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04Nov
Tags: VOTE!
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02Nov
Tags: cheney
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30Oct
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30Oct
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28Oct
Yet again, John McCain has demonstrated his utter disregard for the truth. As part of his futile and increasingly angry campaign to peg Obama as a socialist, McCain has been touting a 2001 radio interview with Obama. McCain argues that the interview demonstrates Obama’s regret that the civil rights movement did not result in a “redistribution of wealth in our society.”This characterization of the interview is baseless and misleading.
In the interview, Obama discussed his view (widely shared by conservatives) that the Court is institutionally ill-suited to create change and argued that the Civil Rights movement should have focused more on grassroots change and less on the courts. He said “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 coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Cass Sunstein, one of the most respected law professors in the country, argues that “it is truly ridiculous to take Obama’s remarks in 2001 as suggesting that the nation should embark on a large-scale redistributive scheme.” First, Obama’s principal argument about the institutional limits of courts was made by many conservatives in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Second, the type of “redistribution” Obama was discussing includes programs such as Social Security, educational reform, and the American with Disabilities Act, which almost all modern politicians (including McCain) support.
Sunstein is not alone in his incredulity. The Associated Press Fact Checker explains that McCain misread the 2001 interview and the New York Times shows that even conservative legal thinkers agree that McCain misrepresented Obama’s argument.
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28Oct
“In one week, at this defining moment in history, you can give this country the change we need.”
With one week left, Obama is going back to basics. Obama’s new speech reminds us of the importance of the election and the need for change.
In honor of Obama’s back to Springfield message, I thought I’d post an oldie, but a goodie—will.i.am’s inspiring Yes We Can song. I think it resonates now, more than ever, as election day draws near.
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27Oct
In the current issue of Newsweek, Richard Haass, president of the esteemed foreign policy think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a memo to the president-elect about the world that awaits him upon his inauguration (Haass was the director of policy planning for the Department of State, where he was Colin Powell’s principal adviser, from 2001 to 2003, and previously served as special assistant to President H.W. Bush).
While the memo is non-partisan, its recommendations echo several of Obama’s key foreign policy positions, and can be read as a barely concealed endorsement that Obama is the candidate best-prepared to handle America’s global challenges. For example, Haass advises:
“We should be prepared to have face-to-face talks with the Iranians, without preconditions. In general, it is wiser to see negotiations not as a reward but as a tool of national security.” (Over the course of the primary and general election, Obama has made clear that if elected he plans to talk to Iran without preconditions about its nuclear weapons programs and the stability of Iraq.)
“The vice president should be your counselor, a minister without portfolio, and not a cabinet secretary with a specific set of responsibilities. You need someone with an administration-wide perspective who can tell you what you need to hear, even if it isn’t always what you want to hear. The one person around you (other than your spouse) you cannot fire is best placed to do this.” (Through his 35 years in the Senate, Joe Biden has gained expertise in foreign policy and legal issues, and this experience is the main reason Obama chose him as his running mate. Biden has said that he expects to serve as a senior policymaker and confidant in an Obama-Biden administration.)
“Speaking of energy, the current situation is untenable . . . We can offer tax breaks and subsidies as long as they are linked to greater efficiency and “greenness.” We should devote resources to the development of alternatives, although resources will be in short supply and developing alternatives will take time.” (Not exactly an endorsement of “Drill, Baby, Drill” and pretty close to Obama’s energy plan.)
“Trade is also worth talking about now . . . The only way you are likely to win a debate on trade is if you do more to cushion individual workers from the vagaries of modern global life. This means tax-deferred retraining and education accounts, and a health-care option not linked to jobs. So if you are going to press for health care, I suggest you link it to trade.” (Again, this is almost exactly Obama’s position on trade.)
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27Oct
Unfortunately for Palin, our nation’s outrageously cute kid reporters are all in the tank for Obama and Biden.
One should note that Palin gets her question about the Vice President’s responsibilities incredibly wrong, claiming that the VP is “in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes“.
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26Oct
David Brooks has written a thoughtful piece on how the Republican Party gave up on moderates while the Democratic Party has made a hard tack to the middle.
The Hamiltonian-Bull Moose tendency is the great, moderate strain in American politics. In some sense this whole campaign was a contest to see which party could reach out from its base and occupy that centrist ground. The Democratic Party did that. Senior Democrats like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Jason Furman actually created something called The Hamilton Project to lay out a Hamiltonian approach for our day.
McCain and Republicans stayed within their lines. There was a lot of talk about earmarks. There was a good health care plan that was never fully explained. And there was Sarah Palin, who represents the old resentments and the narrow appeal of conventional Republicanism.
As a result, Democrats now control the middle. Self-declared moderates now favor Obama by 59 to 30, according to the New York Times/CBS News poll. Suburban voters favor Obama 50 to 39. Voters over all give him a 21 point lead when it comes to better handling the economy and a 14 point lead on tax policy, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
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25Oct
There’s an interesting endorsement from Ken Adelman, who had worked under Ford, Rumsfled and Reagan, entitled “Why a Staunch Conservative Like Me Endorsed Obama.” It’s worth reading. Here are some key lines:
Granted, McCain’s views are closer to mine than Obama’s. But I’ve learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years.
McCain’s temperament — leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke — and his judgment — leading him to Wasilla — depressed me into thinking that “our guy” would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.
I’d rather a competent moderate president. Even at a risk, since Obama lacks lots of executive experience displaying competence (though his presidential campaign has been spot-on). And since his Senate voting record is not moderate, but depressingly liberal. Looming in the background, Pelosi and Reid really scare me.
Nonetheless, I concluded that McCain would not — could not — be a good president. Obama just might be.
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24Oct
We’ve written a few times about why Obama’s health care plan is so much better than McCain’s, but Slate has a great piece by Peter Bray entitled “McCain’s Defensive Web Site: Why is his health care page all about Obama?” on how the plans have changed.
The McCain camp now defines its health care plan in relation to Obama’s critiques. The assumption is that the public knows more about Obama’s critiques on the plan than about the plan itself.
To get a sense of this dynamic, check out the bizarre “Four Pillars of Reform” palliative that was slapped onto McCain’s health care page last week. Its platitudes—”John McCain believes in strengthening health care quality”—join new links to anti-Obama rebuttal pages. But that apparently wasn’t enough, as this week those rebuttal pages are now the main event.
While McCain flails, Obama’s health care page (devoid of any mention of McCain) continues to refine and adjust its policy points—note the swap of “sliding scale subsidies” with the arguably centrist “sliding scale tax credits” as a solution for health insurance premiums.
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24Oct
Former Republican Gov. of Minnesota, Arne Carlson, has endorsed Obama “saying Obama represented the best hope for an America facing an economic crisis and criticizing Republicans for waging a mean-spirited campaign that has ‘been going down all these side roads.‘”The former Republican Gov. of Massachusetts, William Weld (a supporter of Mitt Romney) has also endorsed Obama, saying that “Senator Obama is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate who will transform our politics and restore America’s standing in the world…We need a president who will lead based on our common values and Senator Obama demonstrates an ability to unite and inspire. Throughout this campaign I’ve watched his steady leadership through trying times and I’m confident he is the best candidate to move our country forward.”
Meanwhile, former Republican Gov. Linwood Holton of Virginia is now campaigning heavily for Obama in a red state where an Obama win looks very possible.
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23Oct
As Barack Obama leaves the campaign trail today to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii, it’s worth reflecting on Obama’s grandmother and mother, the two women who raised him and the biggest influences on his life.Barack Obama has said of his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, “She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.” When Obama was young, Dunham, who did not have a college degree, got a job as a secretary at a bank to help provide for him. Time Magazine’s article on Obama’s bond with his grandmother can be found here.
The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine all published excellent profiles of S. Ann Soetero, Obama’s mother, earlier this year. In the Time article, the magazine conceded, “In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.
She was a “dozen things,” including a “teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman
from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.” She cared deeply about helping poor people, and near the end of her life, she helped build a microfinance program in Indonesia before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story.His mother’s influence can be seen in Obama’s political gifts, as Time Magazine observes: “Obama is his mother’s son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother’s credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they’re responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.”
Obama wrote about his mother in the preface to his memoir Dreams from My Father: “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”
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22Oct
It almost isn’t worth rolling our eyes at the $150,000 the RNC spent on clothing, hair, and make-up for Sarah Palin. Even GOP donors are annoyed and asking for their money back, so it doesn’t seem necessary to fan the flames.
But it’s definitely worth reading Robin Givhan’s take on the situation. For Palin, it’s about more than just the clothes–for a campaign that has spent so much time and effort cultivating an image of the simple, down-to-earth hockey mom, it says a lot that she opted for Neiman’s, Sachs, and Barney’s over more reasonably priced stores.
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22Oct
The last time Virginia voted for the Democratic candidate in a presidential election was in 1964.Until 1997, Viriginia’s state song was “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” which contains a derogatory term for African-Americans.
That song is still Virginia’s “State Song Emeritus.” It hasn’t picked a new one.
Barack Obama is leading John McCain in Virginia polls by 7 percentage points as of today.
The fact that Virginia is considered a swing state at all this year, let alone one that is leaning heavily toward Obama at the moment, is one of the most important stories of the 2008 election. The Financial Times, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker have all recently published in-depth articles on Obama’s push into this former Republican stronghold.
It is a testament to Barack Obama’s wholehearted dedication to connecting with voters across America, not just in traditional Democratic strongholds. John Kerry had five campaign offices in Virginia. Barack Obama has 49.
It is a vote of confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to lead America in the twenty-first century. Virginia has a high population of young people, of immigrants, and of educated workers, encapsulating demographic trends that are evident across the nation. It is a state that is successfully navigating the transition to a post-industrial economy, with the largest concentration of high-tech workers in the nation. In 2006, Forbes magazine named it the best state in the nation for business. Its public universities are among the best in the country.
Obama has also spent a great deal of time in the state’s poorer southwestern region, an area that Democratic candidates have generally ignored. His plans for middle-class tax cuts, improved access to healthcare, and his support for clean coal technology are all factors in his growing support in what used to be known as the reddest area of a red state. Obama recently gained the endorsement of Ralph Stanley, the world’s greatest living bluegrass musician and a native of southwest Virginia. Have a listen.
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