Tag: Barack Obama

The Most Liberal Senator

Seth Anderson0 comment

Unless you are brain dead, or work for the National Review1, you wouldn’t ever claim that Barack Obama is the most liberal Senator2.

How Liberal Interest Groups Rate the Senators (2007)

Many interest groups rate senators on how they vote. Well-known groups that issue such ratings include Americans for Democratic Action (a progressive group) and the American Conservative Union (a conservative group). In the table below, we give the ratings of seven such groups and the mean value for each senator. However, the ratings are not completely independent. Usually senators who get a good rating from the ADA get a bad rating from the ACU and vice versa. If we used four progressive groups and four conservative groups, every senator would probably get a score of 50%–not very interesting. To avoid this problem, we have only used (relatively) progressive groups. If you are a progressive, a senator with a high score is a good senator (supports everything progressive). If you are a conservative, a senator with a low score is a good senator (opposes everything progressive). In this way the differences between the senators stand out clearly. The table below is sorted on mean rating.

[From How Liberal Interest Groups Rate the Senators 2007 ]

The .csv file is here, if you want to do your own sorting.

Per my quicky analysis, there is no way anyone can claim with a straight face that Obama is the most liberal Senator. Liberals such as myself have to come up with other reasons for supporting Obama – which, for the record, isn’t that hard to do – but liberal support isn’t because Obama is a Paul Wellstone acolyte. The numbers agree.

Some number crunching:

Per ACLU: Obama is 21st.
Per ADA: Obama is 46th.
Per CDF: Obama is 57th.
Per LCV: Obama is 50th.
Per NAACP: Obama is 3rd.
Per NARAL: Obama is 4th.
Per SEIU: Obama is 27th.

Ballot - Touchscreen Page 1

Footnotes:
  1. kind of the same thing, I guess [↩]
  2. unless you are running on the Republican Party ticket, or brain dead. Sort of the same thing, again [↩]

Grant Park Obama Rally

Seth Anderson3 Comments

I signed up for notification for a ticket to go to this rally, weather notwithstanding.

Speaking to U.S.

James Janega and John McCormick write:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign Tuesday offered online applications to Illinois supporters to attend an Election Night rally in Grant Park, as Chicago officials gave every indication they were bracing for an enormous turnout.

The decision to limit tickets to Illinois residents—at least so far—reflects a desire among campaign officials to pack in a raucous crowd while also limiting the rally’s potential for leeching campaign volunteers from voting battlegrounds in Indiana and Wisconsin.

City planners face their own balancing act: a desire to showcase Chicago as inclusive, while also making sure that the presidential candidate and the attendees are safe.

“That night will be a celebration, and we are asking the families and everybody to come together. And of course security is very important whether it’s a presidential candidate or any grouping you have for the people,” Mayor Richard Daley told reporters. “This is going to be a night of celebration. You can feel it in the air.”

Last week, the city said the south end of Grant Park can hold up to 70,000 people.

On Tuesday, Daley said he expected an overflow crowd of up to a million.

[From Tickets needed for Obama rally — chicagotribune.com]

and looks like I cannot bring my standard camera bag with other lenses. I’d like to bring both a wide angle lens and my fastest lens, a 50mm prime lens.

It appears that people attending the rally will need to pass through metal detectors to gain entry, similar to going through security at the airport.

The Obama campaign’s invitation required photo IDs and prohibited bags, signs, banners, chairs and strollers.

The electronic invitation for next week’s rally, sent exclusively to Illinois supporters, says gates will open at 8:30 p.m., well after the end of the downtown rush hour. After providing a Web address for ticket applications, the invitation states that “an official printed ticket is required for entrance” and that each ticket will be valid for two people.

Doesn’t look like there are any tickets left either. Want to buy mine? Leave a compelling reason/offer in the comment field, and we’ll see.

—

Obama palooza

Update: election day. Unless somebody makes an insane offer, we’re using the tickets.

map Obamapalooza

Charles Barkley for Governor!

Seth Anderson0 comment

Charley Barkley doesn’t need my financial support, obviously, nor would I ever consider moving to Alabama to vote for him, but I sincerely hope Mr. Barkley does run for Governor of Alabama in 2014. Alabama, and the nation, could use the Round Mound of Rebound.

Campbell Brown: Uh, do you think…do you think that John McCain, do you think the Republican Party has used race as an issue in this race?

Charles Barkley: Oh, no question, and they’ve used cold1 words like welfare and things like that. When people pick on welfare, first of all when they use the word welfare, that is really swaying, trying to use that as a minority thing, because people assume — if they really knew anything about the numbers. There seven times as many white people on welfare as black. Because there’s more white people in America. But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people. But most white people don’t know that sometimes there’s as many whites on welfare as black people. And they just use cold2 words, they use the terrorist thing now. You know, they try to use the Muslims thing. Those are racial innuendos, of course, and I’ve said it from the beginning, the only way with the economy in the situation it is — we’ve had eight terrible years under the Bush’s administration, with the war in Iraq — I’ve said it from the beginning. The only way they can win this election is make it about race. That’s the only way they can win. I wrote a chapter in one of my books about what happens in a race, when things are going bad, everybody kind of goes with their own tribe and the only way the Republican party can make this thing work is they get their tribe to get together and of course they use racial innuendo.

[From Transcript: Charles Barkley tells Brown ‘racism is a cancer’ – CNN.com]

and Barkley echoes a frequently made point about the Christian Taliban aka fake Christians:

Brown: You, there has been a lot of polarizing rhetoric on both sides, frankly throughout this campaign. You yourself have called the evangelical base of the GOP fake Christians.

Barkley: Well, because they are so judgmental. And you know what is really interesting about that? I was actually defending John McCain when I said that, because they were saying when he first got nominated that he is not part of the evangelicals. You got to respect Sen. McCain. What I meant by that and I still stick by it — my idea of religion is we are supposed to encourage people to love other people. I am a big pro-choice guy. I am a big gay marriage guy and they are so divisive and that is not my idea of religion. My idea of religion is we are supposed to bring people together. We are not supposed to judge other people.

Brown: But aren’t you judging them?

Barkley: They judge me. First of all the notion that you would vote for a president because he is against abortion or against gay marriage is absurd. I think politicians have three jobs.

No. 1 they should fix our public school system, they should make sure our neighborhoods are safe and they should give people economic opportunity. I don’t care who is gay, I don’t care who is pro-choice. I really think that is the only three jobs that our government and our elected officials should have and we obviously got to do something about the health care and this situation. But to elect a president and vote for a president just because he is against abortion and against gay marriage is absurd.

Footnotes:
  1. obviously a typo: should be code [↩]
  2. sic. s/b code [↩]

Ken Adelman leaves the sinking ship of McCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

First the Chicago Tribune, then Colin Powell, and now Ken Adelman! Soon only the brain dead will be supporting McCain1

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama. He can hardly believe it himself.

[From FIRST COLIN POWELL, NOW…: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Adelman’s reasoning for supporting Obama is mostly about temperament as well. Read for yourself

Footnotes:
  1. wait, isn’t that already true? [↩]

The Colonel vs FDR

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Chicago Tribune has been a Republican-leaning newspaper for what seems like forever. The Chicago Tribune has not previously endorsed a Democratic nominee for President, ever. However, they did endorse Barack Obama for president, quite strongly, in fact.

On Nov. 4 we’re going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.

The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama. The Tribune is proud to endorse him today for president of the United States.

On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that.

Many Americans say they’re uneasy about Obama. He’s pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

Happy 4th of July

As a companion piece, a bit of newspaper history:

The most famous was the long-running feud between Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

McCormick complained bitterly that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a socialistic boondoggle that he feared would destroy Americans’ personal freedoms and rights. At one point, the Colonel, as he was known around the Tower, had a photo “cooked up to argue that soon the Social Security plot would have every working man tagged and numbered like a prisoner of war,” according to historian Frank C. Waldrop.

In the 1936 presidential campaign, McCormick instructed telephone operators at Tribune Tower to answer all calls with a declaration of how many days remained to “save the Republic” by turning Roosevelt out of office.

The feud was very personal. Once, reported historian Richard Norton Smith, McCormick showed a Tribune financial writer a headline clipped from another newspaper. The story was about a nationwide series of fund-raising balls for a polio foundation organized by FDR. The headline: “President’s Balls To Come Off Tonight.”

“I suppose,” sighed McCormick, “that is rather too much to hope for.”

FDR once said of McCormick: “I think he must be a little touched in the head.”

The high–or low–point, depending on your point of view: In 1942, a livid Roosevelt briefly contemplated sending the Marines to occupy Tribune Tower because of a report in the newspaper that naval officials feared would tip the Japanese that the U.S. had broken their military code. Goaded by an adviser, FDR also briefly pressed for a charge of treason against McCormick, knowing a conviction could bring the death sentence. An investigation later cleared the Tribune and two of its staffers of violating an espionage law.

[From Behind the scenes: ‘Was there shouting?’ ‘Who really decided?’ — chicagotribune.com]

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps Colonel McCormick paid closer attention to his hemp farms than we know…

50 State Strategy

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Personally, I think Obama’s adherence to the 50 state strategy1 is what turned this election2. The stupidity of recent presidential elections focusing nearly all resources on a couple of pivotal states – Florida, Ohio – always has irked me. The nation is not quite as divided as some would claim: the red state blue state was a convenient metaphor, but never was reality. Each state was more purple than red or blue, and Obama was clever to realize that early on, and thus out-maneuvered Hillary in the primary season, and is out-maneuvering John McCain right now..

Speaking to U.S.

Matt Bai has a New York Times Magazine piece coming out this Sunday, discussing mostly Obama’s quest to capture the rural, white, under-educated vote. Quite interesting to political junkies like myself.

Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a “50-state” campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Mont., and Las Cruces, N.M. To a large extent, this reflects Obama’s personal conviction about modern politics, which he first laid out in his 2004 convention speech when he talked about worshiping “an awesome God in the blue states” and having “gay friends in the red states.” He told me, when we talked, that Washington’s us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. “If voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done,” Obama said.

It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the president more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there’s the advent of the Internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history (about $460 million, at last count), meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama’s campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over — a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.

[From Magazine Preview – Will Gun-Totting, Churchgoing White Guys Pull the Lever for Barack Obama? – NYTimes.com]

The truth of the matter is that before LBJ’s presidency, and the confusion of the 1960s, white, rural Americans were reliably Democrats because the Republican party has long, long been the party of corporate America, and not the party of the little guy. Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and their acolytes3 have cloaked Republican motives in a veil of cultural war, but perhaps the cloak is a bit threadbare this season.

Footnotes:
  1. Howard Dean’s project, among others [↩]
  2. with the caveat that the election isn’t quite over, yet [↩]
  3. Karl Rove especially, but others too [↩]

Racist McCain

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I was afraid the Westbrook Pegler citation in Sarah Palin’s convention speech was going down the memory hole, but Frank Rich mentions it in his column today:

The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

[From Frank Rich – The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama – NYTimes.com]

Is John McCain a bigot? Maybe, maybe not, but his campaign surely is. If McCain was the leader he proclaims himself to be, he would be able to effortlessly lead those demagogues into the 21st century, away from the mindless racism that stems from fear of the unknown. But he isn’t, and he won’t.

McCain and Gordon Liddy

swanksalot0 comment

Talk about criminal associations! Gordon Liddy is a convicted criminal, and domestic terrorist, and a close friend of John McCain.

McCain has been friends with another violent political extremist: Gordon Liddy.

Liddy, who worked for President Nixon’s campaign, was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for multiple crimes in burglarizing the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate building–part of a broader plot to steal the 1972 election through sabotage, illegal spying and other dirty tricks. He even planned the murder of a journalist, though that idea was overruled. Bombings? He proposed the firebombing of a liberal think tank.

Liddy, now a conservative radio host, has never expressed regret for this attempt to subvert the Constitution. Nor has he developed any respect for the law. After the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, he endorsed the shooting of federal agents: “Kill the sons of bitches.”

Yet none of this bothers McCain. Liddy has contributed thousands of dollars to his campaigns, held a fundraiser for McCain at his home and hosted the senator on his radio show, where McCain said, “I’m proud of you.” Exactly which part of Liddy’s record is McCain proud of?

[From Steve Chapman | Chicago Tribune | Blog]

So if you are eight years old, you have to exercise better judgement than when you are actively running for President? Double standard much?

Pal Around McCain

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Speaking of pallin’ around with terrorists, Harold Meyerson notes the well-known financial terrorist Phil Gramm is quite close to McCain. Kissin’ close, if fact.

But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates’ associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain’s own economic guru.

Gramm was always Wall Street’s man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm’s piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm’s relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm’s short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain’s current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America “a nation of whiners.”

[From Harold Meyerson – A Pal Around McCain – washingtonpost.com]

Will Obama mention Phil Gramm in the debate tonight? Keating is one thing, but Gramm is still closer, albeit just as corrupt.

Long Strange Trip of Bill Ayers

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Fascinating1 article published in the Chicago Reader, circa 1990, about the man John McCain is trying his best to link to Barack Obama.

Haymarket Riot memorial, old version.
[The Haymarket Riot Memorial plaque that was placed at the Haymarket Riot location, 147 N. Desplaines, Chicago, IL 60661, after Bill Ayers (link to his blog) blew up the memorial to policemen. Now replaced by yet another memorial]

The students are already seated, quiet and polite in perfectly aligned rows of chairs, when Bill Ayers walks into the classroom.

It’s a Monday-evening political-science class at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a class devoted to the study of the “impact of the 60s on the 90s.”

“We’re very lucky to have Bill Ayers here,” says Victoria Cooper-Musselman, the instructor. “Bill was an active player in the 60s. You read about him in all the books.”

Ayers smiles, a boyish grin, and steps to the podium. He’s 45, but doesn’t look much older than most of the students. He wears his curly blond hair over his ears, with a rattail down the back. His T-shirt reads: “America is like a melting pot: The people at the bottom get burned and the scum floats to the top.”
He wears shorts.

“To me it’s funny that the 60s are studied,” Ayers begins. “I get rolled in like a Civil War veteran. I feel strange.”

The students laugh. As he continues, they fall quiet. His voice is raspy, sexy, a little mesmerizing. He’s completely at ease.

The story he tells, a condensed version of his life, is a tale of extremes. He wasn’t just any all-American, suburban-bred boy; his father, Thomas Ayers, ran Commonwealth Edison. And he didn’t just rebel; he was a leader of the Weathermen, the most radical of all 1960s revolutionaries, who among other things bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol and sprung Timothy Leary from jail.

For three years Ayers’s wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted criminals. They spent nearly 11 years as fugitives, living on the run “underground.”

“We were anarchists,” he tells the class. “We were willing to get thrown out of school. We were willing to go to jail. I make no apologies. There comes a time in your life when you face a moral challenge. You have to ask yourself: ‘Will I bow to conformity and accede to the world as it is, or will I take a stand?'”

These days, he takes his stands aboveground. He’s an assistant professor of education at UIC. He works in the university’s elementary teacher education program. His specialty is school improvement. He’s written one book on early childhood education, and he’s writing another about teaching. He publishes regularly in scholarly journals. Each year he trains dozens of would-be teachers for private, public, and parochial schools.

[Click to read more from Reader Archive–Extract: 1990/901109/The Long, Strange Trip of Bill Ayers He wasn’t just any suburban-bred all-American boy; his father ran Commonwealth Edison. And he didn’t just rebel; he was a leader of the Weathermen, the group that bombed the Pentagon and sprung LSD guru Timothy Leary from jail. Now he’s an assistant professor of education at UIC and an influential thinker in the school reform movement. And yes, he would do it all again]

Personally, the McCain smear is so weak to be laughable. I mean come on, Obama was 8 when Ayers was on the lam. Not every politician is Billy Pilgrim, able to look into the past of everyone they meet like the past was a Chinese New Year parade float. Now, McCain’s guilt by association trick actually works quite well on connections between McCain and Keating – actually as some wag put it, the McCain Keating connection is more of a “guilt by guilt” association.

(h/t Whet Moser via Twitter)

Footnotes:
  1. albeit horribly formatted [↩]

YouTube Pulls Obama Spot

swanksalot0 comment

Now I’m really curious to see the ad, I wonder if it is available.

Google-owned YouTube has pulled a Barack Obama ad from its site at the insistence of NBC, which charged that the spot infringed on its copyrighted content and that it did not give Obama’s campaign permission to use the material.

The ad, titled “Bad News,” is designed to get out the vote by appealing to voters and potential voters who do not want John McCain to win the election. At one point, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann are shown — with Olbermann announcing that McCain has “won.”

NBC has demanded that Obama stop using the clip altogether. But his campaign balked and instead attached a disclaimer to it that said, “NBC and MSNBC did not cooperate in the making of this video.”

[From YouTube Pulls Obama Spot]

I checked YouTube, and found the ad, removed, with this disclaimer: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC

If I find a copy, I’ll post it. Must have really irked NBC to be hoisted with their own petard.

Debate 1 Notes

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’d score the first debate as mostly a draw, which means Obama, as the new guy, won. I don’t recall any sound bites tailor-made for repetition on the 24 hour news shows, nor any obvious gaffes. McCain couldn’t help himself from lying a few times about Obama’s record, but that’s typical behavior. McCain has never been constrained by the truth.

As far as demeanor, McCain seemed petty by not ever looking directly at Obama, nor calling him by his first name. Perhaps McCain was afraid of mangling the word, “Barack”? McCain did mangle nearly every world leader’s name1. McCain fidgeted and smirked while Obama spoke, while Obama was calm and cool, and able to speak in coherent sentences. Again, Obama won this aspect of the debate by looking presidential.

NYT

More than anything, Mr. McCain seemed intent on presenting Mr. Obama as green and inexperienced, a risky choice during a difficult time. Again and again, sounding almost like a professor talking down to a new student, he talked about having to explain foreign policy to Mr. Obama and repeatedly invoked his 30 years of history on national security (even though Mr. McCain, in the kind of misstep that no doubt would have been used by Republicans against Mr. Obama, mangled the name of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he stumbled over the name of Pakistan’s newly inaugurated president, calling him “Qadari.” His name is actually Asif Ali Zardari.).

…

But Mr. Obama seemed calm and in control and seemed to hold his own on foreign policy, the subject on which Mr. McCain was assumed to hold a natural advantage. Mr. Obama talked in detail about foreign countries and their leaders, as if trying to assure the audience that he could hold his own on the world stage. He raised his own questions about Mr. McCain’s judgment in supporting the Iraq war.

McCain made a big deal about earmarks, even as his own running mate requested millions of dollars in earmarks this year. Earmarks are not the biggest economic problem our country faces however, and represent a miniscule part of the annual budget2.

Obama managed to work in the point that McCain forgot who the president of Spain was, even though his delivery was not quite as harsh as it could have been3. For all of McCain’s vaunted foreign policy experience, he seems to have trouble remembering facts about places. McCain also seems to emphasize going to a country makes one an expert. Not sure how relevant setting foot on foreign soil and being escorted around by Secret Service equivalents in a dignitary’s motorcade is to actually learning details and nuance about a country. Similar reasoning to saying that one is a Russian expert because of proximity of one’s house to Russia. You learn more about a subject by reading about it, and talking to experts, at least in my experience. Simply setting foot in Afghanistan is not relevant. Also, Madeleine Albright is not a Republican, so McCain cannot claim her, especially when the Republicans used to ridicule her for attempting to have dialogue with North Korea.

As far as North Korea is concerned, our secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went to North Korea. By the way, North Korea, most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag.

(via transcript of the debate)

A brief roundup of some pundit reaction to the debate here including this:

Jonathan Alter on MSNBC: The biggest loser? Sarah Palin. The debates set a standard she cannot live up to.

Footnotes:
  1. such as calling the new president of Pakistan “Qadari” instead of Zardari [↩]
  2. somewhere less than 1% [↩]
  3. though apparently McCain muttered under his breath, horse shit [↩]

Wild day, no deal

Seth Anderson0 comment

Damn, I wish there was video footage of this massive temper tantrum, and especially of Still-President Bush “struggling to maintain order”. What, he was yelling at folks? Offering to refill their sippy cups with Jim Beam? Why would anyone, on either side of the aisle, even bother to listen to Bush? He’s so obviously out of his element when the topic isn’t about blowing things up.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) angrily accused the minority of trying to undercut Paulson by crafting a late-breaking alternative proposal—with the tacit support, Frank said, of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Both McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, would leave the White House without comment, and the meeting was described as among the wildest in memory. A beleaguered President Bush had to struggle to maintain order and reassert himself. And when Democrats left to caucus in the Roosevelt Room, Paulson pursued them, begging that they not “blow up” the legislation.

The former Goldman Sachs CEO even went down on one knee as if genuflecting, to which Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) is said to have joked, “I didn’t know you were Catholic.”

[From Wild day, no deal – David Rogers – Politico.com]

John McSame wants to make sure the whole charade turns into a partisan snipe-fest for his own reasons, and so he can avoid losing a debate to a better prepared candidate.

(via Whet Moser)

A Contrast

Seth Anderson0 comment

McCain’s weird day yesterday should be remembered for posterity. McCain just made voting for Obama a lot easier for a lot of on-the-fence people1. There is a definite contrast in styles between the two men, Obama has the Presidential demeanor2 in a way that John McCain could only wish he had.

Anyway, Henrik Hertzberg had this to say:

What a contrast yesterday. First, out comes McCain, looking drawn, jittery, and (to my admittedly jaundiced eye) guilty, with his announcement that he doesn’t want to debate on Friday because the financial crisis is too awful for a thing like politics to occur. He reads his statement and exits quickly. A couple of hours later, Obama appears. He looks and sounds like a President of the United States. He is preternaturally calm. He explains the chronology of the day: he called McCain at 8:30, the call was returned at 2:30, they discussed the idea of putting out a joint statement about the crisis. He says not a word about postponing the debate.

Then, unlike McCain, Obama takes questions. It becomes a full-fledged press conference. He eventually mentions the postponement. He says that during their phone call McCain had said it was something that ought to be looked at, and he had replied that they should get their joint statement out first. He makes it clear, in an offhand way, that McCain had blindsided him, but he does it without rancor. Perhaps there was a miscommunication, he suggests generously. He stresses his agreement with McCain that the crisis is neither Republican nor Democratic but American. He outlines some conditions he would like to see attached to the bailout bill but adds that both parties should refrain from loading it up with extraneous desiderata. He mentions a couple of specific examples of Democratic pet causes, including bankruptcy protection, that he doesn’t think should be in the bill. His manner with respect to the crisis is grave and businesslike, but he treats McCain’s debate-postponement demand as a minor matter that need not be taken too seriously. He notes dryly that both candidates have big airplanes with their names emblazoned and can easily travel to Oxford, Mississippi. He suggests that a potential President ought to be able to cope with more than one problem at a time.

[From Hendrik Hertzberg: Online Only: The New Yorker]

There’s more in that vein, if you’re interested, including an observation that Obama handled McCain’s cheap gambit with aplomb, by ignoring it.

Footnotes:
  1. not me, obviously, as I would abstain rather than vote for McCain, but you probably know somebody who isn’t quite sure if Obama is Presidential enough, mostly because they haven’t been paying much attention to the campaign yet [↩]
  2. again, whatever the hell that is. [↩]

MoDo channels Jed Bartlet

swanksalot0 comment


“The West Wing – The Complete First Four Seasons (4-Pack)” (Jason Ensler)

Maureen Dowd channels Aaron Sorkin (the producer who created the fictional President, Jed Bartlet for the television show, The West Wing) to give Obama this bit of advice:

GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

[From Maureen Dowd – Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

Not bad advice actually for a change.