Category Archives: Barack Obama

Obama’s cutting out some nuts, all right…

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You’ve heard what Jesse Jackson said about Barack Obama (video above). But whether he said "out" or "off," it’s clear that Obama is cutting out (or off) the nuts who would drag his campaign down.

If Jesse Jackson wants to be counted in that number, along with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that’s up to him.

Jesse pere should take the advice of Jesse fils on this point:

“Reverend Jackson is my dad, and I’ll always love him,” the congressman said Wednesday evening in a statement. He added, “I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric. He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”

Such old party (and race) warriors as the Rev. Jackson and Bob Herbert of The New York Times need to realize that Barack Obama is not running to please them. He’s running to win, and to become the president of all Americans, not just of some political clique to which they believe he should be loyal and obedient.

Apparently, Hillary supporters still really ticked

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Of course, I could have written that headline a month ago, and I could probably write it five years from now, and it would likely still be true. Hillary supporters are not people with what we could call a forgiving nature — even when there’s nothing to forgive, let me hasten to add. (These folks have less of a sense of humor than our own Lee Muller, if you can believe it.) Anyway, it’s a persistent movement out there.

On the front page of today’s WSJ was this story, which contained the following lame attempt to explain just what it is that Hillary supporters are so ticked about:

    The Clinton holdouts are typically most angry about what they say was the media’s sexist treatment of Sen. Clinton during the campaign. And though few, if any, blame Sen. Obama directly, they fault the Illinois senator and other party leaders for what they say was failing to do enough to stop it….

    Last Wednesday, Daphna Ziman, a prominent Beverly Hills backer of Sen. Clinton, hosted a conference call of some 70 political activists from around the country, spurred by what she and others on the call saw as the media’s sexism during the campaign.
    One high-profile example: pundits both on TV and in print referred to Sen. Clinton’s laugh as a "cackle." Separately, a joke by comedian Chris Rock comparing the candidate to the knife-wielding madwoman played by Glenn Close in the film "Fatal Attraction" was picked up and parroted by others in the mainstream media.

Really: A "cackle." They’re really worked up about stuff like this. For a moment, I thought, "These two WSJ reporters, who are both of the male persuasion, are trying to make fun of the legitimate concerns of the Clinton camp," but then I realized they were doing their best! What those folks are mad about is precisely stuff like this! And they complain about it without smirking or anything.

And poor ol’ Obama is supposed to have made Chris Rock stop it. Or something. Don’t ask me to explain.

Neither Obama nor McCain meets Energy Party standard

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are lucky there’s such a thing as Republicans and Democrats in this country, because neither would be able to get the Energy Party nomination.
    They’re also lucky that the Energy Party exists only in my head, because I believe its nominee could tap into a longing, among the very independent voters Messrs. McCain and Obama need to court for victory, for a pragmatic, nonideological, comprehensive national energy policy. This independent voter longs for it, anyway.
    What is the greatest failure of George W. Bush as president? If you answered “Iraq,” you lose. His greatest failure was summed up well by Sen. Joe Biden, who said at the 2006 Galivants Ferry Stump Meeting, “History will judge George Bush harshly not for the mistakes he has made… but because of the opportunities that he has squandered.”
    The biggest wasted opportunity was when he failed, on Sept. 12, 2001, to ask Americans to sacrifice, to work together to shake off “the grip of foreign oil oligarchs,” and “plan the demise of Islamic fundamentalism.”
    Gasoline was between about $1.40 and $1.50 a gallon then. If we had applied a federal tax increase then of $1 or $2 — as voices as varied as Tom Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Jim Hoagland and Robert Samuelson have urged for years — we’d still have been paying less per gallon than we are now, and the money would have stayed in this country, in our hands, rather than in those of Mahmoud Ahmajinedad, or Hugo Chavez, or our “friends” the Saudis (you know, the ones who underwrite the Wahhabist madrassas).
    And who, on the day after the terrorist attacks, would have refused? Most Americans would have been glad to be asked to do something to fight back.
    We could have used that money for a lot of things, from funding the War on Terror (rather than passing the debt to our grandchildren) to accelerating the development of hydrogen, solar, wind, clean coal, methanol-from-coal, electric cars, mass transit — on something useful. We would have started conserving a lot more a lot faster, reducing demand enough to deliver a shock to world oil prices. Demand would have resumed its rise because of such irresistible forces as Chinese growth, but we would have had a salutary effect.
    But we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to defund the terrorists or the petrodictators, or to reduce upward pressure on the national debt, or to respond to rising world energy demands, or to save the planet. We didn’t do it because we can’t do it individually and have an appreciable effect — it would take a national effort, and that takes leadership. And no one in a position of political leadership — not the president, not his fellow Republicans, and not their Democratic opposition — has stood up and said, Let’s get our act together, and here’s how….
    Getting our act together would require leaders who are no longer interested in playing the Party Game. In Messrs. McCain and Obama, we had an opportunity. No major Republican is less into party than John McCain, which is why so many Republicans wanted to deny him the nomination. And in Barack Obama, Democrats have finally settled on the far-less-partisan alternative.
    But in the energy realm, what have we gotten? Sen. Obama generally sticks to the liberal/Democratic playbook: No drilling offshore or in ANWR. Play down nuclear, play up solar and wind.
    Sen. McCain, at least, is not doctrinaire Republican on energy. For that, you have to look to someone like Jim DeMint, whose op-ed piece on our pages a week ago extolled drilling, but excoriated “cap and trade.”
    Sen. McCain will at least take some items from the left (cap and trade, CAFE standards) and some from the right (let states decide whether to drill offshore), but he’s mushy about it. And any credit he gets for ideological flexibility is overshadowed by his being the author of the biggest pander on energy this year — the proposal for a “gas tax holiday.”
    An Energy Party nominee wouldn’t propose to lower the price of gasoline at the pump, so if that’s what you want — and a lot of you do want that — you can just stop reading now. Making it temporarily easier to buy more foreign oil is in no way in the national interest, and a leader would have the guts to explain that.
    The Energy nominee would increase domestic production in the short term and lead a no-holds-barred national effort to take us beyond major dependence on anybody’s oil. He (or she) would put America at the forefront of both energy innovation and environmental stewardship, and would not let any sort of ideology stand in the way. (We must distinguish, for instance, between an environmental goal that matters, such as global climate change, and the inconvenience of a few caribou.) The Energy nominee would, given the chance:

  • Drill off our coast, something we’ve seen can be done with minimal environmental risk.
  • Drill in the ANWR (which, as detractors note, would not solve the problem, but it would help, and would demonstrate that we’re serious).
  • Prohibitively tax the ownership of SUVs, and any other unconscionable, antisocial behavior.
  • Lower speed limits, and enforce them (use the fines to pay for more traffic cops).
  • Take money away from highway construction, and devote it to mass transit.
  • Build nuclear plants with the urgency of the Manhattan Project.
  • Develop electric cars at Apollo speed.

    We need leadership that respects no one’s sacred ideological cows, left or right — leadership that will take risks to do what works, both for the nation and ultimately for the planet.
    Is that really so much to ask?

Apparently, black folks don’t have ‘biographies’

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Today, I went to Barnes & Noble to spend a gift certificate I received for Father’s Day. Given the occasion, it seemed fitting to use it to buy a copy of a book I’ve been meaning to read, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

Of course, I sought it under "biography." No dice. I scanned the shelf where the "O’s" would be repeatedly. I looked to see if it had been mistakenly placed under "New Biography." Nope. Then I looked to make sure it hadn’t been filed by "Barack." Nope. Not under the "B’s."

So I went to the "Current Affairs" section. No luck.

Finally, I did the thing I hate, and went to the information desk. The clerk made a beeline for the "Store Favorites" table, and handed me a copy. As one does under such circumstances, I felt constrained to explain why I had had to ask for help, muttering something about having searched and searched under "Biography."

The clerk told me it wouldn’t have been under "Biography." It would have been under "African-American."

You’ll note that on the Web site, it’s considered to be a biography. But apparently not in the store. In case you wondered, John McCain does appear under "biography." Yes, the subtitle of the book is "A Story of Race and Inheritance." I get that. But it’s still a biography — or, to be technical, and autobiography. If it was right to file this under "African-American" instead of "Biography," then the McCain books — which feature him as a Navy aviator on the cover — should have been under "military history." But they weren’t.

After I got home a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that I didn’t go check what the clerk had told me — I didn’t search the "African-American" section, assuming that such a section exists. I’ll try to remember to check next time. But I do know that there were no copies under "Biography."

Still fired up, 12 months on

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LIKE A ROCK STAR who prefers to do his new stuff, Barack Obama had not played his greatest hit in several weeks.
    At least, Kevin Griffis hadn’t heard it for awhile, not until Sen. Obama “pulled it out” at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D., the week that he sewed up the Democratic nomination.
    He rocked the house. Like besotted boomers doing the “na, na, na, na-na-na-na” part of “Hey Jude” with Paul McCartney, the fans sang right along.
    Mr. Griffis, 34, who spent much of 2007 here in South Carolina handling the press for the Obama campaign, was there when the hit was born.
    You’ve heard the story; Mr. Obama has told it often enough. He went to Greenwood on June 15, 2007 — one year ago today — as a favor to S.C. Rep. Anne Parks. He wasn’t having a great day. As he told the crowd at the Corn Palace:

    I feel terrible…. It is a miserable day. Pouring down rain, looks awful. I stagger over to the door and I pull open the door and pick up the newspaper and start drinking some coffee and there’s a bad story about me in The New York Times.
    I pack up my belongings and go down stairs and as I’m about to get in the car my umbrella blows open and I get soaked. So by the time I’m in the car I am mad, I am sleepy and I’m wet….

    “He really was grumpy there that morning,” said Mr. Griffis. But he did the drill, quietly, doggedly, doing what you do when you’ve promised to show up — working the room, one dutiful handshake at a time. “I wasn’t paying attention,” said Mr. Griffis. Just the usual, numb routine.
    Suddenly, this little lady — Greenwood County councilwoman Edith Childs, whom Obama describes as just over five feet tall, 65 years old, with “a big church hat” — starts her patented chant: “Fired up!” The Greenwood folks, for whom this is habit, echo the call, which she follows with “Ready to go!”
    The senator would later recall being startled: “I jumped.” Mr. Griffis, a quiet, sober-faced young white guy from Atlanta, reacted this way:
    “It really kind of scared me — I didn’t know what was going on.”
    And he had no idea how the thing would become a rallying cry. For a long time, neither did the rest of the country.
    For the next few months, Mr. Griffis recalled last week, the media narrative was all about how Obama wasn’t catching fire, how he was trailing in the polls among black voters in South Carolina — a self-fulfilling perception.
    Then, in the last weeks of the year, the narrative changed. In a Dec. 23 column, David Broder of The Washington Post wrote that “The stump speech he has developed in the closing stages of the pre-Christmas campaign is a thing of beauty… Hillary Clinton has nothing to match it.”
    It was the speech that climaxed each time with “Fired up… Ready to go!” Reality matching perception, Sen. Obama rose quickly in the polls, and won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.
    As the campaign suffered a setback in New Hampshire and moved on to South Carolina, William Safire — former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and ardent student of words and their power — wrote in The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 20 about the speech and its origins: “That local origin of the inspiring chant, and its familiarity to many voters in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary this week, means a lot to the Obama campaign.”
    Jim Davenport of The Associated Press (and formerly of The State) reported that Ms. Childs — who insisted to reporters as her fame grew that she was 59, not 65 — got the “Fired up” routine from Nelson Rivers, NAACP field operations chief, and he got it from the late civil rights activist and Charleston native Jondelle Harris Johnson.
    But however it started, Obama has taken the chant to undreamt-of places: Des Moines, Iowa. The Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. The Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
    Long before he got “fired up,” of course, Barack Obama was a gifted and charismatic speaker, one who could get any Democratic crowd “ready to go.” And he’s going up against a Republican who is not a master of the set-piece speech, as he demonstrated when he tried upstaging Sen. Obama on the night he clinched the nomination, and bombed on national television.
    So it was that John McCain challenged Mr. Obama to meet him on his turf — the “town hall”-style meeting. On Friday, the campaigns were squabbling over whether the events would even take place.
    I hope they do. I had the chance to see how Sen. McCain connected with voters in small venues in South Carolina last year, during the months that his campaign was down and out, according to conventional “wisdom” at the time.
    And as Mr. Griffis said last week in Columbia (where he was getting reacquainted with his 4-year-old daughter, after having been away in Virginia, Ohio, Mississippi, Indiana and South Dakota almost every minute since January), such a format plays to his candidate’s strength as well.
    “He’s a remarkably empathetic person,” he said, “and so fiercely intelligent,” he shines when given “the opportunity to put that on display.”
    I agree. For the first time in many an election cycle, my first choice in both major parties will be on the ballot in the fall. Each of them got to where he is by pulling away from the polarizing force of his respective party.
    The nation deserves to see them interact — repeatedly, if possible — in a setting as free of artifice as possible. That would be something for all of us to get fired up about.

… and let me know if the folks in Dubuque need anything, anything at all

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Just got this release:

 
BARACK OBAMA’S TRIP
TO CEDAR RAPIDS CANCELLED
 
Chicago, IL
–U.S. Senator Barack Obama’s  trip to Cedar Rapids tomorrow, Wednesday, June 11,
has been cancelled due to the floods.  After speaking with Governor Culver’s
staff, the Obama campaign wanted to ensure that no resources were diverted from
Iowans devastated by the floods. The Obama campaign is encouraging all Iowans
who need assistance or would like to volunteer their time to assist with relief
effort to call the Iowa Concern Hotline at (800) 447-1985.


###

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

At first, I thought this was a case of Obama making the point that THIS is how you deal with a disaster (as opposed to the Katrina mess).

But then I thought, This is Iowa. He’d better be nice to those folks. He owes them, big-time. That’s where it all started…

McCain-Obama: America at its best

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Now is a time to savor the way the nominating process has come out. Before the usual polarizing interests do their worst to try to make you HATE THE OTHER GUY, it’s time to reflect upon the fact that the best candidate won each of the major parties’ nominations. And that has not happened in a lifetime.

You’ll recall, from what I have written and from this hastily produced video I did on the day we endorsed Barack Obama (10 days after endorsing John McCain) in the S.C. primaries, that this is the outcome I had hoped for, the win-win for our nation.

If you — and unfortunately, I’ve noticed that some of my readers have already toed their respective party lines and starting spewing venom toward the other side’s candidate, like so obedient little soldiers in what they imagine to be a war — can’t see how blessed we are this year (as opposed to the lousy choice we had, say, four years ago), maybe you need to step back for a moment. If you step back, say, as far as London, maybe you can see what The Economist sees.

That British publication’s cover this week celebrates both John McCain and Barack Obama, with the headline, "America at its best." Indeed. An excerpt from the main leader (that’s Brit jargon for "editorial"):

    … In John McCain, the Republicans chose a man whose political courage has led him constantly to attempt to forge bipartisan deals and to speak out against the Bush administration when it went wrong. Conservatives may hate him, but even they can see that he offers the party its only realistic hope in November.
    Mr Obama has demonstrated charisma, coolness under fire and an impressive understanding of the transforming power of technology in modern politics. Beating the mighty Clinton machine is an astonishing achievement. Even greater though, is his achievement in becoming the first black presidential nominee of either political party. For a country whose past is disfigured by slavery, segregation and unequal voting rights, this is a moment to celebrate. America’s history of reinventing and perfecting itself has acquired another page.

Note that The Economist can see that these are mortal men, and each has his weaknesses. But in the end, these choices are good news for America, and about America:

Both candidates have their flaws and their admirable points; the doughty but sometimes cranky old warrior makes a fine contrast with the inspirational but sometimes vaporous young visionary. Voters now have those five months to study them before making up their minds (and The Economist will be doing the same). But, on the face of it, this is the most impressive choice America has had for a very long time.

History to be made tonight

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Leave it to Samuel T., who gets really pumped about politics (and life in general), to put things in perspective, just when we’re on the brink of getting jaded:

    Tonight the western world , the white world is nominating an African-American for President of the United States of America !!!!!!!!!!!. Remember 1964 and how far have we come and how far we have to go ! Look how far Senator Obama had to go to get here from 5 months ago in Iowa. He was behind by 20 plus points ! Senator Obama’s victory tonight is a huge victory for all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for America to get here !
Mazel Tov America! Samuel 

That was a broadcast e-mail that Mr. Tenenbaum sent out to his list at 5:13 p.m. Seven minutes later, Luther Battiste III responded thusly:

    Well said. Using a NBA analogy, we have qualified for the finals. Now we have to win the ring. Yes, we can. Luther Battiste

Hillary on Obama, RFK: I’m just sayin’…

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I ran into Neal Dolan before Mass on Sunday at St. Peter’s, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him since Martin Luther King Day. That was the day the Secret Service descended in force upon our building here at The State while Sen. Barack Obama was talking to the editorial board. Neal was the Secret Service agent in charge here in Columbia until his retirement recently. He’s now working with SLED.

Obama has had (for good reasons, apparently) the heaviest security detail of any candidate who’s ever come to see us. So it seemed a bit of coincidence that I would be reminded of that by running into Neal the very weekend that Hillary Clinton explained why hers is the Campaign That Won’t Leave as follows:

"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

So, you know, anything could happen, so why quit now? She later explained that far from being coldbloodedly calculating, she was just in a particularly sensitive frame of mind regarding Kennedys in general, what with the terrible news about Teddy.

And now that we’ve all exclaimed, "That’s awful!" let’s think about this a minute. This is the most logical explanation for the Never-Ending Campaign I’ve heard yet. I’m not saying it’s a good explanation, but it has a certain morbid logic.

But it still doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing you hear from a presidential candidate. Hollywood would never have a presidential candidate say such a thing, unless the candidate were played by Robert DeNiro:

Not that I got nothin’ against this guy, you unnerstand… It’s just that somethin’ could happen to him — like he could get whacked or somethin’, God forbid (hands form prayer position). Nobody’d want nothin’ to happen to him or anyt’ing like that; I’m just sayin’…

Isn’t that, after all, what she said? It’s not that she’d WANT such a terrible thing to happen; she’s just saying…. Until now, who knew that when she spoke of getting that 3 a.m. phone call, she was thinking about before the election?

Where to find our endorsements

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At the start of this year, when we were about to do our endorsements in the S.C. presidential primaries, I asked the folks downstairs at thestate.com to set us up a page where our current endorsements would reside. As long as we remember to do the right coding on the editorials as we run them, they go to this page, and stay.

It just occurred to me tonight, now that we’ve run a few endorsements in the June 10 primary, to check to see if it’s working. And it is. Here’s the link.

That is, it’s mostly working. For some reason a couple of months back, the pictures that were set up to run with the McCain and Obama endorsements disappeared from the files. I went in and, using my limited understanding of the inner workings of thestate.com, managed to restore the McCain one, but the Obama picture defied my efforts to remove the recently passed expiration date.

I think I might go in and try again on that…

Radical Chic, and Mau-Mauing the Superdelegates

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Four quick things:

  1. First, don’t try to figure out the headline on this post. It doesn’t exactly make sense; I just liked it.
  2. Second, The Washington Post has a piece today suggesting that if Hillary Clinton is going to point to Barack Obama’s associations with ’60s-era radicals, she’ll need to answer for her own experience "in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law
    firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers."
  3. Third, when folks do give Obama a hard time about the Weather Underground, why do they talk about Bill Ayres, when the guy’s name rings no bells for me? Why don’t they speak instead of Ayres’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who is way more famous and way, way more memorable? She and Obama worked in the same law firm once, and when an Obama fund-raiser was held at Ayres’ home when he was running for state Senate, it was her home, too? This seems to me a slight to female radicals everywhere, and they are not a category of woman one usuals wants to cross…
  4. Finally, which do you prefer, Weather Underground, or the much-cooler, Dylan-inspired "Weatherman?" Not that I’m trying to influence your decisions…

The Obama Effect

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
WEEKS SUCH as the one just past — in which I am still mired as I write this — do not lend themselves to complete, extended thought of the sort that leads to coherent columns.
    But when have I ever let that stop me?
    We’re in the middle of candidate interviews for the June primaries — 50-plus meetings with folks seeking their respective parties’ nominations for the state House, state Senate, county councils, sheriff, clerk of court, and on and on ….
    But as disparate as these candidates and their goals and issues may be, sometimes themes emerge, or seem to emerge.
    Here’s one, which I’ll call The Obama Effect, just to have something trendy to call it.
    There’s nothing new about this effect, of course, and I certainly didn’t discover it. But I have been tracking it since last July, when I wrote a column headlined “Obama, the young, and the magic of Making a Difference.” I wasn’t sure what I was describing then. I’m not sure now, either. It’s an amorphous phenomenon, or set of phenomena — but one of considerable force in spite of, or perhaps because of, that lack of easy definition.
    It’s the thing that led to nearly half a million people coming out to vote in the S.C. Democratic presidential primary in January, which is all the more extraordinary when you recall that there had been a very hotly contested Republican presidential primary just the week before, and that no one who voted in that was allowed to vote in the other. The turnout on Jan. 26 was double that of the 2004 Democratic primary. Republicans, after 20 years of touting the growing pull of their party, actually saw participation decline from their last contested presidential primary. This is less because of a decline in GOP fortunes in the state, and more because of an indefinable something over on the Democratic side.
    Detractors mock the phenomenon for the very fact that it is so hard to describe. “Hope” for what? they say. What kind of “Change”? Satirists have no end of fun mocking media types — people who make their livings describing things — for failing to explain why they’re going gaga. None of that diminishes the power of the thing.
    Still, I thought it had rolled on to other states beginning in February. But then we started these interviews, and I began to see a certain something — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on — cropping up on the county and legislative district levels.
    We’re used to candidates coming in with definite reasons for seeking office. Challengers speak of their enthusiasm for a certain cause, or describe in excruciating detail their indignation over having sought help from their representative and found him or her insufficiently responsive (a very common reason to run for office). Incumbents speak of needing just a little more time to accomplish that same thing they wanted to accomplish the last time they ran, and the time before that. And so on. After a few election cycles, you can finish the candidates’ sentences for them.
    But this time, we met some first-time candidates in Democratic primaries who didn’t seem to have a particular reason for filing, beyond a newfound enthusiasm for public service itself. Their reason for being in our interview room was ill-defined. I wrote a summary of one such interview on my blog, which led a curmudgeonly reader to complain that “those bromides tell us exactly nothing” as to what this candidacy was about. But I had included this clue: a quote from said candidate to the effect that this was “an exciting year, an historical year” to get involved….
    Not long after that interview, Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe wondered aloud why some of these folks were running, and I ventured the hunch that this was a case of The Obama Effect. She said I had no objective, quantifiable reason for saying that. And she was right, of course.
    A few days later, Richland County Council Chairman Joe McEachern — who’s running for the seat currently held by Rep. John Scott, who’s running for one held by Sen. Kay Patterson — made no bones about it: There was an Obama Factor pulling in folks who had never previously given any consideration to public life. He and other more experienced hands were fielding a lot of questions from enthusiastic people wanting to know exactly how to go about getting involved.
    All of the aforementioned candidates have been black Democrats. But it fell to a white Democrat, Rep. Jimmy Bales, to spell out the thing more overtly. He said he’d like to see his party increase its numbers in the S.C. House, and “this might be the year this happens.”
    “If Obama were the nominee,” he said on May 1, “and if Democrats would come together… I believe that he would come close to carrying this state,” and would in addition have the effect of increasing the number of Democratic S.C. House members — not so much to a majority, but to a less anemic minority. Say, from 51 members out of 124 to 58. He says this dispassionately, calmly, without any signs of hysteria. It’s just that the candidacy of Barack Obama has made some previously unlikely things seem attainable.
    No, I can’t prove it. Nor can I quantify it. But there’s something there, and it’s happening down on a much more local level than has been widely documented so far.

Obama answers Hillary’s shot with a PBR

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Obama1

Barack Obama, not to be outdone on the regular-guy front by Hillary’s boilermakers, strode decisively into a Raleigh bar tonight and ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

As a result, he won the North Carolina primary. That is, you can’t prove that’s not why he won. If only he’d mastered the intricacies of Yuengling while there was still time in PA…

He also demonstrated that he could hold his brew by resisting a pitch from a perky saleswoman who wanted to sell him new kitchen countertops for the White House. Really.

Unfortunately, while the candidate was catching up on his drinking, his rival went and stole the Indiana primary — apparently. Obama, apparently feeling mellow, conceded that contest to her before it was even over.

So the madness continues.

Tomorrow, his campaign plans to work on his bowling. Once he cracks 100, they’ll teach him to bowl and drink beer at the same time, and then he’ll be unstoppable…

Obama2

The Obama Effect: Democrats’ chances in the S.C. House

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Here’s a video I prepared for publication on the Saturday Opinion Extra page for this week. It’s from an endorsement interview with Rep. Jimmy Bales, who’s being challenged in the Democratic primary for District 80 by Stanley Robinson.

Mr. Bales mentioned in passing in the first minute or so of the interview that he hoped Democrats would pick up a few seats in the S.C. House this year. Not quite hearing him, I asked a little later whether he had said he thought Dems might regain a majority.

Actually, he did think there was an outside possibility of that, but mainly he was hoping his party would find itself in a better tactical position with a few more seats. He mentions some districts in particular where he thought Democrats might prevail.

Here’s the kicker — he’s pinning his hopes on Barack Obama. This is a theme I’ve been running into, in various forms, in these interviews so far. The Obama Effect ranges from motivating folks who were previously uninterested in politics to run. And it prompts Mr. Bales to hope to get closer to 58 Democrats in the House, from the present 51. This depends, of course, on Mr. Obama being the nominee — as does so much else.

The Democratic Presidential Primary back in January created a lot of excitement, and we’re still seeing the effects.

A little bit of inside baseball: On the video, you’ll hear Cindi jumping in to make sure I have it right, and won’t go hog-wild on the "Democratic Majority" theme. She has nothing to worry about; I’m a professional.

Did Obama get the job done in denouncing Wright?

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There was no question, as this day dawned, that Barack Obama was going to have to denounce his ex-pastor in unequivocal terms — no more of that, Well, you just have to understand about the black church stuff.

Right now, I’m trying to decide rather urgently — did he go far enough in what he said today? I don’t mean "far enough" to satisfy me, or even you, necessarily. I just mean, did he do what he had to to save his candidacy? Because there’s no question in my mind that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s statements of the last two days put the Obama campaign below water.

After failing with white middle-class voters in Pennsylvania — and not least of all because of what we’d already heard from the Wright pulpit — this latest stuff could not be allowed to stand.

Normally, I’d allow myself a little time to decide whether what Sen. Obama said today was enough. But at the moment, I’ve trying to decide whether it makes the Bob Herbert column I just put on tomorrow’s op-ed page too outdated.

We have this problem with The New York Times. While The Washington Post, for instance, gives us its opinion columnists in plenty of time for us to run them the same day that the Post does, The Times takes a far more self-centered approach, not moving its copy until it’s damned well good and ready — which is generally hours after our next day’s pages are done. Consequently, when we run columns by Herbert, Dowd, Brooks, et al., it’s generally a day later. Which is not usually a problem. A good opinion is a good opinion a day later.

Anyway, Bob Herbert had a strong column on the Wright situation this morning, and I picked it for tomorrow over — well, over a lot of things, but in the end, it was down to that or a Samuelson piece that’s embargoed until Wednesday. I chose the Herbert. But his column says, in part:

    For Senator Obama, the re-emergence of Rev. Wright has been devastating. The senator has been trying desperately to bolster his standing with skeptical and even hostile white working-class voters. When the story line of the campaign shifts almost entirely to the race-in-your-face antics of someone like Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama’s chances can only suffer.
    Beyond that, the apparent helplessness of the Obama campaign in the face of the Wright onslaught contributes to the growing perception of the candidate as weak, as someone who is unwilling or unable to fight aggressively on his own behalf.
    Hillary Clinton is taunting Mr. Obama about his unwillingness to participate in another debate. Rev. Wright is roaming the country with the press corps in tow, happily promoting the one issue Mr. Obama had tried to avoid: race.
    Mr. Obama seems more and more like someone buffeted by events, rather than in charge of them. Very little has changed in the superdelegate count, but a number of those delegates have expressed concern in private over Mr. Obama’s inability to do better among white working-class voters and Catholics.

Then today, Obama comes out swinging on the issue…

So right this moment, I’m trying to decide whether to run Herbert because he still makes good points, or ditch him because Obama has at least tried to do something Herbert says he needed to do.

Right now, I’m at the coin-toss stage…

Hillary joins McCain in pandering on gas tax; Obama stands up to them both

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This has been a busy day and I’m just getting around to some basic things now. But I couldn’t let the day pass without noting how right Obama is about this:

Obama says rivals Clinton, McCain pandering on gas tax
By MIKE GLOVER and BETH FOUHY
Associated Press Writers
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Democrat Barack Obama dismissed his rivals’ calls for national gas tax holiday as a political ploy that won’t help struggling consumers. Hillary Rodham Clinton said his stance shows he’s out of touch with the economic realities faced by ordinary citizens.
    Clinton and certain Republican presidential nominee John McCain are calling for a holiday on collecting the federal gas tax "to get them through an election," Obama said at a campaign rally before more than 2,000 cheering backers a week before crucial primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. "The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear."
    Clinton, who toured the Miller Veneers wood manufacturing company in Indianapolis, said "there are a lot of people in Indiana who would really benefit from a gas tax holiday.
    "That might not mean much to my opponent, but I think it means a lot to people who are struggling here, people who commute a long way to work, farmers and truckers," Clinton said. She has called for a windfall tax on oil companies to pay for a gas tax holiday.
    "Senator Obama won’t provide relief, while Senator McCain won’t pay for it," Clinton said. "I’m the only candidate who will provide immediate relief at the pump, with a plan."
    With his comments, Obama continued a running dispute over whether ending collection of the gas tax is the quickest and best way to help consumers. Leading in delegates and the popular vote, Obama in recent days has focused on McCain, but he broadened that criticism Tuesday to include Democrat Clinton.
    "Now the two Washington candidates in the race have decided to do something different," said Obama. "John McCain started it, he made the proposal, and then Hillary Clinton said ‘me too.’"
    The plan would suspend collecting the 18.4 cent federal gas tax 24.4 cent diesel tax for the summer.
    He said drying up gas tax collections would batter highway construction, costing North Carolina up to 7,000 jobs, while saving consumers little.
    "We’re arguing over a gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer so that everyone in Washington can pat themselves on the back and say they did something," said Obama.
    "Well, let me tell you, this isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s designed to get them through an election," said Obama. He said his call for middle-class tax cuts would be far more beneficial than suspending gas tax collections.
    Obama took a different view on the issue when he was an Illinois legislator, voting at least three times in favor of temporarily lifting the state’s 5 percent sales tax on gasoline.
    The tax holiday was finally approved during a special session in June of 2000, when Illinois motorists were furious that gas prices had just topped $2 a gallon in Chicago.
    During one debate, he joked that he wanted signs on gas pumps in his district to say, "Senator Obama reduced your gasoline prices."
    But the impact of the tax holiday was never clear. A government study could not determine how much of the savings was passed on to motorists. Many lawmakers said their constituents didn’t seem to have benefited. They also worried the tax break was pushing the state budget out of balance.
    When legislation was introduced to eliminate the tax permanently, Obama voted "no." The effort failed, and the sales tax was allowed to take effect again.
    Responding to Obama’s criticism, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds said the Illinois senator "does not understand the effect of gas prices on the economy. Senator Obama voted for a gas tax reduction before he opposed it."
    Bounds was deliberately echoing one of Democrat John Kerry’s most troublesome missteps of the 2004 presidential campaign. Kerry said of funding for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
    Obama and Clinton both opened their campaign day in North Carolina. Clinton toured a research facility and collected the prized endorsement of Gov. Mike Easley.
    "It’s time for somebody to be in the White House who understands the challenges we face in this country," said Easley, in announcing his backing of Clinton. She then promptly headed for a string of events in Indiana.
    "The governor and I have something in common – we think results matter," said Clinton.
    Easley is popular with white, working-class voters that have formed the base for Clinton’s success in recent primaries.
    Clinton also collected an endorsement from Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who praised "her support in rural America, her commitment to national security and her dedication to our men and women in uniform."
    Skelton, a conservative Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, was among a half-dozen Democratic House members called to meet with Clinton after she won the Pennsylvania primary last week.
    While Obama is favored in North Carolina, the race in Indiana is very tight, and Obama was heading there Wednesday.
    Obama collected endorsements of his own during the day: In Kentucky, Rep. Ben Chandler, son of former Gov. A.B. "Happy" Chandler, gave Obama his backing ahead of that state’s May 20 primary, and in Iowa, Democratic National Committee member Richard Machacek – a supporter of former Sen. John Edwards before he dropped out of the presidential race – switched his support to Obama.
    Interest in the two primaries next week has been high. Officials in Indiana said nearly 90,000 people have cast early ballots, far outpacing absentee turnout in 2004.
    At stake Tuesday are 115 delegates in North Carolina, and 72 in Indiana.
Beth Fouhy reported from Indianapolis. Associated Press writers Christopher Wills in Springfield, Ill., and Sam Hananel in Washington contributed to this report.

Obama’s the only one acting like a responsible grownup here. He’s also the only one speaking up for Energy Party values.

What McCain and Clinton are both doing on this is appalling. They’re treating us like two-year-olds, and proposing to act in direct opposition to the nation’s interests.

Rev. Wright still fails to clarify

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Just in case anyone was still confused, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright emerged over the last day or so to explain (I think) what I’ve already said about his sermons: He meant what he said the first time.

It seems he was being "descriptive," not "divisive."

Asked whether he thought some of the things he said might be less than "patriotic," he changed the subject — he mentioned his service in the Marine Corps in his youth, and mentioned that Dick Cheney never served. To which I say, "Huh?" To elaborate, thank you for your service, Reverend — I stand in awe of anyone who has been a Marine. But did you mean "God Damn America" or not? Were you being ironic, or stating a wish that was not your own, or was that "descriptive?" And how does that message square with Semper Fidelis?

I should mention that he also explained that if you take exception to his message, you’re a racist. Just so you know.

He also made the same argument that has been made in his behalf by others, that his remarks have been taken out of context — mere "soundbites." I’m still waiting to hear the context that makes "God Damn America" mean something else. Sadly, I’ve not heard it yet.

Poor Obama. With friends like this one…

SNL parodies of media and Obama

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Charles Krauthammers’ column on our Sunday op-ed page makes reference to the Saturday Night Live skits mocking the media’s fawning over Barack Obama. An excerpt:

    Real change has never been easy. . . . The status quo in Washington will fight. They will fight harder than ever to divide us and distract us with ads and attacks from now until November.
                — Barack Obama,
                    Pennsylvania primary
                    night speech

With that, Obama identified the new public enemy: the "distractions" foisted upon a pliable electorate by the malevolent forces of the status quo, i.e., those who might wish to see someone else become president next January. "It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics" and "trivializes the profound issues" that face our country, he warned sternly. These must be resisted.
    Why? Because Obama understands that the real threat to his candidacy is less Hillary Clinton and John McCain than his own character and cultural attitudes. He came out of nowhere with his autobiography already written, then saw it embellished daily by the hagiographic coverage and kid-gloves questioning of a supine press. (Which is why those "Saturday Night Live" parodies were so devastatingly effective.)…

That prompted me to search for and find the skits, which I had not seen. They are funny. Not Akroyd-Belushi funny or anything, but amusing by the standards of latter-day casts. The funnier (and longer) one is the second one, at the bottom of this post.

Of course, the mockery isn’t one-sided. There’s also a funny send-up of Hillary Clinton being petulant about how Obama is treated and received. If you think that’s over-the-top, here’s a link to a real-life video in which, ironically enough, Hillary invokes the SNL skits, but only after whining in a particularly passive-aggressive manner about always having to answer the first question — acting a lot like her mimic in the skit. And I don’t think she’s kidding…

Yeah, the press likes Obama, too. So?

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Here we go: Our pals on The Wall Street Journal editorial board — the same crowd that’s trying to make Mark Sanford a veep contender, when he isn’t, just by using its bully pulpit to say its so, over and over — are now telling us that the media like Obama (or at least, one of them is).

So what — we knew that, right? Just as we know the press likes John McCain, too. The two have a lot in common. The press likes them both because we get overexposed to politicos, and these two stand out above the herd. And beside, they’re nicer to us than certain other people are.

But Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Journal’s editorial board is preparing for the fall campaign by casting the press as being in partisan thrall to Obama:

    The uproar is the latest confirmation of the special place Mr. Obama
holds in the hearts of a good part of the media, a status ensured by
their shared political sympathies and his star power. That status has
in turn given rise to a tendency to provide generous explanations, and
put the best possible gloss on missteps and utterances seriously
embarrassing to Mr. Obama.

Just to set the record straight on some assumption Ms. Rabinowitz leaps to with regard to Obama’s fan club:

You see, one can like a guy and still see him clearly, even though Ms. Rabinowitz doesn’t think so. I just thought somebody should point it out.