistan. Perhaps most intriguing were accounts of Abu Malik, a martial arts expert from New York who allegedly fought in Afghanistan and later turned up at al Qaeda's headquarters in Sudan.
U.S. News gained access to records of other American jihadists from some of Pakistan's best-known Islamic schools. There are thousands of these madrasahs, as they are known, and they provided tens of thousands of recruits to the Taliban. One of the most influential, the Haqqania school outside Peshawar, graduated much of the Taliban's senior leadership--along with at least nine Americans. The records are sketchy. In most cases, they list only the student's Arabic name, ethnicity, and home country. In 1995, seven Arab-Americans enrolled in the school, among them Zaid Bin Tufail of North Carolina, Zahid Al-Shafi of Texas, and Ahmed Abi-Bakr of Washington, D.C. All received military training and fought with Taliban units in their drive to unite the country, school officials say. Other students included two African-Americans: a "Dr. Bernard" from New York, who arrived in 1997, and "Abdullah," whose parents left their native Barbados and settled in Michigan; he, too, joined the Taliban and was reported "martyred" near Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 or 2000. None of them, however, shows up in checks of U.S. public records.
Records at another madrasah, the Tajweed-ul-Koran in Quetta, show that three Americans studied there in 1996. Two were African-American--"Omar" and Farooq" are the only names listed in the register--and school officials described the third, "Haidar," as a tall, white fellow, about 25, "with a strong build and small golden beard." The foreigners, they say, left for military training with the Taliban in Kandahar. At another pro-Taliban school in Quetta, the Jamia Hammadia, workers recall a 25-year-old American student from Chicago--Abu Bakar al-Faisal--who arrived in 1995 and died while soldiering with the Taliban in 1999. Al-Faisal, they say, had broken with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam before coming to Afghanistan. Even sketchier records exist at the Jamia Abi-Bakr school in Karachi, where officials say about a dozen African-Americans studied. The madrasah is linked closely to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Kashmir militia Jibreel al-Amreekee joined.
The best-known American jihadist--John Walker Lindh--attended yet another madrasah. The alienated Lindh, a lawyer's son, discovered Islam online and, like many jihadists, later fell in with Tablighi Jamaat, a Pakistani evangelical group. Although not itself linked to terrorism, Tablighi's radical preaching is thought to have influenced several British citizens now held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo, as well as suspected shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Rocket grenades. Through Tablighi, Lindh ended up at his Pakistani madrasah. At age 19, he finished six months of studies at the pro-Taliban school. His next stop was Harakat ul-Mujahideen--the Jihad Fighters Movement--another Kashmir-focused militia tied to hijackings, kidnappings, and bin Laden's terrorist network. In mid-2001, armed with a Harakat letter of introduction, Lindh presented himself to al Qaeda, where he trained with explosives and rocket-propelled grenades, U.S. officials say. Captured in November and then wounded in a revolt, Lindh stayed true to his views, insisting that martyrdom is "the goal of every Muslim." Today, his hair cut and beard shorn, he sits in an Alexandria, Va., jail, facing charges of murder and terrorism. His attorneys argue he is innocent; they say Lindh never fired on Americans and has constitutional rights to bear arms and associate with radicals like al Qaeda.
Harakat ul-Mujahideen seems to be a favored home for traveling jihadists. Earlier this year, an apparent list of recruits surfaced in a Harakat safe house, bearing the name Hiram Torres--a Puerto Rican from New Jersey missing for years. In 1995, Harakat officials claimed they were hosting several hundred foreign Muslims at their training camps, including 16 Americans. That year, at Harakat offices in Lahore, Pakistan, two Saudis boasted of their own American backgrounds to a reporter. In smooth English, Muhammad Al-Jabeer claimed to be from Chicago, where he'd studied for an M.B.A. His friend, Ahmed Usaid, said he hailed from New Jersey and held a B.S. in computer science. Usaid, Harakat sources say, died in battle near Mazar-e Sharif in 1999 and was buried in Afghanistan.
One well-trod route to jihad leads through London, a city so popular among radical Islamists that some call it Londonistan. This was the apparent path taken by New Yorker Mohammad Junaid. The grandson of Pakistani immigrants, the 26-year-old Junaid surfaced in Pakistan last October, vowing to kill fellow Americans on sight. Sounding much like a New Yorker, Junaid claimed to have grown up listening to Whitney Houston and riding roller coasters. The stocky, spectacled Junaid said he'd left a dot-com job in midtown Manhattan, but even more striking was the claim that his own mother escaped from the ninth floor of the World Trade Center.
None of that lessened his rage at America, which stemmed, he said, from racist taunts at his Bronx high school. At college, Junaid read of how Muslims were under attack worldwide; he later linked up with the London-based al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants). The group is believed to have sent hundreds of foreign jihadists to Pakistan and Afghanistan, largely by targeting British colleges and immigrant communities. Now banned on U.K. campuses, its leaders have praised the 9/11 attacks and say that America has declared war on Islam. Junaid believes them. "I will kill every American that I see," he vowed to a TV reporter. "I'm not a New Yorker. I'm a Muslim."
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Holy warriors like Junaid deeply worry authorities, but that wasn't always the case. During the Cold War, Washington encouraged the jihad movement in its drive to bog down the Soviets in Afghanistan. As many as 25,000 foreigners answered the call during the 1980s, most notably bin Laden. The majority hailed from Arab nations, but many journeyed from Sudan, Southeast Asia, China, and Great Britain. Others came from the United States, among them dozens of native-born Americans. One, Muhammed Haseeb Abdul-Haqq, was the son of a Baptist preacher in New York. A recent convert to a Pakistani Sufi sect, Muslims of the Americas, Abdul-Haqq rallied fellow Americans to fight the Soviets in the early 1980s. The group set up "jihad councils" across the country and in 1982 sent 12 members to Pakistan, intent on finding their way into battle. "It was amazing for me," recalls Abdul-Haqq. "I had no military training, but I knew what I was doing was for the Almighty."
Fearing an international incident, alarmed U.S. and Pakistani officials stopped the group from entering Afghanistan. But others followed. "We were the spark," says Abdul-Haqq. "Different avenues opened and others got through." Indeed, during the war, a handful of journalists came across Americans fighting alongside the Afghans. Among them was 34-year-old Akhbar Shah, an African-American from Boston found by reporters in 1985. Shah claimed to be a U.S. Army veteran helping the rebels organize training camps and said he'd seen two dozen other black American Muslims in Afghanistan.
Soldiers of Allah. Meanwhile, Abdul-Haqq's Muslims of the Americas continued to preach jihad. The sect's American branch had been founded in 1980 by a charismatic Pakistani cleric, Sheik Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani, who appeared at a Brooklyn mosque bedecked with ammunition belts and calling on his mostly African-American converts to wage holy war. A recruitment video from the early 1990s--Soldiers of Allah--depicts would-be guerrillas handling firearms and explosives and shows Gilani boasting how recruits are given "highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare." The organization freely admits sending more than 100 of its members--all U.S. citizens--to Pakistan, but says it was only for religious study. Federal agents believe that dozens also received military training there and that some fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Kashmir. It was Gilani whom the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was seeking before he was murdered--on a tip the cleric was tied to alleged shoe bomber Reid. Gilani was questioned and released.
Gilani's claims of nonviolence would be easier to believe if so many of his followers were not in trouble with the law. Over the years, the group has drawn more than 1,000 members to rural compounds in a half-dozen states. During the 1980s, its followers engaged in a bloody campaign of U.S. bombings and murders, largely against Indian religious figures in America, officials say. Two Muslims of the Americas members were recently convicted on firearms charges, and another was charged with the murder of a deputy sheriff in California. The group's Abdul-Haqq says that these crimes are not typical of his membership and that most occurred many years ago. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, have found nothing to tie the group to bin Laden's al Qaeda and note that Gilani's Sufism has long been at odds with Taliban-style Islam.
The dream of Gilani and other jihadists to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan came true in 1989. For them, it was a great victory, the triumph of international Islam over a godless superpower. Even as America withdrew its CIA officers and its funding, the emboldened jihadists stayed and plotted new campaigns. Some went on to new battles overseas; some returned to their homelands, such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia, intent on making them strict Islamic states. Others took aim at America, angry over its support of Israel and basing of troops in Saudi Arabia.
On Feb. 26, 1993, their pent-up rage exploded in the form of a 1,200-pound bomb under the World Trade Center, which killed six and injured more than 1,000. That first attempt to topple the twin towers led investigators to a sheik named Omar Abdel Rahman. An Afghan war veteran, Abdel Rahman had been driven from his native Egypt for his ties to terrorism. He arrived in Brooklyn in 1990, and soon, he, too, was preaching holy war at local mosques. More important, Abdel Rahman's followers took control of an obscure "charity" in Brooklyn--the Alkifah Refugee Center. Founded in Pakistan in the early 1980s, Alkifah had scores of branches around the world, including Jersey City, N.J.; Tucson, Ariz.; Boston, and 30 other U.S. cities. Most were little more than storefronts--the Brooklyn one sat atop a Chinese restaurant--but they raised millions of dollars to support the Afghan resistance. And, they sent men along with the money. By 1993, the Brooklyn office alone had sent as many as 200 jihadists from America to join the mujahideen, investigators say.
As agents closed in on Abdel Rahman's network, they were stunned at the number of jihadists heading overseas, says Blitzer, the former FBI counterterrorism chief. "What the hell's going on?" he remembers thinking. Five years after the Soviets had left Afghanistan, the jihad movement was booming in America. "It was like a modern underground railroad," says Neil Herman, who supervised the FBI investigation of the bombing. Most were Arab immigrants, but investigators remember many native-born Americans who frequented the center.
One of those Americans was a bearded black Muslim named Rodney Hampton-el, known to his friends as Dr. Rashid. Hampton-el juggled several roles: He battled local drug dealers on the streets of New York's 67th Precinct, while at his job he worked a dialysis machine in an AIDS ward. By 1988, he'd made his way to Afghanistan and joined the rebels, but he was nearly killed by a land mine. Recuperating in a Long Island hospital, Hampton-el gave a revealing interview to anthropologist Robert Dannin, author of Black Pilgrimage to Islam. A true believer, Hampton-el said his wound was "a blessing" and he hoped to return soon to Afghanistan. "To be injured in jihad is a guarantee that you will go to Paradise," he explained. "Most important of all, you must have faith in order to go. This is the ultimate honor for a true Muslim."
Bomb plots. Within months, Hampton-el was leading workshops on guerrilla warfare for Abdel Rahman's followers in Connecticut and New Jersey. By 1993, there was talk among his group of fighting in Bosnia, but increasingly attention focused on America. Hampton-el offered to supply his friends with bombs and automatic weapons, part of a plot that included attacks on major bridges and tunnels leading into Manhattan. He never got the chance. The FBI nabbed Hampton-el, Abdel Rahman, and eight others, who all received heavy prison sentences in 1996.
And what became of the Alkifah Center and its jihadists? The Brooklyn center closed, but the network of other jihad centers remained active, where they helped form the nucleus of bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Indeed, the centers were left largely intact, even in the United States. "They certainly continued on, but were somewhat fragmented," says Herman, the former FBI case agent. Only in the wake of 9/11--eight years after the 1993 attack--did the White House issue an executive order freezing Alkifah's assets.
By then, however, the centers had gone underground. Today, many of the connections are handled informally, through radical members of mosques and Islamic centers, investigators say. But officials believe a network of Islamic charities has also helped fill the void, among them the Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation. With offices in nine countries and a budget last year of $3.4 million, Benevolence is one of the nation's largest Muslim charities. In December, federal officials froze its assets, and in April they arrested its director, Enaam Arnaout, for allegedly lying about ties to terrorism. They claim that Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, is an Alkifah veteran and longtime bin Laden associate. According to an FBI affidavit, the 39-year-old Arnaout helped send jihadists to Bosnia and nearly $700,000 to Chechen rebels, and directed arms convoys into Afghanistan and Croatia. Arnaout denies any wrongdoing, and his foundation is suing the government to recover its funds.
Whatever the outcome of those cases, the jihad movement in America remains alive and well. And while it is easy enough to dismiss the varied jihadists as adventurers or extremists, most seem motivated by unselfish aims; they care deeply about the suffering of their brethren overseas. What else would propel someone like Jibreel al-Amreekee, the soft-spoken Atlanta teenager, to leave his home, travel 7,000 miles, and get killed fighting a foreign army? "The Muslims don't have any help," says Abdul-Haqq of Muslims of the Americas. "Look at the world's hot spots; look at how many places Muslims are being killed." The problem is balancing their right to intervene against the danger posed by the fanaticism that infects so much of their movement. For now, America seems convinced that the business of jihad needs to come to an end. "The government did too little too late," says Herman. "Had law enforcement looked harder at some of these issues, we wouldn't be talking about it today."
MARTIAL ARTIST
ABU MALIK
Age: Unknown
Last U.S. address: New York
A martial arts expert from New York, Abu Malik's name surfaced repeatedly in last year's federal trial of those behind the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. Witnesses described him as a jihadist who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1989.
Malik appeared again in 1993 or '94 in Khartoum, Sudan, at Taba Investments, then a nerve center of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, according to court testimony. Little is known about Malik, whose photo is published above for the first time. One trial witness, bin Laden aide Wadih el-Hage, testified that Malik had a wife and children in Cairo.
Investigators believe he is the most important of a handful of native-born Americans associated with al Qaeda during its Sudan days, before bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Federal agents are eager to talk with him.
STUDENT
HIRAM TORRES
Age: 27
Last U.S. Address: Perth Amboy, N.J.
An unlikely jihadist, Hiram Torres, a young Puerto Rican from the working class city of Perth Amboy, N. J., was introverted and bright as a teenager. Torres also played chess and displayed an unhealthy fascination with Adolf Hitler. He pored over books on philosophy, read the Bible and the Koran, and fantasized about being a revolutionary.
The 1993 valedictorian at his high school, Torres went on to Yale University but lasted barely a month. Intrigued by Islam, he found his way to Pakistan and, in 1998, called his mother from Afghanistan to say he was "studying" there. It was the last she would hear of him until a reporter called earlier this year; Torres's name, along with his New Jersey address and phone number, had been found on an apparent list of recruits in a safe house run by Harakat ul-Muhahideen, the same al Qaeda-tied militia that was joined by John Walker Lindh.
SOLDIER
ISA ABDULLAH ALI,
aka Kevin Holt
Age: 45
Last U.S. address: Washington, D.C.
Born Cleven Raphael Holt, Ali grew up in a housing project in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood. After serving with the U.S. Army in Korea, he converted to Islam and joined the Afghan fight against the Soviets. Forced by an injury back to Washington, he soon left for Lebanon, where he worked with the Amal militia and Hezbollah.
At 6 foot 3 and 250 pounds, with a booming voice and bald head, Holt attracted attention and was nearly killed by an assassin in Beirut. He returned to Washington and worked picking up trash at Howard University, but in 1996 U.S. intelligence believed he had joined up with foreign jihadists in Bosnia.
Officials issued warnings about Ali to guards at bases in the region and announced that he was wanted for questioning about "terrorist activities," but no charges were brought against him.
CAR SALESMAN
KHALID ABU AL-DAHAB
Age: 38
Last U.S. address: Santa Clara, Calif.
A former Silicon Valley car salesman, al-Dahab allegedly recruited 10 U.S. citizens into al Qaeda during his 12 years in the Bay Area, according to an account of his statements to an Egyptian military court. Born to a wealthy family in Alexandria, Egypt, al-Dahab became radicalized when his father, a pilot, was shot down after straying into Israeli airspace.
Al-Dahab joined Islamic Jihad, responsible for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, and came to America in 1986 on a student visa. Over the next decade he took three American wives, one after another, fathered five children, and became a U.S. citizen. At the same time, he allegedly led a double life, traveling to fight in jihad wars in the Balkans and Afghanistan, including a 1990 trip to train Afghan fighters to use hang gliders to free prisoners in Egypt. Arrested in 1998 in Cairo on terrorism charges, he is now serving a 15-year sentence.
CAB DRIVER
RAED HIJAZI
Age: 33
Last U.S. address: Boston
His father once called him "a typical American." A former Boston cabdriver, Hijazi now sits in a Jordanian jail, sentenced to death by hanging for his role in plotting terrorist attacks over the millennium holiday.
In a plot tied to Osama bin Laden, the heavyset Hijazi allegedly hoped to murder hundreds of Americans, Israelis, and others by bombing Christian holy sites, border crossings, and the Radisson Hotel in Jordan.
Hijazi was born in San Jose, Calif., the son of a San Francisco-educated Palestinian engineer. Although he grew up mostly in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, his family had a love affair with America and vacationed at Disneyland and in Florida. Hijazi fell in with Islamic radicals while studying business at California State University-Sacramento around 1989. He later left for Afghanistan and allegedly studied bomb making at an al Qaeda camp.
BUSINESSMAN
MOHAMED BAYAZID,
aka Abu Rida al Suri
Age: 41
Last U.S. address: Kansas City, Mo.
A nuclear bomb for Osama bin Laden was a key goal for Syrian-American Mohamed Bayazid, according to court records. Using his U.S. passport to travel, Bayazid allegedly worked as a manager for bin Laden's Taba Investments in Khartoum, Sudan, during the early 1990s, buying uranium as well as tractors and automatic weapons. His driver's license listed for his home the same address as Benevolence International, an Illinois-based charity whose assets are now frozen.
Bayazid lived in Kansas City until about 1994 and is now variously reported to be dead or living in Sudan or Turkey. His uncle in Kansas City, Adnan Bayazid, believes his role was limited to buying supplies for the Afghan resistance, and he says that Mohamed grew disillusioned with bin Laden. He warns that officials may have the wrong man. "Mohamed is a very popular name," he says.
With Monica M. Ekman, Jonathan Elliston, Aamir Latif, Michael Reynolds and Kit Roane
This story appears in the June 10, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/04/MN117081.DTL
Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks
Lance Williams and Erin McCormick, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, November 4, 2001
A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to sources familiar with his case.
Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty last year to terrorism charges, approached the Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist groups, a U.S. government official said.
Later, according to the sources, Mohamed spent years as an FBI informant while concealing his own deep involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist band: training bin Laden's bodyguards and Islamic guerrillas in camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan; bringing Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy, to the Bay Area on a covert fund-raising mission; and planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, in which more than 200 people died.
The story of Mohamed's dual roles as FBI informant and bin Laden terrorist - - and the freedom he had to operate unchecked in the United States -- illustrates the problems facing U.S. intelligence services as they attempt to penetrate the shadowy, close-knit world of al Qaeda, experts said.
Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C. Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a onetime CIA employee, said in an interview.
Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable and severed its relationship with him shortly after Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an informant, saying the bureau should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply involved in plotting violence against the United States and its allies.
"It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties lay elsewhere."
The affair was "a study in incompetence, in how not to run an agent," Johnson said.
FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette declined to comment on Mohamed, as did a spokesman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose office prosecuted the case of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case said the FBI had followed appropriate procedures in attempting to obtain crucial information from Mohamed, whom he conceded was "double-dealing" and difficult.
"When you operate assets and informants, they're holding the cards," this source said. "They can choose to be 100 percent honest or 10 percent honest. You don't have much control over them.
"Maybe (the informant) gives you a great kernel of information, and then you can't find him for eight weeks. Is that a management problem? Hindsight is 20/20."
Mohamed, 49, is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden's "California connection." Last year, when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year's assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.
In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable," the official said.
The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a "watch list" aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.
Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S.
citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.
There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.
Mohamed's behavior and his background were so unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, became convinced that he was both a "dangerous fanatic" and an operative of U.S. intelligence.
Anderson, now a businessman in North Carolina, said that on their first meeting in 1988, Mohamed told him, "Anwar Sadat was a traitor and he had to die."
Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs what he claimed were their uniform belts.
Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed -- and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the reports were ignored.
"I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he said. "That just doesn't happen. "
It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said.
Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said.
In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.
Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden's al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden's fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country,
he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.
According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.
"He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies," Emerson said in an interview.
One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed's role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.
The case shows "the sophistication of the bin Laden network, and how they were toying with us," he said.
Some information about the nature of Mohamed's contacts with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies is contained in an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in New York at the time of his 1998 arrest. The document describes contacts between Mohamed and the FBI and Defense Department officials.
At times, Mohamed made alarming admissions about his links to the al Qaeda terrorists, seemingly without fear of being arrested. Mohamed willfully deceived the agents about his activities, according to the affidavit.
In 1993, the affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed's driver's license and a false passport.
Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden's group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn't hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.
(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)
Later that year, Mohamed -- again seemingly without concern for consequences -- told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.
In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.
"I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist," he told the interviewers.
According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was "obvious" that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.
In August 1998, after the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, he told the FBI that he knew who did it, but refused to provide the names.
Two weeks later, after lying to a U.S. grand jury investigating the embassy bombings, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty last year, but he has never been sentenced and is once again believed to be providing information to the government -- this time from a prison cell.
"There's a hell of a lot (U.S. officials) didn't know about Ali Mohamed," said Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert and criminology professor at the University of Long Island. "He infiltrated our armed services and duped them."
Yet, Kushner said, such duplicitous interactions may be a necessary component of intelligence work.
"I hate to say it, but these relationships are something we should be involved in more of. That's the nasty (part) of covert operations. We're not dealing with people we can trust."
E-mail the reporters at emccormick@sfchronicle.com and lmwilliams@sfchronicle. com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/washington/14spy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
November 14, 2007
C.I.A. Officer Admits Guilt Over Hezbollah Files
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — A Lebanese-born C.I.A. officer who had previously worked as an F.B.I. agent pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that she illegally sought classified information from government computers about the radical Islamic group Hezbollah.
The plea agreement by the defendant, Nada Nadim Prouty, appeared to expose grave flaws in the methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct background checks on its investigators.
Ms. Prouty, 37, who also confessed that she had fraudulently obtained American citizenship, faces up to 16 years in prison.
Court papers do not specifically say why Ms. Prouty sought information about Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that is based in southern Lebanon, from the F.B.I.’s computer case files in June 2003, the month she left the bureau to join the C.I.A.
There is no accusation in the documents that she passed information on to Hezbollah or any other extremist group.
The plea agreement noted, however, that Ms. Prouty’s sister and her brother-in-law attended a fund-raising event in Lebanon in August 2002 at which the keynote speaker was Sheikh Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Sheikh Fadlallah has been designated by the United States government as a terrorist leader.
The plea agreement said that in 2003 Ms. Prouty specifically went searching for computerized case files maintained by the F.B.I.’s Detroit field office in an investigation that centered on Hezbollah although she “was not assigned to work on Hezbollah cases as part of her F.B.I. duties and she was not authorized by her supervisor, the case agent assigned to the case, or anybody else to access information about the investigation in question.”
The C.I.A. would not describe Ms. Prouty’s duties at the agency, apart from describing her as a “midlevel” employee, nor would it say if she traveled abroad as part of her duties or had been considered undercover.
Government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the investigation with reporters, said Ms. Prouty was an “operations” officer at the C.I.A., meaning she was involved in some way in basic espionage work, not as an analyst or translator.
As part of the plea agreement, she agreed to resign from the C.I.A. and give up any claim to American citizenship.
“It is fitting that she now stands to lose both her citizenship and her liberty,” Kenneth L. Wainstein, assistant attorney general, said in announcing the guilty plea, which was entered in Federal District Court in Detroit.
Mr. Wainstein, who runs the Justice Department’s national security division, said Ms. Prouty “engaged in a pattern of deceit to secure U.S. citizenship, to gain employment in the intelligence community and to obtain and exploit her access to sensitive counterterrorism intelligence.”
She pleaded guilty to one count each of criminal conspiracy, which has a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine; unauthorized computer access, which has a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $100,000 fine, and naturalization fraud, which has a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
In her plea agreement, Ms. Prouty, who lived mostly recently in Vienna, Va., close to the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va, acknowledged that her crimes began shortly after she entered the United States from Lebanon in June 1989 on a one-year student visa.
She acknowledged that after overstaying her visa, she had illegally offered money to an unemployed American man to marry her in 1990, which allowed her to remain in the United States as his wife, although the couple never lived together.
She then submitted a series of false and forged documents to obtain American citizenship, which she was granted in 1994. She obtained a divorce the next year and worked in a series of jobs, including as a waitress and hostess in a chain of Middle Eastern restaurants in the Detroit area owned by her brother-in-law.
In 1997, she was hired as a special agent of the F.B.I., which has been under pressure for years to hire more agents and other employees who speak Arabic for terrorism investigations. She was assigned to the bureau’s Washington field office, given a security clearance and placed in “an extraterritorial squad investigating crimes against U.S. persons overseas,” the Justice Department said in a statement to reporters.
Ms. Prouty acknowledged two sets of illegal computer searches at the F.B.I. The first, in September 2002, involved case files that contained her name, her sister’s name or her brother-in-law’s name. The second, in June 2003, involved files from a national-security investigation of Hezbollah that was being conducted in Detroit, which has one of the nation’s largest Arabic-speaking communities.
The court papers say Ms. Prouty’s crimes first became known to the F.B.I. in December 2005 and have been under investigation for nearly two years. The documents suggest that she came under scrutiny as part of an investigation of her brother-in-law, Talal Khalil Chahine, in a scheme to funnel millions of dollars from his restaurant to people in Lebanon. Mr. Chahine is a fugitive from tax evasion charges filed in Michigan.
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http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2003/09/04/2003-09-04_9-11_book__terror_link_insid.html
9-11 BOOK: TERROR LINK INSIDE FDNY
By TRACY CONNOR DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Thursday, September 4th 2003, 8:02AM
A hero fire marshal killed in the terror attacks told the FBI of his suspicions about an Egyptian-born FDNY employee who associated with terrorists - but his warning was ignored, a new book claims.
The book, "1000 Years for Revenge" by Peter Lance, contends the feds missed opportunities to stop the attacks.
But New York FBI spokesman Joe Valiquette slammed Lance's book as a "rehash of old stories, gossip and speculation."
One thread of the book follows Fire Department veteran Ronnie Bucca and his suspicions about a department accountant, Ahmed Amin Refai.
Bucca began investigating Refai in 1999, after Refai filed a bogus report to get a new building identification pass for department headquarters, the book says.
Bucca was alarmed by Refai's association with Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The marshal uncovered TV footage of Refai escorting Abdel-Rahman through a crowd at a New Jersey mosque and learned he was also acquainted with El Sayed A Nosair, who assassinated Jewish Defense League leader Meir Kahane in 1990.
That year, Refai took a pile of Trade Center blueprints that had been tossed out by the FDNY, the book says. When the complex was bombed, Refai called in sick, Lance reports.
Now retired, Refai denied any wrongdoing. He admitted to Lance that he met Abdel-Rahman and other terror figures but said he wasn't close to them. He also denied taking the blueprints and blamed the attacks on a U.S.-Israeli conspiracy.
The FBI is now investigating Refai, the book says. Valiquette declined comment yesterday on any probe.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/22/AR2008042201994.html
Probation For Sergeant Who Misused Databases
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 23, 2008; Page B01
A Fairfax County police sergeant was sentenced yesterday in federal court in Alexandria to two years' probation for his admission that he checked police databases for someone who was the target of a federal terrorism case.
Sgt. Weiss Rasool, 31, initially faced up to six months in jail, but federal prosecutors urged U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz to consider as much as a year of jail time after Rasool took a lie-detector test last week and "was not fully compliant" with the test procedures. Prosecutors also said in a motion filed with the court that FBI agents "do not believe that he has been truthful."
Before sentencing, Rasool stood and wept as he admitted breaking the law.
"If I could turn back time, I would maybe do things different," he said. "It was an error in judgment. I never intended for things to turn out this way. I don't know what to say to you or anyone. . . . I admit I made errors of judgment. But I never intended to put anybody's life at risk."
The police sergeant said after the sentencing that he hopes to remain with the Fairfax department. A misdemeanor conviction does not automatically disqualify him from continuing with the force. Rasool remains on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of an internal investigation, Fairfax police said.
In June 2005, when federal agents had a Fairfax man under surveillance, the man apparently asked Rasool to check the license plates of three vehicles he thought were following him. Rasool's lawyer described the man as a member of Rasool's mosque.
According to court records, Rasool checked the databases and left the following voice-mail message for the man:
"Umm, as I told you, I can only tell you if it comes back to a person or not a person, and all three vehicles did not come back to an individual person. So, I just wanted to give you that much."
The three vehicles were undercover FBI vehicles, according to a letter from the FBI filed in court yesterday, and Rasool's message "likely alerted the subject of the FBI investigation which had a disruptive effect on the pending counterterrorism case." Prosecutors said the vehicles were listed with a leasing company, which an experienced officer might have known was an indicator of law enforcement vehicles.
The target was arrested in November 2005, then convicted and deported, according to court filings in Rasool's case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeanine Linehan said that the target and his family were already dressed and destroying evidence at 6 a.m. when agents arrived to make the arrest, indicating that they had been tipped off. The target's name and the charges against him have not been disclosed.
In October 2007, the FBI confronted Rasool about his computer inquiries on the man's behalf. According to a brief written by Linehan, Rasool denied knowing the man. When presented with the recording of his message for the man, Rasool admitted checking the databases, Linehan wrote.
Linehan also noted that Rasool made computer inquiries about himself, through the National Crime Information Center system, about 17 times in 18 months, purportedly to see whether his name appeared on the terrorism watch list. His lawyer, James W. Hundley, said Rasool checked the database because of increased scrutiny of Muslims in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In January, Rasool pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized computer access. He acknowledged checking his name and those of family members on the Violent Crime and Terrorist Offender File, maintained within the NCIC system, but said he did so to be sure the names were not there by mistake.
Hundley said that Rasool did not remember making the computer inquiries for the investigative target, and that Rasool did not tip off the target to his impending arrest.
Rasool's lawyer filed character-reference letters from Rasool's friends, family and co-workers, including Lt. Susan Lamar, the assistant commander of the McLean station, where Rasool worked. Lamar wrote that, compared with similar computer violations by Fairfax officers, Rasool's "seems to be the least significant."
Poretz told Rasool that some of his conduct "appears to strain credulity, to this court." But he declined to consider a sentencing range of six to 12 months in jail and gave Rasool credit for "acceptance of responsibility," a key factor in federal sentencing guidelines.
The magistrate judge then offered a stern analysis, saying: "What we have here is a defendant doing stupid things. What we have here is a credibility issue as to the defendant." But he found no evidence that Rasool intended to disrupt the federal investigation.
He placed the sergeant on two years of supervised probation and fined him $1,000.
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Oh great moderator in the sky, please explain what the last six posts by GM have to do with the 2008 Presidential Race.....
I think GM had one too many beers and his finger stuck on the cut and paste buttons, but he got the post wrong...
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911 Dispatcher Arrested for Accessing Websites With Terrorist Information
A 911 dispatcher, Nadire Zelenaj, has been arrested for using computers at work to access secure government websites containing information about suspected terrorists.
Now the FBI wants to know what she did with that sensitive information.
The employee was hired in 2002 after the September 11 terrorist attack. 911 computers allow employees to access a secured police data site with criminal information.
However, Zelenaj was using that access for personal reasons.
Police say she accessed information from a terrorist watch list.
They tracked her movements in a two-year period between January ‘06 and December ‘07 and say she visited that site at least 232 times.
Richard Vega of the Office of Public Integrity said that at the present, they can only suspect what she’s been up to.
What we do know is — now the FBI is involved. Agents would not comment other than to say it’s part of a larger investigation.
Zelenaj has been charged with 232 felony counts of computer trespass and one count of official misconduct. She was fired in December.
A co-worker saw her on the site and became suspicious. From there, it was easy to track her computer movements.
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Oh great moderator in the sky, please explain what the last six posts by GM have to do with the 2008 Presidential Race.....
I think GM had one too many beers and his finger stuck on the cut and paste buttons, but he got the post wrong...
**You posted the article about "Muslim-Americans" bemoaning "All I want is for one of the candidates to assure me and the American public that "Muslim" and "American" are not mutually exclusive terms."
Unfortunately "muslim" and loyal American sometimes are mutually exclusive terms, as my posts demonstrate.**
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Ahhh my one article directly related to the elections; your six plus one had nothing to do with the elections. This post is about the 2008 Presidential Race.
Not the dump on Muslim post. Where is the moderator when you need him? :-D
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**Is it "dumping on muslims" to raise the issue of loyalty to this nation? Why would Americans who are muslim do such things?**
Former Navy sailor arrested on terror charge
By Dennis Wagner, The Arizona Republic
PHOENIX — A former U.S. sailor was arrested Wednesday on charges that he took part in a conspiracy to kill military personnel by giving suspected terrorists information about American ship movements in the Middle East in 2001.
Hassan Abujihaad, 31, who served aboard the destroyer USS Benfold from 1998 to 2002, also allegedly sent e-mails to a terrorist website, according to the Justice Department. The e-mails applauded Osama bin Laden and praised al-Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul Hall, was arrested in Phoenix, FBI spokeswoman Deb McCarley said. He will be sent to Connecticut to face charges in federal court.
According to court records, Abujihaad linked up by Internet with British nationals Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan through a London organization known as Azzam Publications. Ahmad and Ahsan also are under federal indictment. The government says Azzam had an intelligence and fundraising role in terrorism.
Scotland Yard agents searched Ahmad's residence in 2003 and found classified information about a Navy battle group. According to court records, Abujihaad had sent detailed intelligence from the Benfold to Azzam in 2001, nine months after the Cole attack, which killed 17 sailors.
Abujihaad's messages allegedly said the battle group would pass through the entrance to the Persian Gulf, in 19 days, adding: "They have nothing to stop a small craft with RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) etc. except their Seals' stinger missiles … Please destroy message."
Abujihaad received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 2002, according to an FBI affidavit. Abujihaad's alleged role was first reported in news media 27 months ago, but no charges were filed at the time. Thomas Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, wouldn't comment on what delayed the indictment.
In December, the case against Abujihaad apparently received a boost after the arrest of Derrick Shareef, 22, of Genoa, Ill. Shareef, who lived with Abujihaad in 2004, was accused of planning to use grenades to attack a mall. An informer who became acquainted with Shareef helped the FBI set up a sting against Abujihaad.
Amid reports in 2004 of Ahmad's arrest, Abujihaad turned to the Council on American-Islamic Relations for support. Deedra Abboud, then executive director at the council's Arizona office, said at the time that Abujihaad told her he sent e-mails critical of U.S. foreign policy to Azzam, but denied divulging classified information.
Contributing: The Associated Press.
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**Ok, JDN. Is this just "dumping on muslims"? Is there a legitimate concern?**
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2007/02/noureddine_malk.html
February 15, 2007
Mr. X/Noureddine Malki: The Perpetual Risk (& Likelihood) With Muslim Translators
Printer Friendly
By Debbie Schlussel
I'm constantly being told by Pan-Islamists about all of the Muslim Arabic translators and soldiers we have and how patriotic and dedicated they are to America.
Actually, their numbers aren't so large, and their patriotism, well . . . . I think the many stories we've had about Muslim soldiers--from Wassef Ali Hassoun (who faked his kidnapping in Iraq, went AWOL, twice, and is now on the NCIS Most Wanted List) to Assan Akbar (who shot at fellow American soldiers in the name of Islam) and a host of similar others (Ahmad Al-Halabi, Ali Mohamed, Ryan Anderson, Semi Osman, John A. Muhammad, Jeffrey Leon Battle, etc., etc., ad nauseam)--makes the case otherwise.
The latest story--about Army Arabic translator Mr. X a/k/a Noureddine Malki a/k/a Almaliki Nour a/k/a Abu Hakim a/k/a Abdulhakeem Nour--makes the same case, ie., that we must be suspicious, instead of bending over backwards to welcome those whose co-religionists around the world (and here) are openly bent on our destruction.
The story of the Muslim Arabic translator Mr. X--we don't even know his real name--is chronicled in an AP report in New York Daily News, which I strangely didn't see in any of my print newspapers.
Mr. X/"Malki" deliberately hid information about insurgents, their location, and the location of their weaponry. By doing so, he knowingly cost American soldiers their lives. Plainly, this Muslim translator is a mass-murderer of Americans. Even worse, he is believed to have provided classified Coalition Forces intelligence (which he illegally downloaded) to insurgents in the Sunni Triangle. Again, he's a mass-murderer.
More incredible is that this man was allowed to become a U.S. citizen and a translator despite professing allegiance to Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Prosecutors have made no attempt to strip him of his citizenship, which was likely obtained under false pretenses.
He should be given the death penalty (a little torture first would be appropriate). But, instead, he'll only do a maximum of 60 years . . . if we're lucky. Who is responsible for hiring this man? That's another person who should be tried, if it can be shown he/she knew of the man's open loyalty to Al-Qaeda and hatred of America. If so, that person is an accessory to mass murder.
More:
A former Arabic translator for the Army in Iraq pleaded guilty Wednesday to illegally possessing secret documents detailing the 82nd Airborne Division's mission against insurgents.
Among the documents was a report with precise information about U.S. weaponry and targets, court papers said. Another document contained "information about 82nd Airborne strategies for interfacing with various tribal groups in Iraq," the court papers added.
The defendant, who goes by the name Noureddine Malki, also pleaded guilty in 2005 to using an alias, Almaliki Nour, while becoming a U.S. citizen. Authorities say his true identity remains unknown.
He faces up to 60 years in prison for both charges, prosecutors said. No sentencing date was set.
U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said the case demonstrated the importance of "safeguarding military plans and intelligence."
The 47-year-old defendant, who had been scheduled to go to trial next week, "fraudulently obtained security clearances and then stole classified military information," Mauskopf said in a statement.
Using his false identity, the defendant was hired in 2003 by a contractor as a translator and interpreter for an intelligence unit of the 82nd Airborne stationed in the Sunni Triangle, authorities said. After he returned to the United States, authorities discovered the documents - some marked "secret" - during a 2005 raid on his Brooklyn apartment.
While entering his plea in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday, the defendant admitted he knew he was not authorized to have the documents and made no attempt to return them, said his lawyer, Mildred Whalen.
The defense attorney said her client did not address a motive. She declined further comment.
In a memo filed last week, prosecutors had warned that if the defendant professed his loyalty to the United States at trial, they would present evidence that he supported al-Qaida and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The evidence included propaganda downloaded from the Internet to his computer, the memo said.
Prosecutors also said they would argue the defendant "had an opportunity to provide stolen classified information to anti-coalition forces" because he was in phone and e-mail contact with people in the Sunni Triangle, including Sunni sheiks who gave him thousands of dollars in bribes.
"Religion of Peace." "Loyal Americans." "Very Patriotic." Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Thanks to reader Kent for the tip. He writes:
His true identity is unknown? What the hell was he doing having any access to anything without having been vetted?
Amen. Why? I think we all know the answer: Political correctness in favor of Muslims--at the cost of safety and security.
It'll kill ya, every time.
More info in The Washington Post.
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Woof:
The "Great Moderator in the Sky" is in the back of the van in the dark on a laptop wireless connection. Without reading them all, my snap impression is that each article is designed to address particular points of the article by the Harvard woman Muslim seriatim. As is his wont, GM facilitates the misunderstanding by not including a one or two sentence description of the article e.g. The author mentions this Muslim Congressman. Let's take a look at who he really is in this article." or something that would clue the read in as to why the article is there.
Anyway, I'm to bed soon. You two will have to hash this out on your own. :evil: :lol:
TAC,
Marc
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Unfortunately "muslim" and loyal American sometimes are mutually exclusive terms, as my posts demonstrate.**[/b]
And unfortunately "Christian" and loyal American sometimes are mutually exclusive terms. Should I cut and paste a dozen long articles on this subject too? Would it be
relevant on the 2008 Presidential Race Post Page?
My point about extreme cut and paste was that your numerous articles do not relate to this particular post, i.e. The 2008 Presidential Race. Controversial perhaps,
and perhaps worthy of discussion on the Islam in America Post Page, but not the 2008 Presidential Election Race Post. As I indirectly acknowledged,
your one article pertaining to the Muslim Congressman does; it is relevant, on target, and brings up interesting points, but the rest of your articles do not even mention the upcoming election.
Just another example of "if you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your $%^&*". Or "throw enough $%^&* against the wall and hope something will stick".
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Unfortunately "muslim" and loyal American sometimes are mutually exclusive terms, as my posts demonstrate.**[/b]
And unfortunately "Christian" and loyal American sometimes are mutually exclusive terms. Should I cut and paste a dozen long articles on this subject too?
**Yes, please cut and paste all the articles you can find where christians betrayed this nation to assist christian terrorists making war on American motivated by christian theology. BTW, what is the current body count inflicted on the US by christian terrorists?**
Would it be
relevant on the 2008 Presidential Race Post Page?
**It would, if the US were currently engaged in a war with a global movement by christians to impose christian dominance by force globally, and the US had suffered thousands of fatalities from christian terrorists while other christians worked to subvert the US, and then I posted an article bemoaning the bad rap christians are getting from the mainstream. Then it would be relevant.**
My point about extreme cut and paste was that your numerous articles do not relate to this particular post, i.e. The 2008 Presidential Race. Controversial perhaps,
and perhaps worthy of discussion on the Islam in America Post Page, but not the 2008 Presidential Election Race Post. As I indirectly acknowledged,
your one article pertaining to the Muslim Congressman does; it is relevant, on target, and brings up interesting points, but the rest of your articles do not even mention the upcoming election.
Just another example of "if you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your $%^&*". Or "throw enough $%^&* against the wall and hope something will stick".
**It is relevant, as the left loves to play the "poor muslim" card, such as your post on muslims and the presidential race. The bad reputation islam has is the direct result of the oppression and violence inherent in islamic theology, which you love to ignore because it doesn't fit your politically correct narrative.**
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Which is why it would be helpful to precede posts of articles with a sentence or three description of why you are posting the article :-)
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Yes sir. You are correct.
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Drudge is linking to this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck
Will this have an effect on the race?
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/10/27/smells-like-socialist-spirit/
Smells Like Socialist Spirit
posted at 7:24 am on October 27, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
If people thought Joe the Plumber was some kind of stumble for Barack Obama, a rediscovered interview from 2001 should dispel any doubts about Barack Obama’s redistributionism. Seven years ago, Obama told Chicago Public Radio that the Warren Court was too conservative and missed its opportunity to redistribute wealth on a much grander scale. In fact, Obama wanted them to break the Constitution and reorder American society far outside of what the founders intended.
Stop the ACLU has the transcript (via Michelle):
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.
To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …
I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.
People have assumed that Obama merely offered a rhetorical stumble, and Obama and Joe Biden have strenuously attacked anyone that claimed he intended to bring about radical socialist change. This sounds very much like socialism and radical change, and there is no mistaking the context of this statement. While Obama recognizes in this passage that the judiciary doesn’t have the “structure” to make radical changes to the Constitution, he doesn’t sound at all happy about it.
Instead, Obama sees community organizing as the essential path to move from a Constitution of personal liberties to a Constitution of federal mandates. He wants a new governing document that essentially forces both the federal and state governments to redistribute wealth, and he sees that as the natural outcome of the civil rights movement. That certainly smells of socialism on a far grander scale than ever attempted in the US, with the New Deal and Great Societies looking like pale imitations of Obama’s vision.
In fact, as Jeff Goldstein notes, that’s almost classic Marxism, and it would leave America somewhere to the left of 1970s France:
In Obama’s America, we’ll finally be able to break free of the “constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution” — and in so doing, achieve “social justice” through “redistributive change.”
Well, then. Fine .
But this is not the America I knew…
The government does not exist to determine the acceptable level of wealth of its individual citizens. For government to assume that role, it would have to end private property rights and assume all property belonged to the State. That is classic Marxism, and as Barbara West of WFTV noted, it runs in Marx’s classic philosophy of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. That economic direction has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, and in many cases resulted in famines that killed millions of people.
The RNC and the McCain campaign has to get these quotes out to the American public in the final week of this election.
Update: One more clarifying thought is in order. Barack Obama complains that the Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties”. That’s because the Constitution was intended as a limiting document, to curtail the power of the federal government vis-a-vis the states and the individual. The founders intended at the time to limit the reach of the federal government, and built the Constitution accordingly.
Barack Obama wants to reverse that entirely. And that’s radical change you’d better believe in, or else.
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Thank you Mark Levin on talk radio to opening my eyes to how leftist and truly Marxist BO is. Unfortunately he speaks to the choir and the mainstream garbage media (who by the way is making fortunes on this election campaign by not doing their job) has ignored BOs hazy, fuzzy, past.
He obviously doesn't like our country the way it is or the principles it was founded on and kept it great for 200+ years.
Neither did/does his angry wife.
MSM did not do their job in getting his real past into the open.
He surrounded himself with radicals for one reason and one reason only. He agrees with them. This is not rocket science.
I may be sorry that the Hill didn't win. BO may just be far worse.
Ths country has fallen for him hook line and sinker. Yet the country is right to be disgusted with the Republicans too.
I can only hope it is not too late for McCain but it probably is. The MSM and Academia who are teaching our young the propapaganda gobbly goop that the US is to be despised has contributed to this.
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"Unfortunately he speaks to the choir"
I meant Mark Levin , not BO.
Levins message does not get out to the general public.
Can you imagine if the DEms subvert freedom of speech and get the fairness doctrine back into law - which they WILL do if McCain can't stop them.
The media which would be their only check will also be controlled by the government. How doumb the young are. They have no clue. They just dream of love peace and equality while their parents foot the bills.
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“Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama has been measuring for his White House curtains for months. Now, big plans have been made public for his $2 million election night victory party in Chicago. Sen. Obama is even talking quite candidly about his transition plans. And why not? After all, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has Obama leading Republican nominee John McCain by 13 percentage points among both registered and likely voters. Of course, Obama’s largest cheering section—Big Media—long has been in the tank for the junior senator of Illinois. Even the liberal Pew Research Center finds that Obama’s ratio of favorable stories to overall stories was more than 2 1/2 times as large as Sen. McCain’s. But you might be surprised to learn that not every poll considers Obama’s coronation a fait accompli. An Associated Press poll has the race in a statistical dead heat. And the IBD/TIPP poll, considered to have been the most accurate in the 2004 presidential race, has Obama with a mere 1.1 percentage point lead, 44.8 percent to 43.7 percent with 11.6 percent undecided. Thus, the race for president is far closer than the media masses have led you to believe. And how delicious it would be if the media’s ‘election’ of Barack Obama suppresses his numbers and leads to an Electoral College landslide for John McCain. Talk about being hoisted by your own petard.” —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
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A "Dewey defeats Truman" result would be very, very sweet.
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Don't Let the Polls Affect Your Vote
They were wrong in 2000 and 2004.By KARL ROVEArticle
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There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.
Some polls are sponsored by reputable news organizations, others by publicity-eager universities or polling firms on the make. None have the scientific precision we imagine.
For example, academics gathered by the American Political Science Association at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington on Aug. 31, 2000, to make forecasts declared that Al Gore would be the winner. Their models told them so. Mr. Gore would receive between 53% and 60% of the two-party vote; Gov. George W. Bush would get between just 40% and 47%. Impersonal demographic and economic forces had settled the contest, they said. They were wrong.
Right now, all the polls show Barack Obama ahead of John McCain, but the margins vary widely (in part because some polls use an "expanded" definition of a likely voter, while others use a "traditional" polling model, which assumes turnout will mirror historical trends but with a higher turnout among African-Americans and young voters).
On Monday, there were seven nationwide polls, with the candidates as close as three points in the Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll and as far apart as 10 points in Gallup's "expanded" model. On Tuesday, the Gallup "traditional" model poll had the candidates separated by two points and the Pew poll had them separated by 15. On Wednesday, Battleground, Rasmussen and Gallup "traditional" model polls had the candidates separated by three points while Diageo/Hotline and Gallup "expanded" model polls had the spread at seven points.
Polls can reveal underlying or emerging trends and help campaigns decide where to focus. The danger is that commentators use them to declare a race over before the votes are in. This can demoralize the underdog's supporters, depressing turnout. I know that from experience.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
On election night in 2000 Al Hunt -- then a columnist for this newspaper and a commentator on CNN -- was the first TV talking head to erroneously declare that Florida's polls had closed, when those in the Panhandle were open for another hour. Shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Judy Woodruff said: "A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column."
Mr. Hunt and Ms. Woodruff were not only wrong. What they did was harmful. We know, for example, that turnout in 2000 compared to 1996 improved more in states whose polls had closed by the time Ms. Woodruff all but declared the contest over. The data suggests that as many as 500,000 people in the Midwest and West didn't bother to vote after the networks indicated Florida cinched the race for Mr. Gore.
I recall, too, the media's screwup in 2004, when exit-polling data leaked in the afternoon. It showed President Bush losing Pennsylvania by 17 points, New Hampshire by 18, behind among white males in Florida, and projected South Carolina and Colorado too close to call. It looked like the GOP would be wiped out.
Bob Shrum famously became the first to congratulate Sen. John Kerry by addressing him as "President Kerry." Commentators let the exit polls color their coverage for hours until their certainty was undone by actual vote tallies.
Polls have proliferated this year in part because it is much easier for journalists to devote the limited space in their papers or on TV to the horse-race aspect of the election rather than its substance. And I admit, I've aided and abetted this process.
In the campaign's final week, though, the candidates can offer little new substance, so attention turns to the political landscape, and there's no question Mr. McCain is in a difficult place.
The last national poll that showed Mr. McCain ahead came out Sept. 25 and the 232 polls since then have all shown Mr. Obama leading. Only one time in the past 14 presidential elections has a candidate won the popular vote and the Electoral College after trailing in the Gallup Poll the week before the election: Ronald Reagan in 1980.
But the question that matters is the margin. If Mr. McCain is down by 3%, his task is doable, if difficult. If he's down by 9%, his task is essentially impossible. In truth, however, no one knows for sure what kind of polling deficit is insurmountable or even which poll is correct. All of us should act with the proper understanding that nothing is yet decided.
As for me, I've already cast my absentee ballot in Kerr County, Texas -- joyfully, enthusiastically marking the straight Republican column. I would like to have joined the line Tuesday outside the polling place in Ingram, where I've been registered the past few years. But I will be in New York, part of the vast horde analyzing exit polls, dissecting returns, and pontificating on consequences. I'll thoroughly enjoy myself that night, and probably feel guilty the next morning. But this year's 728 national polls and the thousands of state polls made me do it.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
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It's time
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world
IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.
For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.
Thinking about 2009 and 2017
The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed (see article), though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.
Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country (see article). Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.
At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.
The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.
If only the real John McCain had been running
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.
Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).
The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.
Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.
Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.
So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.
There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and out-fought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.
Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.
It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.
Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.
He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.
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Not a stupid piece. I disagree of course :lol:
Security Should Be the Deciding Issue
By FREDERICK W. KAGAN
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As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a "real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.
One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression -- the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.
Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.
When Franklin Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover in the White House, the country's economy was in shambles but its security was not threatened. No American forces were engaged in significant military conflict; America faced no threats. The U.S. was largely disarmed militarily and disengaged internationally.
[Security Should Be the Deciding Issue] Corbis
Yet within a decade, American territory had been attacked for the first time in 130 years, a massive rearmament program was underway, and the U.S. was fighting a desperate struggle that spanned the globe and ultimately cost the lives of nearly half a million American service members. The seeds of that global conflict, unimaginable in 1933 given the relative weakness of Germany and Japan, were planted in the first years of the Roosevelt administration as FDR focused on the American economy.
Hoover had the distinction of being the last American president who did not command American troops in important conflicts. After FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower led the war in Korea that ended up shaping East Asia and the global economy profoundly.
John F. Kennedy's ill-fated efforts in Cuba shape Central America and the Caribbean to this day. He also made key decisions regarding Vietnam, followed, of course, by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. These decisions had major effects on American security and also helped launch a social revolution within the U.S.
Jimmy Carter's disastrous hostage rescue operation in Iran had profound implications for the U.S. there and throughout the region, as did his reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Ronald Reagan's failed policies in Lebanon in the early 1980s, leading to the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983, shaped the nature of American involvement in that key region, and also the perception of the U.S., for two decades. His attack on Libya, on the other hand, effectively ended a significant terrorist threat to the U.S. It also laid the basis for the elimination of Libya's WMD program after 9/11.
George H.W. Bush fought in Panama and Iraq. Bill Clinton, who took office promising to focus "like a laser beam" on the economy, led U.S. forces to humiliation in Somalia, ineffective, pinprick responses to al Qaeda terrorism and to Saddam Hussein's provocations, and to large-scale conflict in the Balkans. The current administration inherited ongoing military operations in the Balkans and almost immediately confronted the consequences of President Clinton's policy failures in Afghanistan on 9/11.
The next president will not break this string of fighting presidents. He will inherit two ongoing wars involving more than 180,000 troops. He will face two global enemies -- al Qaeda and Iranian terror networks, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps/Quds Force and Hezbollah.
It is important to note here the distinction between an enemy and a threat. Threats are problems to be concerned about in the future; enemies are organizations trying to kill Americans right now. Al Qaeda and Iranian agents are both killing Americans on a regular basis and have proclaimed their determination to kill more. They are enemies, not threats, and they will confront the next president from day one.
There are threats too, such as Pakistan's instability, combined with its inability and unwillingness to confront the al Qaeda safe havens on its territory. The growth of al Qaeda organizations in Algeria and Somalia poses another. Russian adventurism on the borders of states to which the U.S. has already given security guarantees is still another. The dangers of nuclear proliferation if the North Korean regime collapses -- or if it does not -- are still another.
Lastly, the next president will almost certainly face Iran's arrival at the threshold of nuclear-weapons capability. This, combined with Iran's efforts to develop long-range (and ultimately intercontinental) ballistic missiles and its global terrorist networks, is a threat to America's allies and to Americans at home.
Whatever the parallels between the current economic situation and that of the early 1930s, the current international environment is by any comparison more dangerous for the U.S. than the one that led to World War II. This is not hyperbole, particularly considering a last factor. When France and Britain ignored developing dangers while handling them would have been possible and relatively inexpensive, America was able to bail them out, if at terrific cost. There is no one to save us if we make similar mistakes in the coming years.
The current economic crisis is extremely grave. It is hurting many Americans today and will hurt many more as it unwinds. It will end, however, as economic crises always do. The question is how long the recovery will take and how bad things will get before it takes hold.
This question should be at the forefront of voters' thinking as they consider the economic proposals of the two candidates for president, but not necessarily as they decide whom to vote for. Better policies can speed the recovery; worse ones can slow it -- but none are likely to prevent it.
The presidential impact on foreign-policy problems is much more direct. Skillful approaches can avoid or mitigate conflict; foolish ones can lead to cataclysms. And make no mistake -- mistaken policies will lead to the unnecessary deaths of Americans, and not just our soldiers. Any American who wants to travel outside the U.S. can be directly affected by the wisdom or folly of our foreign policy. Even those who never leave their own state must be concerned, as residents of New York, Arlington and Pennsylvania can attest.
The health of our economy rests on its fundamentals, and on the way the entire government -- the president, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, and the courts -- approach the problem. The lives of American citizens rest on the way the president interacts with our enemies. When people feel relatively safe, they vote their pocketbooks. When they feel endangered, they vote for security. The world today offers no reason for Americans to feel safe. If we want safety, we have to be ready to fight for it.
Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of "Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power" (AEI Press, 2008).
Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/01/obamas-illegal-alien-aunt-is-a-deportation-fugitive-bush-administration-moves-to-protect-her/
Illegal alien, illegal contributions. I wonder if ACORN registered her to vote?
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http://www.nypost.com/seven/11012008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/obama_2012__his_triumphs_abroad_136358.htm?page=0
OBAMA 2012: HIS TRIUMPHS ABROAD
OUR GREATEST FOREIGN POLICY PRESIDENT?
By RALPH PETERS
New ruler of the Baltics, Vladimir Putin
Last updated: 1:09 pm
November 1, 2008
Posted: 12:17 pm
November 1, 2008
Looking back on the four years of his first administration, President Obama can be proud: He made the US welcome among the family of nations again; he reduced our reliance on military force; and he gave us peace by reaching sensible accommodations with our enemies.
The lies told about him in the 2008 election were exposed as sheer bigotry. Far from being "soft on radical Islam," President Obama was the first world leader to welcome Jewish refugees after Iran's nuclear destruction of Israel's major cities (his only caveat - a fair one - was the refusal to accept Zionist military officers and their families, in light of Israel's excessive retaliation).
Obama 2012: Nicole Gelinas: A Term of Fiscal Pain
Obama 2012: Jonah Goldberg: Four Years Later
He also demonstrated his resolve in the face of extremism when he overruled the obstructionist advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered our military to cross the border into Pakistan in force. The subsequent debacle, as Pakistan cut off supply routes to Afghanistan and threatened a nuclear response, was entirely the fault of our generals on the ground, not of the administration.
Fortunately, President Obama's willingness to talk to our enemies rescued the situation. After laying down their arms, our troops were allowed to evacuate Pakistan and Afghanistan in peace. The Taliban's return to power in Kabul did not result in an excessive bloodbath, and al Qaeda is not permitted the unrestricted freedom it enjoyed in the country prior to 2001.
State Department surveys prove that the Afghan population welcomes Sharia law, the closure of girls' schools and other such cultural choices. Our reparations payments to Kabul (as with those to Havana) are only just. Opium production is, arguably, no worse than in the past.
We also have seen peace in Iraq. Claims that our troop withdrawal was responsible for the resurgence of al Qaeda and the subsequent civil war are nothing but Republican campaign propaganda. With the International Sunni Alliance in firm control of Iraq - after Israel's wanton destruction of Iran - order prevails in the streets. As for the Turkish and Arab suppression of the Kurds, our diplomats regard it as a small price to pay for regional stability. Biased reports of massacres and concentration camps remain unsubstantiated.
Our relations with the Muslim world have rarely, if ever, been better. The current $320 per barrel price of oil allows long-oppressed states to develop themselves without the yoke of neo-colonialism or invasive efforts to force democracy upon their populations. As UN Ambassador Ayers noted, "We can state with pride that the US not only respects, but embraces cultural differences."
Relations with Russia are also at a high unthinkable a mere four years ago. Moscow's legitimate concerns for the welfare of its citizens in the "near abroad," as well as for ethnic Russians persecuted by so-called free democracies, fully justified its peace-preservation military deployments into Ukraine and other regional states. The subsequent referendums on re-unification with Russia, while displaying a few inevitable irregularities, have been judged free and fair by the Jimmy Carter Memorial Foundation.
While the deployment of Russian forces into the NATO-member Baltic states to protect ethnic Russians proved controversial, President Obama's personal intervention kept us - and NATO - out of war. Partisan charges of "Finlandization" distort the generous terms of the neutrality guarantees Moscow provides for the former NATO members.
After the internationally brokered (with President Obama in the lead) demilitarization of eastern Poland, it's clear to all responsible parties that Russia's legitimate claims have been fully satisfied and we may expect peace in our time.
President Obama resisted yet another war trap as China lost patience and finally reclaimed its long-lost province, Taiwan. Furthermore, the reduction of the US military presence in Japan and South Korea has deflated strategic tensions in East Asia to the lowest level in over one hundred years. Again, President Obama gave us peace.
(The resulting peace dividend from our president's 25% cut in the defense budget has allowed our government, in a public/private partnership with the Chicago-based Rezko Foundation, to provide subsidized housing for almost six million new immigrant families from developing countries. No other administration policy has raised the world's esteem for us more profoundly than our "Global Balance" instant-citizenship immigration reforms.)
In our own hemisphere, President Obama has supported the cause of justice, human rights and trade unions, cutting off military aid to Colombia, killing the proposed free-trade agreement with that country, and expressing humane understanding for the long freedom struggle of the FARC and other liberation groups.
Preferring a sensible rapprochement with Venezuela to needless confrontation, our president went to Caracas and negotiated a regional division of labor with democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez. The end of our destructive trade embargo against Cuba, our formal apology for the deprivations we imposed, and our generous reparations payments have inaugurated a new era of friendship with our long-suffering neighbors to the south.
The only complaint Democratic Party cadres fairly may lodge against the Obama administration's foreign policy is that we still have not fully opened our border with Mexico. Resistance among right-wing fanatics in Washington and bigots around the country remains too strong for now.
As for Mexico's presidential contest, President Obama has made it clear that, while he would prefer that a reputed drug-cartel leader not be elected, the US will respect the will of the Mexican people and strive for good relations with any future Mexican government.
One can only ask how much higher our 16.2% unemployment rate - an obvious legacy of the Bush years - might be if President Obama had not restored America's standing in the world and re-negotiated unfair trade treaties imposed on American workers by previous administrations.
As our president remarked just the other day in a re-election campaign speech in Dearborn, Michigan: "Wealth redistribution isn't just an American issue - it's a global issue. Better that Americans should be a little poorer, if that means our brothers in Egypt and Bolivia can become a little richer."
Under President Obama, America's back!
Ralph Peters' most recent book is, "Barack Obama: Too Great To Be A Mere Messiah?" (Fairness Doctrine Press, Limited, Chicago, July 2012)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8
Dear Mr. Obama.....
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Woof All:
I leave for the Buenos Aires, Argentina airport in 90 minutes and will be home mid-day tomorrow with plenty of time to vote.
God bless America, land that I love.
The Adventure continues,
Marc
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Woof comrades!
If you need a ride to the polls, just get drunk and passout in front of your house. ACORN will be by shortly to carry you to the nearest voting place and remind you who to vote for.
P.C.
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Can Republicans sell the old style pitch to the changing face of America? I don't think so.
Immigrants of today are less likely from Europe and are Latinos from S and C America and Asians and a smaller number from the Middle East. They come from places where they are used to government control. If they come here and government is their nanny they don't have a problem with that.
They are happy for it.
What ever they do they have to face demographics and what appeals to the Evangelical Right is not the same although we have to find common shared values.
Rove is up there saying that Latinos tend to be social conservatives with family values and work ethic. Maybe, but most of the ones I know also want free health care, and big government social programs.
It is more than just salesmenship. You can say 5 + 1 instead of 3 + 3 but the answer is still 6.
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Where Was the Ad?
And there must be some excellent reason we didn’t see this from the McCain campaign, right? Right?
By Bill Whittle
Of the many — actually, it approaches infinite — missed Republican opportunities of this campaign season, I feel there is one so obvious I had to try to remedy it — personally.
It’s just a few hours until the polls open, but I wanted it out there just so I could say it was. Here you go.
My friends, I’m John McCain. Back in 2002, I fought hard to limit the amount of money in politics. I thought it was corrosive and anti-democratic. Public financing of campaigns has long been a Democratic rallying cry, and I crossed the aisle to work with my colleague, Senator Russ Feingold, to pass legislation limiting the amount of money being pumped into campaigns. Nothing I have done has damaged me more with the base of my own party, but I thought it was the right thing to do, so I did it.
During the primaries, both Senator Obama and I agreed to make this campaign about issues and not about money, and I was proud and pleased when he joined me in a pledge to accept public financing for the general election.
However, back in June, Senator Obama renounced that pledge. Once it became clear that he could raise more money by breaking his promise – not just to me, and to America, but to the Democratic Party ideal they have fought for for so long – once he realized he could raise more money by breaking that promise, he broke it.
I did not.
So now, Senator Obama has raised over $600 million dollars. Because I remained committed to a principle we both agreed upon, he is able to outspend me at least seven to one. Remember that, next time you see an ad run by Senator Obama. Or the next one. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. Or the one after that.
And if that doesn’t bother you – at least a little – just ask yourself one question: What if Senator Obama, running on a platform of Change and “a new kind of politics” was the one to accept public financing, and the Republican opponent did not. What if the Democrat, true to his principles and a personal pledge, held true to his beliefs, while the Republican raised six hundred million dollars and turned off the standard credit card anti-fraud protections while doing so? What if the Republican outspent the democrat more than seven to one, and, as a result was up by a few points in key battlefield states.
What would you think then?
Would you not be inclined to say he “bought the election?” And do you think, in the face of that advantage, that anyone will ever accept public financing again?
And what if, in the face of that disadvantage, all you had to trust and depend on was the fundamental integrity of the press to present whatever damaging information they and their army of reporters could uncover, on either candidate?
What if they too failed to live up to their obligation to you? Then where would this principled stand leave you?
I’m John McCain, and I approved this message.
— Bill Whittle lives in Los Angeles and is an on-air commentator for www.pjtv.com. You can find him online at www.ejectejecteject.com.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjhhMWQ4NjVhNTQyMDAwYjM4MTA1NDcxOTI0YmM4NTY=
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Bringing this over from the Rant thread:
I think these comments pretty sharp:
" My question, did McCain fight Republicans when they were right or did he fight them when they were wrong?
His biggest fights were: Campaign finance reform - a HORRIBLE law that led to his own demise. Opposing Bush tax cuts - wrong by his own admission. Opposing drilling in ANWR - political fodder, had nothing to do with the environment or the caribou and just conceded a huge symbolic point to the opposition. Immigration - caved on principle and lawfulness just to pander to a totally unappreciative audience. Supported cap and trade - don't get me started, the best explanation was Obama's saying he looked forward to bankrupting the clean coal industry and McCain did not and could not draw a distinction! My outlets are connected to coal and no one is building nuclear or anything else to replace it. McCain conceded the issue before the general election began. Torture - McCain has credibility here, but drew blurry lines impugning the Americans and hurting the war effort. Spending - I know he opposes earmarks, a minor item, but why didn't he scream bloody murder as Republicans poured more and more money into ALL spending. If he did I didn't hear it. And for all his fighting with his own party, he failed to pin blame for the subprime industry or any other else on his opponents. He's just too nice of a guy, so he let's Bush and the republicans take full blame with his silence. (Skipping over some things he did right - this is a rant)
"McCain fought Republicans hard but if he had won he helped in leaving fewer Republicans around to support him. Zero coattails even in losing. Of course a McCain presidency would also have been a failure with the Pelosi-Reid congress setting most of the agenda.
"One example I posted previously of McCain hurting Republicans was our other senator from MN, Amy Klobuchar, a political clone of Hillary without all the charisma. Every time her opponent tried to paint her as too liberal for MN she managed to point out that she had John McCain on her side of a vote or issue, opposing tax cuts, drilling, etc."
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Six months to a year and the public will want the adults in charge again.
What a sad statement on your part. And how incredibly immature.
Had McCain won with 62% of the youth vote you'd be jumping for joy. The energy and enthusiasm that goes with this win carries beyond age, race, or party. I have NEVER seen people in the street, around the world, celebrating a presidential win. A win like this re-energizes the base, which in turn gets more people involved, which in turn means more people wanting to work for their country, state, and yes, even government. When is the last time THE WORLD was excited about a presidential win. My god man, that means that government actually want to talk to us again, do business with us again, actually like us again. And you want to complain? Please.
People were tired of the b.s., tired of the pessimism, tired of the same old same old. And they voted to do something about it. Do they know what is going to happen? No. But they are willing to take a chance on anything but the usual. The election results show that.
The Republicans blew it, and in the process quite possibly fractured their party beyond repair. They have a lot of work to do, and the usual negative attacks and rants aren't going to work anymore. McCain got his a** handed to him. By a black man. With a funny name. And not only are people o.k. with that, they are HAPPY about it.
The demographic breakdowns that are starting to come in from this election are showing that across the board EVERYONE wanted someone else to be in charge. Not just the "young and naive"
Deal with the loss. Don't be a sore loser.
Or to quote one of my best friends (and a staunch conservative) from both the 2000 and 2004 elections:
YOU LOST, SUCK IT UP AND MOVE ON...
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Quote from: G M on Today at 10:28:04 AM
...Our first "affirmative action" president will have people wistfully longing for W...
Do you really believe this !?! "Affirmative actions", people voted for him BECAUSE he is black!!!! PLEASE!!!! rolleyes
I guess its that white liberal guilt which explains NY, NJ,CT,MA,ME what about the rest of the country?
Vince
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Six months to a year and the public will want the adults in charge again.
What a sad statement on your part. And how incredibly immature.
**Try hardnosed pragmatism.**
Had McCain won with 62% of the youth vote you'd be jumping for joy. The energy and enthusiasm that goes with this win carries beyond age, race, or party. I have NEVER seen people in the street, around the world, celebrating a presidential win.
**No one was happier than our enemies. I'm sure that there were cries of "Allah Akbar" in the caves along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and the remains of the AQ cells in Iraq.**
A win like this re-energizes the base, which in turn gets more people involved, which in turn means more people wanting to work for their country, state, and yes, even government. When is the last time THE WORLD was excited about a presidential win. My god man, that means that government actually want to talk to us again, do business with us again, actually like us again. And you want to complain? Please.
**The ugly collision with reality will drain the delusion from the Obama Kool-aid drinkers.**
People were tired of the b.s., tired of the pessimism, tired of the same old same old. And they voted to do something about it. Do they know what is going to happen? No. But they are willing to take a chance on anything but the usual. The election results show that.
**Sure. Let's go with the novelty act. Government as a reality TV show. Let's vote the old warrior off and go with the charming, good looking guy. Qualifications be dammned.**
The Republicans blew it, and in the process quite possibly fractured their party beyond repair. They have a lot of work to do, and the usual negative attacks and rants aren't going to work anymore. McCain got his a** handed to him. By a black man. With a funny name. And not only are people o.k. with that, they are HAPPY about it.
**Like I said, we'll see in 6 months to a year how happy everyone is with this selection.**
The demographic breakdowns that are starting to come in from this election are showing that across the board EVERYONE wanted someone else to be in charge. Not just the "young and naive"
Deal with the loss. Don't be a sore loser.
**In the big picture, I could care less about the republican party. My concern is the future of this nation. We face a nuclear jihadist Iran because of Jimmy Carter's weakness. In the midst of a war for our survival, we go with the sleazy machine politician from Chicago with NO accomplishments to his record, aside from avoiding being held accountable for the ring of terrorists, bigots and America-hating leftists that make up his social circle.**
Or to quote one of my best friends (and a staunch conservative) from both the 2000 and 2004 elections:
YOU LOST, SUCK IT UP AND MOVE ON...
**We all lost. You just don't know it yet. Maybe I'm wrong. I guess I'll wait for 1/21/2009 to see the rainbows, unicorns and gumdrops as all the bad things disappear.**
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Quote from: G M on Today at 10:28:04 AM
...Our first "affirmative action" president will have people wistfully longing for W...
Do you really believe this !?! "Affirmative actions", people voted for him BECAUSE he is black!!!! PLEASE!!!! rolleyes
I guess its that white liberal guilt which explains NY, NJ,CT,MA,ME what about the rest of the country?
Vince
**Would a "Barry O'Malley" with the same lack of qualifications be the president-elect right now?**
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**Yes, the "world" celebrates, indeed.**
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=80180
ELECTION 2008
Hamas praises Obama win as 'historic victory for world'
Terrorists drafting letter of congrats to be sent directly to president-elect
Posted: November 05, 2008
12:16 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
JERUSALEM – The Hamas terrorist group believes the election of Sen. Barack Obama is an "historic victory" for the world and an opportunity to change U.S. foreign policy toward engagement with America's foes, Ahmed Yousef, Hamas' chief political adviser in the Gaza Strip, told WND in an exclusive interview today.
Yousef, speaking by cell phone from Gaza, said Hamas is drafting a letter of congratulation to be sent tomorrow directly to Obama. He said the current draft of the letter praises the president-elect as "another John F. Kennedy, or great Roosevelt."
"We want to be one of the first to congratulate him," Yousef said.
"This is an historic day, a turning point. I think this is the very first time in history that one country's election concerned everyone everywhere all over [the] world," said Yousef. "Everybody is looking forward to Obama's change, for a change in the U.S. policy, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, which is the mother of all conflicts."
Yousef told WND he believes an Obama administration will be more willing to engage in dialogue with Hamas.
He said Obama's job will be to "restore America's dignity in the world and put an end to the wars in the region."
Yousef took the occasion to blast the policies of President Bush, commenting he hopes "that after January the Bush administration will not be heard from again."
"We are sick of wars and conflict," the Hamas official said.
Yousef seemed aware his comments and Hamas' expected letter to Obama may generate some negative publicity for Obama, but he said he feels it important to "reach out and to express our thoughts and engage."
"I praised him six months ago, some people tried to use that against him. But I knew he would win. Like everyone else, we expected this important victory," he said.
Yousef was referring to an interview he gave to WND and WABC Radio in April in which he praised Obama and then found his comments had fueled a firestorm of accusations in the presidential campaign.
In April, Yousef stated he hoped Obama would become president and compared the Illinois senator to President John F. Kennedy.
"We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election," Yousef told WND at the time.
"I hope Mr. Obama and the Democrats will change the political discourse. ... I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance," Yousef said.
Sen. John McCain repeatedly used Yousef's remarks to criticize Obama's foreign policy.
Obama has condemned Hamas as a terrorist group that should be isolated until it recognizes Israel. He claimed McCain was using the Hamas comments as a "smear."
Hamas is responsible for scores of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings and cross-border raids. Its official charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel. Just today, Hamas members took responsibility for launching dozens of rockets from Gaza aimed at Jewish civilian population centers.
To interview Aaron Klein, contact M. Sliwa Public Relations by e-mail, or call 973-272-2861 or 212-202-4453.
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I think nearly every country and political leader in the world has sent congratulations including but not only the Hamas. As for engaging in dialogue
I believe even McCain two years ago was suggesting the same. From negotiation may come peace. Obviously current tactics aren't working. Maybe
that is why Obama was elected by a landslide?
Regarding McCain and the Hamas:
Rubin has written an op-ed in Friday's Washington Post about his exchange with McCain, and The Huffington Post has obtained exclusive video. Here's the key excerpt:
RUBIN: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"
McCAIN: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."
I think the world hopes that Obama finds the solution so that people can have " security and a decent life and a decent future".
I think and nearly everyone else in the world (including our allies) thinks that an open mind might find solutions.
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Hey JDN,
Why don't you address your unfounded smears of Michelle Malkin before you post anything else? Remember your "unabashed dislike for all blacks" claim? Back it up or shut up.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/05/and-the-real-winner-ispeggy-the-moocher/
A good example of the "re-energized base".
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Hey JDN,
Why don't you address your unfounded smears of Michelle Malkin before you post anything else? Remember your "unabashed dislike for all blacks" claim? Back it up or shut up.
Ahh gee GM to quote someone else earlier on this forum who quoted another conservative; "YOU LOST (BIG TIME) SUCK IT UP AND MOVE ON..."
I guess that pretty well sums it up. :evil:
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JDN,
You are a perfect example of the **EDITED**
Guess you don't have have the minimum integrity to try to back up your baseless smear. Your lack of character is evident to all.
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Ahhhh GM "YOU LOST, SUCK IT UP..." wasn't my quote, it was from another of your fans. :-D
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World leaders' quotes on Obama election win
Wed Nov 5, 2008 5:56am EST
LONDON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama won an extraordinary two-year struggle for the White House, beating Republican John McCain and becoming the first black president in U.S. history.
Following are quotes from world leaders:
YULIA TYMOSHENKO, UKRAINIAN PRIME MINISTER
"Your victory is an inspiration for us. That which appeared impossible has become possible."
FRANCO FRATTINI, ITALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER
"Europe which is celebrating (the victory of) Obama must know that Europe be will be called on to be a producer of security and no longer merely a consumer. I think Obama will rightly call on us to take our responsibilities more seriously."
CELSO AMORIM, BRAZILIAN FOREIGN MINISTER
"In this case hope has won over prejudice -- this is good for the United States and the world as a whole."
GRIGORY KARASIN, RUSSIAN DEPUTY FOREIGN MINISTER
"The news we are receiving on the results of the American presidential election shows that everyone has the right to hope for a freshening of U.S. approaches to all the most complex issues, including foreign policy and therefore relations with the Russian Federation as well."
HOSHIYAR ZEBARI, IRAQI FOREIGN MINISTER
"I think you will hear a lot of discussion and goals and slogans during the election campaigns. When there is a reality check I think any U.S. president has to look very hard at the facts on the ground."
**Translation: Please don't abandon us and our families to mass graves like previous democrats did to the Vietnamese.**
TZIPI LIVNI, ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTER
"Israel expects the close strategic cooperation with the new administration, president and Congress will continue along with the continued strengthening of the special and unshakeable special relationship between the two countries."
**Translation: Please don't abandon us and our families to mass graves like previous democrats did to the Vietnamese.**
MOHAMED MAHDI AKEF, LEADER OF THE EGYPTIAN MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, ONE OF THE LARGEST ISLAMIST GROUPS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
"We congratulate (Obama) on the confidence of the American people in him and we hope that he will change the policy of the United States toward the Middle East and toward the crimes which are happening in Afghanistan and Somalia, in other words that he adopts a just policy that restores to America its natural position of respect for humankind and democracy."
**Allah Akbar! The kufir are weakening in their resolve and our jihad is winning!**
REV, FEDERICO LOMBARDI, POPE BENEDICT'S SPOKESMAN
"Believers are praying that God will enlighten him and help him in his great responsibility, which is enormous because of the global importance of the United States...We hope Obama can fulfil the expectations and hopes that many have in him."
YOUSAF RAZA GILANI, PAKISTANI PRIME MINISTER
"Your election marks a new chapter in the remarkable history of the United States. For long, the ideas of democracy, liberty and freedom espoused by the United States has been a source of inspiration...I hope that under your dynamic leadership, the United States will continue to be a source of global peace and new ideas for humanity."
MANMOHAN SINGH, INDIAN PRIME MINISTER
"Your extraordinary journey to the White House will inspire people not only in your country but also around the world."
ALI AL-SADIG, SUDANESE FOREIGN MINISTRY SPOKESMAN
"We don't expect any change through our previous experience with the Democrats ... When it comes to foreign policy there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats."
JAN PETER BALKENENDE, DUTCH PRIME MINISTER
"The necessity for cooperation between Europe and the United States is bigger than ever. Only by close transatlantic cooperation can we face the world's challenges."
NICOLAS SARKOZY, FRENCH PRESIDENT
"With the world in turmoil and doubt, the American people, faithful to the values that have always defined America's identity, have expressed with force their faith in progress and the future. At a time when we must face huge challenges together, your election has raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond."
HAMID KARZAI, AFGHAN PRESIDENT
"I applaud the American people for their great decision and I hope that this new administration in the United States of America, and the fact of the massive show of concern for human beings and lack of interest in race and color while electing the president, will go a long way in bringing the same values to the rest of world sooner or later."
GORDON BROWN, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
"Barack Obama ran an inspirational campaign, energizing politics with his progressive values and his vision for the future. I know Barack Obama and we share many values. We both have determination to show that government can act to help people fairly through these difficult times facing the global economy."
MWAI KIBAKI, KENYAN PRESIDENT
"We the Kenyan people are immensely proud of your Kenyan roots. Your victory is not only an inspiration to millions of people all over the world, but it has special resonance with us here in Kenya."
JOSE MANUEL BARROSO, EUROPEAN COMMISSION PRESIDENT
"We need to change the current crisis into a new opportunity. We need a new deal for a new world. I sincerely hope that with the leadership of President Obama, the United States of America will join forces with Europe to drive this new deal. For the benefit of our societies, for the benefit of the world."
HU JINTAO, CHINESE PRESIDENT
"The Chinese Government and I myself have always attached great importance to China-U.S. relations. In the new historic era, I look forward to working together with you to continuously strengthen dialogue and exchanges between our two countries."
**We're going to roll you like a drunken sailor.**
ANGELA MERKEL, GERMAN CHANCELLOR
"I offer you my heartfelt congratulations on your historic victory in the presidential election.
"The world faces significant challenges at the start of your term. I am convinced that Europe and the United States will work closely and in a spirit of mutual trust together to confront new dangers and risks and will seize the opportunities presented by our global world."
TARO ASO, JAPANESE PRIME MINISTER
"The Japan-U.S. alliance is key to Japanese diplomacy and it is the foundation for peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. With President-elect Obama, I will strengthen the Japan-U.S. alliance further and work toward resolving global issues such as the world economy, terror and the environment."
KGALEMA MOTLANTHE, SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT
"Africa, which today stands proud of your achievements, can only but look forward to a fruitful working relationship with you both at a bilateral and multilateral levels in our endeavor to create a better world for all who live in it."
STEPHEN HARPER, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER
"I look forward to meeting with the President-elect so that we can continue to strengthen the special bond that exists between Canada and the United States."
KEVIN RUDD, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER
"Senator Obama's message of hope is not just for America's future, it is also a message of hope for the world as well. A world which is now in many respects fearful for its future."
HELEN CLARK, NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER
"Senator Obama will be taking office at a critical juncture. There are many pressing challenges facing the international community, including the global financial crisis and global warming. We look forward to working closely with President-elect Obama and his team to address these challenges."
SUSILO BAMBANG YUDHOYONO, INDONESIAN PRESIDENT
Indonesia especially hopes that the U.S., under new leadership, will stand in the front and take real action to overcome the global financial crisis, especially since the crisis was triggered by the financial conditions in the U.S."
GLORIA MACAPAGAL ARROYO, PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT
"We welcome his triumph in the same vein that we place the integrity of the US electoral process and the choices made by the American people in high regard. We likewise note the making of history with the election of Senator Obama as the first African-American president of the United States."
ALI AGHAMOHAMMADI, CLOSE AIDE TO IRAN'S MOST POWEFUL FIGURE
AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI
"The president-elect has promised changes in policies. There is a capacity for the improvement of ties between America and Iran if Obama pursues his campaign promises, including not confronting other countries as Bush did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also concentrating on America's state matters and removing the American people's concerns."
**Allah Akbar! The kufir are weakening in their resolve and our jihad is winning!**
SAEB EREKAT, AIDE TO PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD ABBAS
"We hope the president-elect in the United States will stay the course and would continue the U.S. engagement in the peace process without delay. We hope the two-state vision would be transferred from a vision to a realistic track immediately."
**Allah Akbar! The kufir are weakening in their resolve and our jihad is winning! Death to Israel!**
(Compiled by Asia Desk)
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Ahhhh GM "YOU LOST, SUCK IT UP..." wasn't my quote, it was from another of your fans. :-D
I have no problem with being told "You lost, suck it up". I have a problem with you, JDN. You lack any integrity. You smear and can't back it up. Let's compare that to SB_Mig, who can defend his points and debate honestly.
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You are right; leave SB_Mig out of it; he's a great guy. I'll say it.
YOU LOST (BIG TIME) SUCK IT UP!
I have to be careful I am laughing too hard, but it's hard to stop. :evil:
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Probably as hard as it is for you to stop telling lies about Michelle Malkin. Yes?
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AHEM.
I agree fully that JDN has failed to back up his accusations of MM. IMHO the honorable thing to do would be to back them up or withdraw the accusations. That said, there is a personal tone to the attacks that is dissonant with the code here of speaking to each other as we would if were having a conversation over dinner.
This is out of line: "You are a perfect example of the dishonorable scum I despise. Maybe we'll meet in a dojo someday. We'll see how loud you bray then."
Bad dog.
Withdrawing these words would be appropriate.
Please adjust accordingly.
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Quote from: G M on Today at 10:28:04 AM
...Our first "affirmative action" president will have people wistfully longing for W...
Do you really believe this !?! "Affirmative actions", people voted for him BECAUSE he is black!!!! PLEASE!!!! rolleyes
I guess its that white liberal guilt which explains NY, NJ,CT,MA,ME what about the rest of the country?
Vince
**Would a "Barry O'Malley" with the same lack of qualifications be the president-elect right now?**
Don't t know, maybe , maybe not. Given then state of the economy, 2 wars, the state of the republican party and the less than stellar campaign McCain ran. Probably.
If O'Malley did run he would still be the 2nd "ethnic" president, JFK being the first.
Vince
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Was his being black helpful or hurtful to his candidacy?
IMHO he would not have even been noticed but for his being black, let alone being aided and abetted by a shameless and dishonest MSM.
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I think a "Barry O'Malley" would have gotten steamrolled by Hillary without her even bothering to learn his name. He wouldn't have made it out of NH.
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AHEM.
I agree fully that JDN has failed to back up his accusations of MM. IMHO the honorable thing to do would be to back them up or withdraw the accusations. That said, there is a personal tone to the attacks that is dissonant with the code here of speaking to each other as we would if were having a conversation over dinner.
This is out of line: "You are a perfect example of the dishonorable scum I despise. Maybe we'll meet in a dojo someday. We'll see how loud you bray then."
Bad dog.
Withdrawing these words would be appropriate.
Crafty, perhaps not to your and GM's satisfaction, I know you like MM, but I did point out MM's relation to DARE - a White Supremacy group.
Also, and perhaps more important to me (I have numerous Japanese friends and travel to Japan frequently) was her comment that rounding up Japanese/Americans was "wrong and abhorrent".
I agree, but then subsequently (shock journalism) two years later she wrote a book defending their imprisonment. That's racist.
Hypocrisy. She is an anchor baby (fine with me). Her parents did not have a permanent VISA. Rather, they had a temporary VISA (legal), yet MM ridicules Koreans for example and others who are here on
a similar and legal VISAs but also do not have a permanent residence VISA calling them all sorts of horrid names. Yet MM herself would not be eligible for citizenship anymore than they would yet she criticizes
and focuses on minorities who have babies here and obtain citizenship just like MM did. That's hypocrisy in my book.
And finally, I did say the topic was boring to me. I politely said, "Let's move on". That is the same I would say at your dinner table. Further, I did try to move on and posted an article on health care on
health care in America and universal health care in Canada. GM would not let up.
GM said,
"You are a perfect example of the dishonorable scum I despise. Maybe we'll meet in a dojo someday. We'll see how loud you bray then."
I don't know about your dinner table, but at my table and at my friend's table the host would have demanded and apology from GM and/or asked him to leave. My friends would not tolerate GM's behavior.
It's one thing to disagree; that is why were are here to discuss these items. But to make it "personal" and threatening is inappropriate in my opinion. Just my opinion...
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Was his being black helpful or hurtful to his candidacy?
IMHO he would not have even been noticed but for his being black, let alone being aided and abetted by a shameless and dishonest MSM.
There have been other black Presidential hopefuls, although BO was the first candidate that could be taken seriously. Initially yeah being black brought BO notoriety, but if he was like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton you still think he would have won? Hell no!
Vince
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Once he entered the spotlight, he got marketed as the "post-racial" candidate, despite his being a creature of Chicago racial politics. Of course, the MSM couldn't be bothered to examine this.
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"but if he was like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton you still think he would have won? Hell no!"
Umm, , , as I see it, that is not the point. The comparison is not with obvious race baiting scum bag professional negroes like those two, the point is whether a glib white candidate with his de minimis qualifications and history of scuzzy associations (Frank Davis Marshal, Ayres & Dorn, the whacko preacher, ACORN, the CAIR connection to his getting into Harvard, not keeping track of the nationality of hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, etc, etc etc) would have gotten the same blind eye treatment and overwhelming support that BO did.
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***YOU LOST, SUCK IT UP AND MOVE ON...***
As someone who voted for McCain I actually agree with you 100%.
The Republicans lost. As a "moderate" Republican I am deeply saddened but not surpirsed at the literally stubborn stupidy of talk radio including Rush Limbaugh and Shawn Hannity neither of which speak for me anymore.
If the Republicans continue with the same losing messages they are doomed. Now their mantra is that W just didn't stay true to their roots, etc. and that is the cause for this huge party defeat.
What Goddam fools, and in total denial.
The reason we had "compassionate conservatism" in the first place was because Rove and others recognized that strict classic Reagonics is doomed and does not speak to the "growing" majority of this country who are simply not expanding their share of the pie like the wealthy have been. That *is* why BO won. End of story. Until the Right recognizes this and finds a way to deal with this they are doomed. Unfortunately, the party is held hostage by "strict" conservatives like those two talk show hosts I speak of.
Let them continue with their rants. They do sound more and more like just a bunch of bigoted out of touch and just rich white guys. I am saddened by this because I used to like Rush. Hannity is just a right wing political hack. While I more often then not agree with him he is just a talking points narrow minded guy. He doesn't speak for me. I still like Mark Levin and Bob Grant.
We need to support BO. He just may be a great President. I am sick of the party bickering. I hate the crats who did everything they could to destroy W the last several years. They spend more time playing their Goddam party politics for persona power than caring about the country. I have no illusions about what lying scum they are with this speak of "bipartisinship" and "reaching out" to Republicans they pretend they are going to do. We all know that is nonsense. Now they are in almost total power they speak of this. What crap. Yet I don't Repbuplicans to paly the opposite game. Lets get this country going. Rebublicans should just be patient and analyze what happens and plan for the future. Their time will come again, but only if they come up with real ideas for *change* that reaches everyone and people at their dinner tables can relate to as Rove states. I think Rove has it right.
We will see. But I am sicikened by some of the cans. Now the Far Right talk radio propagandists down moderates liike me. I am beggining to wonder if we need a new party without them.
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JDN,
I already edited my inappropriate comments this morning. From what your more recent post, I see that I also need to say that I should not have gone personal in my comments and for that I am sorry
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"The reason we had "compassionate conservatism" in the first place was because Rove and others recognized that strict classic Reagonics is doomed and does not speak to the "growing" majority of this country who are simply not expanding their share of the pie like the wealthy have been."
Disagree. Bush 1 lost his re-election because he welched on his "Read my lips- no new taxes" and because Ross Perot allowed
Slick Willie to win with 43% of the vote. Newt Gingrich did not take back the Congress for the Republicans by being a moderate-- he took it back with forthright Win-win Reaganism.
Bush went with "Compassionate Conservatism" because he lacked the chops to defend freedom-- probably because inside he knew he was a child of patrician privilege.
"That *is* why BO won. End of story. Until the Right recognizes this and finds a way to deal with this they are doomed. Unfortunately, the party is held hostage by "strict" conservatives like those two talk show hosts I speak of."
I haven't listened to Rush much recently, (too little content to time ratio, and at that time of day I am not in my car) and find Hannity to be an , , , anus. That said, what you say here would make sense only if McCain had run as a conservative!
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Rebublicans should just be patient and analyze what happens and plan for the future. Their time will come again, but only if they come up with real ideas for *change* that reaches everyone and people at their dinner tables can relate to as Rove states.
Their time will come again, there is no doubt. Everything is cyclical. Unfortunately for the Republicans, they seem to have their work cut out for them.
1) Huge demographic shift - Youth and Latino vote pulled hard for Obama in this election. An energized youth (with or without direction) makes for a powerful voting block. Reagan was able to attract young voters, McCain blew them off. Huge mistake. If you can't energize the youth and pull them to your side, you lose a generations worth of votes. And the Latino vote is a huge prize for either party, due to what is bound to be exponential growth in the future.
2) Message? The question I heard from both conservatives and liberals in the last couple of weeks was "What can the Republicans do for me?" It seems that the McCain campaign was so busy trying to paint Obama as the bad guy, that they forgot to remind people what they stood for. How now do the Republicans refine/define their message. And to whom do they try to speak?
3) Direction... Where do the Republicans go from here? More moderate? It seems that many were wooed by what some conservatives (Bay Buchanan just this morning) are calling Obama's centrist message. Or do they go with the populist message of Sarah Palin (who is being thrown under the bus as I type this)? Several Republicans have made the point that the "Reagan Era" is dead. They say the movers within this movement are old, they can't inspire the youth, and they are out of touch. How do Republicans reconnect with a populace that has apparently abandoned their stance?
I think we are in for a very interesting next few years. A good friend of mine predicted the end of either party regardless of electoral outcome. I can see both parties fractionalizing as their various factions fight for a piece of the voting pie.
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Crafty,
I must disagree. Bush seniors approval ratings went from 90%+ofter desert storm to a lot less because he didn't speak to the recession going on while Clinton did. He just sat back at said a let the market take care of itself. Meanwhile his poll numbers sank while Clinton's rose. And to think Clinton who was a big underdog against a known entity with previously sky high approval ratings.
I don't follow your reasoning on McCain. I think if McCain had run as a stricter conservative he would have lost by even bigger margins. Romney would have gotten wiped all over the floor IMO.
I don't believe about these polls Hannity sites in *swing* states.
For goodness sakes the entire Northeast as well as the WEst and expanding into the Southwest is turning die hard Democrat.
What are the conservatives talking about? Open their eyes.
I mean I could be wrong but I don't see your conclusions at all.
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Bush was a Patrician and was rejected for it.
The problem with McCain is that the man is inarticulate, and lacks comprehension of economics. Much of what he sincerely is, is a Democrat, not a Maverick.
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JDN,
I already edited my inappropriate comments this morning. From what your more recent post, I see that I also need to say that I should not have gone personal in my comments and for that I am sorry
GM; thank you.
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http://www.feministing.com/archives/012032.html
Women voted for Obama by 12 percentage points
Even in solidly Republican Texas, 52 percent of women voted for Mr. Obama.
96 percent of African-American women and 70 percent of Latino women voted for Obama.
Unmarried women gave Obama a margin of victory of more than 12 million votes.
Exit Polls
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26843704/
Some really interesting election maps including " cartograms " of the 2008 US presidential election results
<http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/>
cartogram--- a map in which the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual area on the ground. On such a map, for example, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.
McCain's concession speech was his best speech ever in my opinion and very impressive. Why didn't he sound like the John McCain of 2000 months ago.
Juan William who was not an Obama supporter had some very touching commentary on Fox news.
http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html?playerId=videolandingpage&streamingFormat=FLASH&referralObject=3177862&referralPlaylistId=949437d0db05ed5f5b9954dc049d70b0c12f2749
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McCain's concession speech was his best speech ever in my opinion and very impressive. Why didn't he sound like the John McCain of 2000 months ago.
I as everyone knows I was/am an Obama fan, BUT I too thought that was an outstanding speech. Who is this guy? I was truly impressed. He could/should
have won if he just talked like he did in this speech. He is not eloquent, but it was very personal and close to the heart. And very persuasive. Heck,
after listening to him, I even wanted to vote for him. Why couldn't he show this side before?
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I had a similar reaction to Romney's concession speech, except that this one was so much more.
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Buyer's remorse. Just wait....
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This perfectly captures my take on the election:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/11/election-analysis-america-can-take-pride-in-this-historic-inspirational-disaster.html
Election Analysis: America Can Take Pride In This Historic, Inspirational Disaster
Although I have not always been the most outspoken advocate of President-Elect Barack Obama, today I would like to congratulate him and add my voice to the millions of fellow citizens who are celebrating his historic and frightening election victory. I don't care whether you are a conservative or a liberal -- when you saw this inspiring young African-American rise to our nation's highest office I hope you felt the same sense of patriotic pride that I experienced, no matter how hard you were hyperventilating with deep existential dread.
Yes, I know there are probably other African-Americans much better qualified and prepared for the presidency. Much, much better qualified. Hundreds, easily, if not thousands, and without any troubling ties to radical lunatics and Chicago mobsters. Gary Coleman comes to mind. But let's not let that distract us from the fact that Mr. Obama's election represents a profound, positive milestone in our country's struggle to overcome its long legacy of racial divisions and bigotry. It reminds us of how far we've come, and it's something everyone in our nation should celebrate in whatever little time we now have left.
Less than fifty years ago, African-Americans were barred from public universities, restaurants, and even drinking fountains in many parts of the country. On Tuesday we came together and transcended that shameful legacy, electing an African-American to the country's top job -- which, in fact, appears to be his first actual job. Certainly, it doesn't mean that racism has disappeared in America, but it is an undeniable mark of progress that a majority of voters no longer consider skin color nor a dangerously gullible naivete as a barrier to the presidency.
It's also heartening to realize that as president Mr. Obama will soon be working hand-in-hand with a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard like Senator Robert Byrd to craft the incoherent and destructive programs that will plunge the American economy into a nightmare of full-blown sustained depression. As Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has repeatedly warned, there will be difficult times ahead and the programs will not always be popular, or even sane. But as we look out over the wreckage of bankrupt coal companies, nationalized banks, and hyperinflation, we can always look back with sustained pride on the great National Reconciliation of 2008. Call me an optimist, but I like to think when America's breadlines erupt into riots it will be because of our shared starvation, not the differences in our color.
It's obvious that this newfound pride is not confined to Americans alone. All across the world, Mr. Obama's election has helped mend America's tattered image as a racist, violent cowboy, willing to retaliate with bombs at the slightest provocation. The huge outpouring of international support following the election shows that America can still win new friendships while rebuilding its old ones, and provides Mr. Obama with unprecedented diplomatic leverage over our remaining enemies. When Russian tanks start pouring into eastern Europe and Iranian missiles begin raining down on Jerusalem, their leaders will know they will be facing a man who not only conquered America's racial divide but the hearts of the entire Cannes film community. And those Al Qaeda terrorists plotting a dirty nuke or chemical attack on San Francisco face a stark new reality: while they may no longer need to worry about US Marines, they are looking down the barrel of a strongly worded diplomatic condemnation by a Europe fully united in their deep sympathy for surviving Americans.
So for now, let's put politics aside and celebrate this historic milestone. In his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago, Dr. King said "I have a dream that one day my children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Let us now take pride that Tuesday we Americans proved that neither thing matters anymore.
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Just to be clear I am absolutely thrilled about the idea of President-Elect Obama. I heard from some people who were in Grant Park that it was like 5 minutes of a perfect world. I don't think McCain could have won that election. It just could have been a much better election. McCain lost because no one really liked him. It is the same problem the Democrats had with Kerry. You can't replace something with nothing. ( someone who is not inspiring to the base it is not a comment on the value of John McCain)
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GM: That is very funny in a wicked, deranged sort of way.
Rachel: I disagree that loss was inevitable for McCain. I agree strongly that McCain failed to speak in positives-- indeed I think a large part of BO's appeal was and is his ability to speak in positives-- as vapid and internally incosistent as they may be. The American people were, and are, tired of the Hatfields and McCoy's routine out of the Patricians and Demogogues of Washington.
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Interesting take from Krauthammer. He doesn't take the right's rebuke of McCain. Indded, because McCain tried to please the right wing ideologues by picking Palin he made a devastating choice.
I thought Palin was a good pick but I was wrong. The lesson - you can't take someone who is not prepared and throw them inot a PResidential race at the last minute. BO was not experienced but he had years of preparation. Palin did well considering she was thrown into the fire. I am inclined to think BO may very well be great. It is the typical senerio wherein the opposition in their wishful thinking will underestimate their nemesis. And he will have the adoring MSM on his side to spin everything tohis favor.
I can just hear it now - in four years - "Folks you need to re - elect me so we can finish the great work we have started".
From most though not all the right goes right back to its' pettiness, unwillingness to change or compromise.
****The Campaign Autopsy
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | In my previous life, I witnessed far more difficult postmortems. This one is easy. The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 — caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) — although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4.
In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.
This was not just a meltdown but a panic. For an agonizing few days, there was a collapse of faith in the entire financial system — a run on banks, panicky money-market withdrawals, flights to safety, the impulse to hide one's savings under a mattress.
This did not just have the obvious effect of turning people against the incumbent party, however great or tenuous its responsibility for the crisis. It had the more profound effect of making people seek shelter in government.
After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party's vocation. With a Republican White House having partially nationalized the banks and just about everything else, McCain's final anti-Obama maneuver — Joe the Plumber spread-the-wealth charges of socialism — became almost comical.
We don't yet appreciate how unprecedented were the events of September and October. We have never had a full-fledged financial panic in the middle of a presidential campaign. Consider. If the S&P 500 were to close at the end of the year where it did on Election Day, it will have suffered this year its steepest drop since 1937. That is 71 years.
At the same time, the economy had suffered nine consecutive months of job losses. Considering the carnage to both capital and labor (which covers just about everybody), even a Ronald Reagan could not have survived. The fact that John McCain got 46 percent of the electorate when 75 percent said the country was going in the wrong direction is quite remarkable.
However crushing the external events, McCain did make two significant unforced errors. His suspension of the campaign during the economic meltdown was a long shot that not only failed, it created the McCain-the-erratic meme that deeply undermined his huge advantage over Obama in perception of leadership.
The choice of Sarah Palin was also a mistake. I'm talking here about its political effects, not the sideshow psychodrama of feminist rage and elite loathing that had little to do with politics and everything to do with cultural prejudices, resentments and affectations.
Palin was a mistake (" near suicidal," I wrote on the day of her selection) because she completely undercut McCain's principal case against Obama: his inexperience and unreadiness to lead. And her nomination not only intellectually undermined the readiness argument. It also changed the election dynamic by shifting attention, for days on end, to Palin's preparedness, fitness and experience — and away from Obama's.
McCain thought he could steal from Obama the "change" issue by running a Two Mavericks campaign. A fool's errand from the very beginning. It defied logic for the incumbent-party candidate to try to take "change" away from the opposition. Election Day exit polls bore that out with a vengeance. Voters seeking the "change candidate" went 89 to 9 for Obama.
Which is not to say that Obama did not run a brilliant general election campaign. He did. In its tactically perfect minimalism, it was as well conceived and well executed as the electrifying, highflying, magic carpet ride of his primary victory. By the time of his Denver convention, Obama understood that he had to dispense with the magic and make himself kitchen-table real, accessible and, above all, reassuring. He did that. And when the economic tsunami hit, he understood that all he had to do was get out of the way. He did that too.
With him we get a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin. (I say this admiringly.) With these qualities, Obama will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.
But before our old soldier fades away, it is worth acknowledging that McCain ran a valiant race against impossible odds. He will be — he should be — remembered as the most worthy presidential nominee ever to be denied the prize.****
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http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/11/some-mayhem-arrests-after-obama-rally.html
Some mayhem, arrests after Obama rally
November 5, 2008 at 4:54 PM
At least five people were arrested across the city after Barack Obama's rally in Grant Park, including a woman who slapped a Chicago police officer, saying police couldn't arrest her anymore, prosecutors said today.
Most of the others celebrated the historic occasion with gunfire.
Celita Hart, 19, stood silently in court today when she appeared for a bond hearing.
Prosecutors said Hart, who is black, yelled " 'White [expletive], [expletive] McCain--you white police can't do nothing anymore.'" With that, she reached through the window of a squad car and slapped a white male officer in the face, according to Assistant State's Atty. Lorraine Scaduto.
The incident occurred after police responded to a crowd of people celebrating Obama's win on the corner of 69th Street and Western Avenue. Hart, of the 7100 block of South Rockwell Street, was charged with aggravated battery of a police officer and was ordered her held in lieu of $10,000 bail.
Others who appeared before Circuit Judge Israel Desierto included Andre Murph, 37, of Aurora, who was arrested after police saw him shooting a handgun into the ground on the Southwest Side.
Scaduto said he told the officers he was "shooting to celebrate Obama as president."
Narada Thomas, 23, of the 1200 North Central Avenue, allegedly gave a similar explanation after he was arrested with a handgun near his home. "He said he had the gun because he wanted to celebrate Obama becoming the first black president," Scaduto said.
Kenneth Smith, 24, of the 6700 block of South Ada Street, was arrested after he allegedly fired a handgun outside his home. Smith, who is on parole for a previous weapons conviction, told authorities that "the police only arrested him because a black man won for president," Scaduto said.
Robert Morgan, 54, of the 5700 South Lowe Avenue, appeared to have simply been caught up in the excitement.
When officers arrested him for allegedly firing a handgun into the air from his back porch, "He told the officers, 'Everyone else is shooting off their guns--I figured, why not?'" Scaduto said.
Matthew Walberg, Chicago Breaking News Center
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/08/world/middleeast/08jihadi.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
Jihadi Leader Says Radicals Share Obama Victory
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and SOUAD MEKHENNET
Published: November 7, 2008
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The leader of a jihadi group in Iraq argued Friday that the election of Barack Obama as president represented a victory for radical Islamic groups that had battled American forces since the invasion of Iraq.
The statement, which experts said was part of the psychological duel with the United States, was included in a 25-minute audiotaped speech by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization that claims ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. Baghdadi’s statement was posted on a password-protected Web site called Al Hesbah, used to disseminate information to Islamic radicals.
In his address, Mr. Baghdadi also said that the election of Mr. Obama — and the rejection of the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain — was a victory for his movement, a claim that has already begun to resonate among the radical faithful. In so doing Mr. Baghdadi highlighted the challenge the new president would face as he weighed how to remove troops from Iraq without also giving movements like Al Qaeda a powerful propaganda tool to use for recruiting.
“And the other truth that politicians are embarrassed to admit,” Mr. Baghdadi said, “is that their unjust war on the houses of Islam, with its heavy and successive losses and the continuous operations of exhaustion of your power and your economy, were the principal cause of the collapse of the economic giant.”
The audio statement came amid a very public discussion in the Middle East over what Mr. Obama’s election meant for the future — and what it said about the past. Most of the public reaction, in newspapers and on television and radio stations, was euphoric, with many commentators marveling at the election of a black man whose father was from a Muslim family. There was a general assessment that Mr. Obama’s election was a repudiation of the course taken by President Bush and his inner circle over the past eight years.
“Obama’s election was a message against such destruction, against unjustified wars, wars that are fought with ignorance and rashness, without knowledge of their arenas or the shape of their surroundings,” wrote Ghassan Charbel in Thursday’s issue of the Saudi-owned, pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Hayat. “It was a message against the pattern that became a burden on the U.S. and transformed the U.S. into a burden on the world.”
Some even pointed to Mr. Obama’s election as a lesson to the rest of the region. In Kuwait, Sheik Hamed al-Ali, an Islamic scholar known for his support of jihadi fighters, posted a message titled “We Want Change!” on his Web site.
Sheik Ali said, “It remains the obligation of our Islamic nation to benefit from this example and request change, also, and to get rid of any regime that leads with ignorance and injustice, plunders from the country, enslaves the worshipers, drives us to destruction.” The comments were then circulated on other Islamic Web forums.
But there was also a growing chorus of caution, as commentators began to try to tamp down expectations of any change in American policies in the region. And other commentators echoed Mr. Baghdadi’s view that the election was a victory for the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
“It would be no exaggeration to say that we Arabs and Muslims were the main unseen voters who decided the outcome of these elections,” wrote Abdelbari Atwan in Wednesday’s issue of the London-based pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi.
He wrote, “The transformation that will begin in the U.S. starting today in various political, economic, military, and social domains may well have been delayed for decades, had the new American century been crowned with victory, and had the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan taken the directions sought by the neo-cons — in other words, had there been political stability and economic prosperity, and had the citizens of the two countries targeted by the U.S.’s designs been totally subjugated by it.”
Mr. Baghdadi also used his address to offer Mr. Obama an unlikely deal, one certain to do little to bring any resolution to the conflict between radical Islamic groups and the United States. He offered a truce of sorts in exchange for the removal of all forces from the region.
“On behalf of my brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Chechnya, I offer you what is better for you and us: you return to your previous era of neutrality, you withdraw your forces, and you return to your homes,” Mr. Baghdadi said. “You do not interfere in the affairs of our countries, directly or indirectly. We in turn will not prevent commerce with you, whether it is in oil or otherwise, but with fairness, not at a loss.”
Faris bin Hizam, an expert on Al Qaeda, said the offer of a trade relationship had struck a new note. “How can he call for establishing a relationship with the United States if it withdraws?” Mr. Bin Hizam said. “The main principle of Al Qaeda prohibits any relation with infidels.”
Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher and expert in radical Islamic groups, said that Al Qaeda leaders outside Iraq might balk at such a relationship, but that jihadis might view Mr. Obama’s election as an opportunity.
“Of course there is a shift, because there is a new president who came from an oppressed class, and people who had little opportunity,” Mr. Shehadeh said. “He wants to give Obama the chance to make a change, since Obama has no previous animosity with Islam.”
Intelligence officials working in the region said that they did not see Mr. Obama’s election as having any fundamental effect on Al Qaeda, and that any talk of a truce was likely to go nowhere. But two intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of their work said that they were concerned that any step that could be perceived as a victory for Al Qaeda, like pulling troops out of Iraq right away, would only strengthen its ability to recruit.
“If he withdraws the soldiers from Iraq before the country gets really stable, Al Qaeda will see it as their victory, and they might get stronger again,” one regional intelligence official said. That dynamic was already beginning to play out on Al Hesbah.
As with other Web sites, it is impossible for an outsider to verify the identity, or integrity, of posted comments. But experts recognize Al Hesbah as the one remaining online forum for those aligned with Al Qaeda, after two other Web sites were apparently hacked and taken offline.
On the same day Mr. Baghdadi posted his statement, others chatted about the need to continue the fight against the United States. “All of them are low and dirty, and their hatred of Islam is the same,” one participant wrote. Of Mr. Obama, he wrote, “Even in his speech rejoicing his victory he said, ‘To those who fight us, we will defeat you.’ Let us see who will be victorious.”
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http://www.nypost.com/seven/11102008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_vultures_circle_137964.htm?page=0
THE VULTURES CIRCLE
HOSTILE WORLD TESTING BARACK
A'jad: Sees Obama as potential roadkill.
Posted: 4:54 am
November 10, 2008
THE American people have spoken, and whatever our personal preferences, our duty as citizens is to support our next president. And he's going to need support: The international vultures are already circling.
Immediately upon his inauguration, President Obama will have to demonstrate to allies and enemies alike that he won't be a pushover. Justified or not, the international perception of Obama is that he'll be both passive and a pacifist.
He's going to have to show some Southside Chicago street grit. Fast.
Our enemies haven't wasted any time. The day after our election, President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, speaking for Vladimir Putin, gave a Gucci-loafer version of Premier Nikita Krushchev's shoe-heel-on-the-podium rant of a half-century ago.
In a direct challenge to our president-elect, Medvedev announced that Russia would deploy its latest-generation battlefield missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave between Lithuania and Poland. The Russian president made it clear that the target would be the US ballistic-missile interceptors to be based on Polish soil.
Medvedev's speech then elaborated on the Putin Doctrine: Russia will do what it wants, when it wants, where it wants in the territories that once belonged to the czars.
A day later, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran played good cop to the Russian bad cop, inviting the new US administration to enter direct talks with Tehran. Now, negotiations can be useful - but only when conducted from a position of strength. Unfortunately, the Iranians view our election results as reflecting a greatly weakened American will.
They assess Obama as the perfect patsy, a man who believes in his own powers of persuasion. Drawing out fruitless talks year after year has been Iran's primary technique to protect its pursuit of nukes. Persians are brilliant negotiators. Their position is always, "Well, we might sleep with you . . . next time . . . if you just give us one more present . . ."
And we rush off to Tiffany & Co.
Only the Chinese come close to the Iranian genius for castrating opponents under the negotiating table. Of course, our European allies show up already missing key parts.
By the end of last week, even the Iraqis had swooped down for a bite of roadkill. Brushing President Bush aside (as the Russians, Iranians, Venezuelans and others already have done), Iraqi representatives working on the status-of-forces agreement for our troop presence balked at the previously agreed terms, expecting a better deal from an Obama administration.
One key demand of radical Iraqis is the right to try our troops in Iraqi courts for alleged crimes. Given the present politicized state of the Iraqi legal system, accepting such terms would betray our soldiers.
As a candidate, Obama praised our troops. Will he stand up for them now? Or was his praise pure hypocrisy?
There's much more to come. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and the Castro regime in Cuba have welcomed the election results, anticipating an American retreat from the fight for freedom. As president, it will be Obama's duty to disappoint them. China is facing a serious internal crisis, while terror-tormented Pakistan is broke and begging. A bumper crop of crises is sprouting on every side.
At home, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - a magnificent public servant - has tried to sound the warning that our nuclear arsenal, the ultimate backbone of our national security, has deteriorated badly and must be renewed (not expanded, just updated).
May we hope that the Obama administration, indebted to an extreme left-wing base, will have the audacity to do what is necessary and upgrade our nuclear weapons so that our deterrent remains dependable? The grim paradox of the last 60 years is that humankind's worst weapons were all that prevented another world war.
Today, with faith-drunk fanatics pursuing nukes and old adversaries resharpening their atomic swords, we had best remember that peace is only preserved through evident strength.
President Obama isn't going to enjoy a honeymoon with terrorists, rogue states or opportunistic vultures around the globe. He'll have to establish his leadership credentials immediately, to make it clear that he's America's president, not our liquidator-in-chief.
What could he do to help himself? Three things:
* First, make it clear to all that while America is willing to talk with serious counterparts, we'll expect results, not endless obfuscation.
* Second, beg Secretary Gates to stay on at the Pentagon for at least the first year of transition.
* Third, Obama should nominate that brilliant thug, Richard Holbrooke, as secretary of State. Holbrooke may be the most arrogant man ever to serve in our diplomatic corps (where arrogance has long substituted for competence). But he's also tough, superbly capable and the savviest star in the Democratic constellation when it comes to global affairs.
If Obama wants to project an idealist's image to the world, he's going to need a realist at Foggy Bottom. And someone's going to have to clean up Vice President Joe Biden's inevitable messes. The next four years are going to be interesting.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."
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Move along, nothing to see here.
Milwaukee Puts a Vote-Fraud Cop Out of Business
Local Democrats don't take the issue seriously.
By JOHN FUND
Last week Mike Sandvick, head of the Milwaukee Police Department's five-man Special Investigative Unit, was told by superiors not to send anyone to polling places on Election Day. He was also told his unit -- which wrote the book on how fraud could subvert the vote in his hometown -- would be disbanded.
"We know what to look for," he told me, "and that scares some people." In disgust, Mr. Sandvick plans to retire. (A police spokeswoman claims the unit isn't being disbanded and that any changes to the unit "aren't significant.")
In February, Mr. Sandvick's unit released a 67-page report on what it called an "illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of (the 2004) election in the state of Wisconsin" -- a swing state whose last two presidential races were decided by less than 12,000 votes.
The report found that between 4,600 and 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots. Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once.
Much of the problem resulted from Wisconsin's same-day voter law, which allows anyone to show up at the polls, register and then cast a ballot. ID requirements are minimal. If someone lacks any ID, he can vote so long as someone who lives in the same city vouches for him. The report found that in 2004 a total of 1,305 "same day" voters gave information that was declared "un-enterable" or invalid by election officials.
According to the report, this loophole was abused by many out-of-state workers for the John Kerry campaign. They had "other staff members who were registered voters vouch for them by corroborating their residency."
The investigative unit believed at least 16 workers from the Kerry campaign, and two allied get-out-the-vote groups, "committed felony crimes." But local prosecutors didn't pursue them in part because of a "lack of confidence" in the abysmal record-keeping of the city's Election Commission.
Pat Curley, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's chief of staff, told me he was very upset by the surprise release of the report. "I don't believe all of the facts are necessarily accurate," he said. Which ones? He only cited the report's interpretation of state policy on homeless voters. He denies the mayor's office had any role in disbanding the unit.
Mr. Sandvick says the problems his unit found in 2004 are "only the tip of the iceberg" of what could happen today. His unit has found out-of-state groups registering their temporary workers, a college dorm with 60 voters who aren't students, and what his unit believes are seven illegal absentee ballots.
"The time to stop voter fraud is prior to when the questionable ballot is mixed in with all the valid votes," he says. Former police captain Glenn Frankovis agrees: "This issue could be solved if [the police chief] would assign police officers to the polling locations as was customary about 20 years ago." But election monitors are now viewed as "intimidating" in minority precincts and have been withdrawn.
Mr. Sandvick's report concluded "the one thing that could eliminate a large percentage of the fraud" it found would be elimination of same-day voter registration (which is also in use in seven other states). It also suggested that voters present a photo ID at the polls, a requirement the U.S. Supreme Court declared constitutional this spring.
But weeks after the vote fraud report was released, Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold introduced federal legislation to mandate same-day registration in every state. He claimed the system had worked well in Wisconsin and if "we can bring more people into the process, [it] only strengthens our democracy." Democrats tell me his bill is a top priority of the new Congress.
"They say voter fraud isn't a problem," notes Mr. Sandvick, "but after this election it may be all too clear it is." Now that Mr. Sandvick is resigning from the force after a long, honorable career, let's hope someone else is allowed to follow up on the spadework he's done.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122576113489495571.html
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Woof BBG:
See entry number 42: http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1709.0
@ all:
This matter of vote fraud (notice how I have modified the name of the ACORN thread to the more all encompassing "Vote Fraud" is a profoundly important one. It is the nature of things at this moment that the friends of dishonesty will try to sweep this under the rug. I am hoping that our merry little band of truthseekers here will keep our eye on the ball and continue to share intel here on this issue.
TAC,
Marc
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Obama surfs through
The Obamas are a warm vision for the White House -- but he should strive toward full transparency. Plus: Yes, I still like Sarah Palin!
By Camille Paglia
Nov. 12, 2008 |
Dazed and confused. A week after the election of Barack Obama, millions of American news junkies are in serious cold turkey, the big bump of withdrawal from two years of addiction to the dizzying ups and downs of a campaign that threatened never to end.
Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was "unelectable." Obama's 8 million vote margin over his Republican opponent -- miraculously sparing us endless litigation and chad counting -- was an exhilarating testimony to his personal gifts and power of persuasion. And the formidable Michelle Obama, with her electric combo of brains and style, is already rewriting first ladyhood. The warm partnership of the Obamas (wonderfully caught by the camera as they disappeared offstage after his victory) has set an inspiring standard for modern marriage.
Yes, it's true we know relatively little about Barack Obama, and his triumph is a roll of the dice. But John McCain (like Bob Dole) was a major Republican misfire -- a candidate of personal honor and heroic sacrifice who was woefully inadequate for the times. McCain's lurching grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis made him look like a ham actor on a bender. In debate, McCain was always pugnacious but too often bland or rambling, and he often missed glaring opportunities to score off Obama's vagueness or contradictions.
McCain's brusque treatment of his long-suffering wife, Cindy, was also off-putting -- nowhere more so than after his concession speech, when he barely remembered to give her a perfunctory hug. Probably no one is more relieved by McCain's defeat than Cindy, who seemed too frail and tightly wound for the demanding role of first lady. Now she can slip away once more into blessed privacy.
No one knows whether Obama will move to the center or veer hard left. Perhaps even he doesn't know. But I have great optimism about his political instincts and deftness. He wants to be president of all the people -- if that is possible in so divided a nation. His natural impulse seems to be toward reconciliation and concord. The big question will be how patient the Democratic left wing is in demanding drastic changes in social policy, particularly dicey with a teetering economy.
As I've watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I've been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. A photograph of Obama body surfing on vacation was widely publicized in August. But I'm talking about big-time competitive surfing, as in this stunning video tribute to the death-defying Laird Hamilton (who, like Obama, was raised fatherless in Hawaii). Obama's ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.
In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.
But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.
Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat about Ayers' association with Obama a year ago -- a theme that most of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn't have cared less. I was irritated by Hillary Clinton's aggressive flagging of Ayers in a debate, and I accepted Obama's curt dismissal of the issue.
Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been "pallin' around" with Ayers, in Sarah Palin's memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. Blame for the failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the conservative talk shows, which use the scare term "radical" with simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi.
Pursuing the truth about Ayers, I recently rented the 2002 documentary "The Weather Underground," from Netflix. It was riveting. Although the film seems to waver between ominous exposé and blatant whitewash, the full extent of the group's bombing campaign is dramatically demonstrated. It's not for everyone: The film uses gratuitous cutaways of horrifying carnage, from the Vietnam War to the Manson murders (such as Sharon Tate's smiling corpse, bathed in blood). But the news footage of the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed in 1970 by bomb-making gone wrong in the basement still has enormous impact. Standing in the chaotic street, actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, seems like Everyman at the apocalypse.
Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn -- hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation -- and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it's pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!
The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild!" And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?
"The Weather Underground" never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective's first public communiqué ("Revolutionary violence is the only way") is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer's table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene -- with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket -- was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her "Klute" period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.
Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.
How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don't know their asses from their elbows.
Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology -- contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.
I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.
As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee -- what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry's nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama's pick and who was on everyone's short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin's. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.
The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan -- nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/
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Thanks BBG for that post. I disagree slightly on the Ayers perspective. The attack on Obama regarding Ayers was bungled in my opinion because it put the focus on terrorism instead of politics. The implication became that maybe this Obama guy is secretly a terrorist too and that was a non-starter. Terrorism was a symptom that Ayer's political views were not within any mainstream-acceptable spectrum, not the goal. The questions should have been - what are Ayers political views and which of those does Barack Obama share? If Ayers view was to reintroduce inheritance taxes at 50% instead of 45%, then I doubt that he would be blowing things up to achieve it. But if his political view was to dismantle the free market based capitalist system as we know it then maybe he would want to blow things up. We know Obama never shared Ayer's explosive view of how to get there, the question was - what part of the end-of-capitalism ideal does he share? I don't the president-elect yet knows the answer to that.
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Well articulated Doug.
I would add that my idea of any patriotic American would find such a man (and his wife) utterly reprehensible and be unwilling to be involved with him.
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Woof,
Ah, the good old days, when people thought the second coming was near. :-P
P.C.
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https://gellerreport.com/2018/05/obamas-terror-funders.html/