6 posts tagged “barack obama”
This week something remarkable happened: the inauguration of Barack Obama to the White House. And yes, it was truly remarkable, no matter which of the two parties you belong. I listened to his speech and the following jamboree on the radio, since I was at work and was only able to catch a glimpse of the televisions up front. It was good, great, grood even, and it felt good to finally see this thing realized. What, pray tell, do I mean here by "thing"? Well, in fact, a number of things, not the least of which is the induction of a black man to our highest office; that right there has been a long time coming. But perhaps more mundanely I meant simply the inauguration itself. I couldn't bear another morning of waking up to the pundits going on about how he's almost our new president. It's hard to believe two whole months passed since that whirlwind of an election. In fact, I've been thinking lately of that momentous occasion, and just how fast it all really happened.
On the night of November 4, 2008, I left church and headed over to my friends' house nearby to say hello. When I got there, they were, of course, avidly watching the start of the election coverage on all the major networks. I told them right off the bat I would not be staying to watch. I was merely coming over to say hello, visit a bit, and would be headed home to wait until the next morning to find out the results of the election.
“Why wouldn't you want to watch?” they wondered. Indeed, to my friends, as to most Americans that night, my aspirations to avoid the election coverage at all costs must have sounded asinine. This was the most important night of the year – the night we had all been waiting for, which seemed to capture practically every bit of journalistic interest for as long as any of us could remember.
Of course, a part of me did want to watch – and watch I did, for a while. I, like any informed citizen, had tried my best to keep up with the election coverage so as to guarantee my vote would be knowledgeable, sincere and full of conviction. So naturally I was interested in the outcome. But in my gut, however, I knew that it was curiosity that killed the cat, and my gut was not interested in the imminent ulcer several grueling hours of nail-biting news coverage would surely supply.
I like to think, however, that it was more than just my tummy's well-being that had me so opposed to the carnival of coverage. I hoped there was also in my delinquency an ingredient civil noncompliance, meaning I could abide by the constraint of ideas and principles over and against my personal gratification and the thrill of television at its most unscripted. There was a feeling I just couldn't shake, which mirrored perhaps the feeling you get when, having slept through a long flight, you wake up in a different country and climate, on a different day, and among foreign-tongued civilians. In other words, this election business was all happening so fast. In my own state of Kentucky, polls had opened that morning at 6 AM and closed about 12 hours later. Next, Americans collectively took a breath and held it. For five hours the nation sat rapt before the flat screen HD TV, spiking network ratings perhaps not seen since the last hotly contested election four years earlier. Then came the most anticipated exhale of the century. That same night we had a new president, not 6 hours after the polls had closed.
OK, I admit it. I watched the whole damn thing. But let's face it: if I hadn't how could I bloviate on the matter as I am? Perhaps this time around, my nervousness was overcome by disbelief. I simply could not understand how the networks felt confident enough to call a state for McCain or Obama when only 5% of the state's vote had been counted. More mystifying still, how could they call Washington, Oregon, and California for Obama immediately after their polls closed? It's not that I was dissatisfied with the outcome (I had become an avid Obama recruit), but just how was it that they were able to “project” without fail which way every state and commonwealth in the Union would fall, red or blue, Republican or Democrat, McCain or Obama?
Not only could I not get a grip on the networks' crystal ball clairvoyance, I refused to believe this divination was ideal. Sure, it was nice to know the outcome, to “just get it over with”, to let all those months of anticipation dissipate in buoyant joy or bitter sorrow. But I wondered what were we forsaking in our capitulation to prime time politics? How is it that we were willing to parse down the most important decision of the year, of the next four years, in fact, to a matter of moments? Poor Obama and McCain: so obliged were they to ready themselves for crowning victory or devastating defeat only hours after they left the campaign trail. Gone were the days when each vote was taken singularly and seriously, when the gravity of a nation's resolve outweighed the “urgency of now.” In those days of yore, eager voters had to wait for weeks before every vote was tallied, and a consensus reached. On November 4th, 2008, we could hardly wait till the polls closed before pronouncing our victor.
I wondered: Was this democracy? Was this our sacred ritual of freedom? Perhaps instead this was a sort of ruse, a comic diffusion done up and digestible for the attention-deficient American public. Rather than any dignified sign of civil liberty, this looked to me much more like Hollywood donning wig and gavel to feed us the plot line which we'd come to crave. Suddenly it made sense that the the dust would settle so quickly. Could we, as 21st century American citizens, really bear the suspense of an actual tally of votes? I hardly thought so. We're the nation of fast food, TV dinners and instant messaging. We've come to expect a happy ending after a couple of hours. In other words, we demand instant gratification, and our presidential elections are no exception.
There was something else entirely lost in our mad dash to victory that Tuesday night. So much of the drama of it revolved around the either-or sensibility. The good vs. bad, old vs. young, and experience vs. change narratives the media had written for us (and the candidates stuck by) played perfectly into our preconceived paradigm of contest. The United States democratic process has been locked in a two-party system for decades. Ross Perot made a decent run in 1996 on account of his deep pockets. And on occasion, rogues like Ralph Nader are lambasted for “stealing votes” from the two major candidates. In spite of these anomalies, the essence of our political process has long lain at the feet of two very similar giants. Of course, the general public doesn't see them as all that similar. They can be delineated with labels like “big government” and “fiscal conservative” easily enough. It's not that these names accurately describe the parties they are assigned to. It's just a way for us to keep things simple, to eliminate any shade but black and white. We've got to keep things simple or we might get confused. We like our elections like we like our sports: Two teams, one winner. Ties are a necessary evil. But bringing a third team onto the field – or worse yet, a fourth or fifth – just doesn't fit the bill.
Hence, the vote for third party is often derided as a “wasted vote,” and often the voter's conscience is overrun by pragmatism simply to avoid the spoiler effect. What's the point of voting for someone who's never going to win? Or so goes the logic. This rationale does not reign supreme, however. In every election you still hear of the bleeding hearts out there who hold out hope for a democratic process bigger than just two parties. The evidence is clear. Ralph Nader and company netted nearly 700,000 votes. Bob Barr of the Libertarians caught nearly half a million, and Charles Baldwin, Ron Paul's pick, about 200,000. These are by no means massive or impressive results. But they demonstrate, at least, that the outcasts had captured some interest – well over a million voters' collectively. Racing across the finish line on election night, prematurely calling Obama's or McCain's name for every state completely cuts these contenders out of the race. Why? Because their race is any less valid than the Democrats and Republicans'? Because they're less American than the front runners? Hardly. Most of it comes down to money, and the rest goes to public disinterest. We can't tolerate the wait – especially if the wait involves a pack of nobodies – and so we rush ahead, call the game before we hop in bed, and let the day end.
By no means do I wish for my critique here to detract from the “historic nature” of the recent election. I've said already that Obama was my man this year, and I'm glad he won. I wouldn't have minded, though, waiting a few more days for things to actually happen, rather than simply letting the talking heads call it for me well ahead of time. I lament, too, that our system can't bear more competition than the little we're provided between two parties. Civilized democracies – and even some third world governments – around the world enjoy three parties. Several European countries boast five or six parties even. At times these separate groups align to form a more powerful coalition and solidify a win. Other times they'll go it alone, resting on the strength of their distinct platforms. But options like these are the name of the game when more than two parties are possible. Voters can indulge in the privilege of deliberation. We, too, have access to said privilege. We need only move beyond black and white and into the shades of partisan gray. This, however, may forever remain too tall an order for Americans, so long we call our elections like we do the Kentucky Derby.
From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.
McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. 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.
There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.
Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.
From Frank Rich's scintillating editorial in the New York Times. Read the rest of his insight, because it's all good.
"I will not allow us to be distracted by the same politics that seeks to divide us with false charges and meaningless labels. In this campaign, we will not stand for the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.
I owe what I am to this country I love, and I will never forget it. Where else could a young man who grew up herding goats in Kenya get the chance to fulfill his dream of a college education? Where else could he marry a white girl from Kansas whose parents survived war and depression to find opportunity out west? Where else could they have a child who would one day have the chance to run for the highest office in the greatest nation the world has ever known? Where else, but in the United States of America?
It is now my hope and our task to set this country on a course that will keep this promise alive in the twenty-first century. And the eyes of the world are watching to see if we can."
Kids' Health: A One-eyed Invader in the Bedroom
"Here’s one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV."
The cure for exhaustion? More exercise.
"When a person is sapped by fatigue, the last thing he or she wants to do is exercise. But new research shows that regular, low-intensity exercise may help boost energy levels in people suffering from fatigue."
"I took a few pots of Ethiopian Harrar — quite possibly made from bean grown by those in the film — and it struck me that I’m selling something precious. The coffee is grown by these people, it’s picked by hand, sorted by hand, washed by hand, bagged by hand… then it’s shipped to Nashville, roasted when I order it, and shipped to me the next day. And what do I do with it? I throw it around, I grind and brew and don’t even think about how many people are truly affected by this thing that, ultimately, I am selling to people who do not appreciate their work. They don’t KNOW the work… hell, it’s hard enough for me to remember."
"Scoffers aren’t really open to hearing any answers, because they aren’t really asking serious questions. And as much as they like to be seen as “only being after the hard truth”, they usually are far from what the Proverbs call 'searching for wisdom as for hidden treasure' – they read a lot less than people think they do, and they often uncritically parrot the objections of others rather than working through these things themselves. I think they mistake doubt for a kind of knowledge – as though being educated meant learning to deny everything. It might be what the author of 1 Tim. 6:20 meant when he talked about opposing arguments of what is 'falsely called knowledge'. Such is our age. But among evangelical Christians, scoffers are a minority group. The majority group might be what the book of Proverbs dubs 'the simple'."
Video debate: McGrath vs Hitchens: Poison or Cure? On religious belief in the modern world.
I've been thinking lately about the democratic process between the various presidential candidates. Actually, it's been a struggle for me not to think about it, so much so that I had to tell myself I was giving up politics for Lent. But after last night's results in Ohio and Texas, I have to wonder what path the Democrats' campaigns are going to take. Exit polls in Texas show that particularly among women who decided at the last moment, voters chose Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama based on their belief that Hillary would be "better in the White House." The irony of this reasoning is almost depressing. Why would you ever vote for someone whom you didn't think was going to manage the White House properly? And is that really all the race comes down to: which of the two candidates will manage the White House "better" in an international crisis*, and nothing more? Not trade policy, not potential for reform, not domestic affairs?
There's been speculation that this sudden resurgence of support for Clinton could be the result of a recent television ad for the Clinton campaign, which asks "When the red phone rings at 3 AM, who do you want in the White House to pick it up?" In other words, when there's a international crisis on our hands, when terrorists come knocking on your door... Personally, I see this ad as bordering on the fear-mongering we've been subjected to the last 7 years -- the type that led us to invade and decimate a country, chucking their citizens' rights (few they may have been) and imposing our own sense of justice on them without an exit strategy intact, or even a proper strategy for dealing with the guerrilla warfare we should have expected.
Up until a couple weeks ago, Clinton was trying to live up to Barack Obama's standard of "polite politics". She was holding back from the negative ads and the accusatory tactics. But as she lost one state after another -- 11 in a row -- I guess she realized that it's the OLD politics that really do get results! In other words, let's scare them into your camp. Threaten them with the worst-case scenarios. Go after your opponent's strengths rather that their weaknesses -- that way you'll leave them nothing left to stand on. You'll make them an utterly worthless candidate, because if people can't even believe a candidate has anything good to offer, then indeed there's no hope for him. In a word: ruthless.
So if no one else is going to say it, I will: SHAME ON YOU, HILLARY CLINTON. Shame on you for scaring up your votes. You've had strong base of support all this time, but you still saw fit to grasp at the sense of hope Obama inspires in people from every stripe of American. You saw fit to demean Hope, perhaps the very thing Americans cherish more than anything else, and you saw fit to diminish -- insult, even -- those in every state who have taken refuge its message -- a message espoused eloquently but not fatuously by Barack Obama -- by implying that somehow, they do not represent Americans' true interests.
Shame on you, Hillary Clinton, for attempting to distill America's hope. At this point, even your republican opponent has run a more dignified campaign that you.
I say this because I know Obama won't. He doesn't play the kind of politics that smears his opponent's reputation just because she's a step ahead. But as I'm not a politician -- I'm a citizen bound to hold our politicians in check -- I think it's the proper thing to say, even if it falls on dead ears.
by Frank Rich via the New York Times
WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the
Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended
in the long dark shadow of Iraq.
It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless
value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her
still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then
compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy
that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After
promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.
The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.
That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.
If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.
The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election”: Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.
In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.
What’s next? Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
Anyone interested in Obama? I am. Let's get rollin!
The Early Word: Obama Strategies
Obama, Clinton, Iran?
Obama, Clinton, Social Security
Sharpening Attacks on Clinton
Taking the Gloves Off
Here's a great song written about Obama by the band Extra Golden, a half Kenyan band who apparently the Ill. Senator is into. Check out the cool story of how Obama helped them out here and here.
