The Nation
COULD CLINTON FINISH 3RD IN IOWA? YES...
Posted by John Nichols at 12/07/2007 @ 11:39am
Could Hillary Clinton come in third in Iowa?
It's possible.
Check out the new Insider Advantage poll numbers from the first caucus state.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama is at 32 percent, finally moving outside margin-of-error territory to a clear lead.
Clinton is still in second, with 25 percent. But she is no longer the master of the position. Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards is tied with the former front-runner among likely Democratic presidential caucus participants.
No one else matters much. Joe Biden's at 5 percent, Bill Richardson 3 percent, and Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich 1 percent each.
With Obama apparently closing in on Clinton in New Hampshire, if the latest polling out of the first primary state is right, the senator from New York has a serious problem.
A third-place finish in Iowa and a loss in New Hampshire is not a strong start on a front-loaded primary schedule.
And Obama might want to keep the champagne on ice for a little longer. Midwestern activists with the UNITE-HERE union, which has a strong presence in the region, have been given the go-ahead by the union's national leadership -- which has yet to endorse -- to launch a major campaign on behalf of Edwards in Iowa. And Edwards is about to open an intensive cross-state campaign swing that will be coupled with a television advertising campaign that, while it may not match the spending levels of the Obama and Clinton campaign, should be competitive.
Imagine this scenario: An Edwards win in Iowa, an Obama win in New Hampshire, an Edwards win in the January 19 Nevada caucuses if he scores an endorsement from the muscular UNITE-HERE Culinary Workers local in Las Vegas, an Obama win in the January 29 South Carolina primary where his strong Iowa and New Hampshire finishes will help him ease concerns about his candidacy among older African-American voters, and Clinton desperately looking for solid ground. But don't count the former first-lady out. Her poll numbers remain very strong in Nevada and she is still ahead -- albeit narrowly -- in both New Hampshire and South Carolina. Additionally, her aides quietly remind reporters that the senator is likely to win easily in the neutered January 15 and January 29 primaries in Michigan and Florida, the two biggest states expected to vote before February 5's multi-state primary and caucus "super-duper Tuesday. And, of course, a Clinton campaign that has never been accused of being gentle continues to search -- with new urgency -- for a strategy to kneecap both Obama and Edwards before Iowa.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=257746
Democrats, Primaries etc - Since I'm not sure where to put this one
Oh LORD! Now Hillary's camp is trying to disenfranchise student voters in Iowa! Is there any dirty trick from the Republican playbook she WON'T do?
Counterpunch
December 6, 2007
From War Room to Panic Room
Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Character Assassination
By AL GIORDANO
Events have conspired to deepen my November 14 argument that a generational fault line is reshaping the Democratic presidential nomination contest (“Don’t Trust Anyone Over 50,” CounterPunch, November 14). To wit:
On November 20, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the Democratic frontrunner, issued an awkward attack on presidential rival Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, based on his four childhood years as an American abroad in Indonesia. To an audience in Shenandoah, Iowa, via a telephone speaker call, Clinton spoke these words: "Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face.”
The whack wasn’t merely against a ten-year-old boy but also versus any other American citizen or immigrant that once lived elsewhere. It also played into the nasty whisper campaign on the right that attempts to paint Obama as the Manchurian Muslim that Fox News has falsely implied was trained since childhood to infiltrate and destroy Western Civilization. But in the context of other recent events, it was part and parcel of the pattern of hostility by Clinton and her lackeys toward youth, in general, and young voters in specific.
On December I, the Clinton campaign read a script to various political reporters about the Obama campaign’s efforts to raise voter turnout among university students in Iowa, making the (legally errant) claim that Hawkeye state students that live and study in Iowa but are from other states should not be able to vote in the January 3 caucuses: “We are not courting out-of-staters. The Iowa caucus ought to be for Iowans,” said a Clinton spokeswoman, adding, “We are not systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out of state people. We don’t have literature recruiting out of state college students.”
On December 2, Clinton gave an audience in Clear Lake Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register, an argument reminiscent of those for a poll-tax as a requirement to vote: “This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here.”
The Clinton camp has reason to be worried about the youth vote. The November 25-28 Des Moines Register poll that showed Obama ahead in Iowa with 28 percent, to 25 percent for Clinton and 23 percent for John Edwards – within the margin of error, but with Obama as the only candidate trending upward – noted Obama’s towering lead among younger voters: “Obama also dominates among younger caucusgoers, with support from 48 percent from those younger than 35. Clinton was the choice of 19 percent in that group and Edwards of 17 percent.”
That this year’s Iowa caucuses will be held during winter break, contrary to conventional wisdom, in fact makes the college student vote more potent on a statewide level by spreading it to all corners. Instead of, as in previous years, those votes being concentrated in Ames and other college towns, the students will be participating in their hometown caucuses throughout the state. In Iowa, the sum total of votes does not determine the statewide result. It is rather the sum of 1,700-plus local caucus results that will be added up to determine the winner. In rural Iowa, where three or four extra votes can dramatically change caucus results where, say, only 15 voters turn out to caucus, the decentralization of the university vote will likely have a greater impact on the statewide results than if it had been ghettoized only in college towns. In the academic centers, where, because of high caucus turnout in 2004 there will be a heavy concentration of delegates to be selected, university professors and staff will likely have a comparitavely greater influence than in other years: those are also very strong demographic groups for Obama (who, for example, widely leads among campaign contributions from employees of academic institutions, and in polls among the college educated). At issue in this dust-up is whether students who originate from Illinois and other states will come back to participate as well.
Efforts to disenfranchise student voters are more commonly the signature tactics of Republicans. Prior to the November 2004 elections, the executive director of the Iowa Republican party sent a mailer out to voters, with the images of Senators Clinton and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, proclaiming, “Would you let these two tell you how to vote?” The flyer added: “They’re not from here. They won’t stay here. But they’re voting here. As part of the Democrats plan, they have registered a large number of Grinnell College students from places like New York and Massachusetts to vote in Iowa… Then why would you let 1,000 east-coast college kids elect your State Representative?”
The ACLU, the Democratic Party, MTV’s Rock the Vote and other organizations that encourage young voter participation have historically challenged such voter repression stunts. The sudden adoption of the same anti-democratic tactics speaks volumes about the overriding character of Senator Clinton and her campaign in the home stretch: a paranoid obsession with, and resentment toward, the relative youth of Obama (who is 46 to Clinton’s 60) and his battalions of young supporters.
The Clinton campaign’s generational meltdown became visible to all on December 3, when in a press release that sought to paint Obama as an ambitious pol that had charted his rise to the presidency from the sandbox of his childhood, it wrote:
In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.’ "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." [AP, 1/25/07 ]
The press release included a similar paragraph about such an essay Obama reportedly penned in third grade, too.
Rival candidate John Edwards, when asked about Clinton’s kindergarten attack, told reporters in Clear Lake, Iowa, ''It's fine to talk about our records and about issues. But we probably ought to stop at age 14.'' Later, in Waterloo, he told voters, "I want to confess to all of you right now. In third grade I wanted to be two things: I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted to be Superman."
What some pundits called “Kinder-Gate” came on the heels of a buckshot-load of Clinton attacks on Obama’s “courage,” his “character,” and the policy differences between the two on health care and social security. “Now the fun part starts,” crowed Clinton on December 3, defending her escalation of attacks on Obama. But the resulting week has been anything but fun for Clinton and her campaign.
On the heels of her vanishing lead in Iowa and shrinking lead in first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire and nationwide, Clinton’s artless attacks generated a near consensus throughout the ideological spectrum that the frontrunner is blowing it. Former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich sharply rebutted what he called the “series of slurs” by his “old friend” Clinton against Obama. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto wrote that, “a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on the brink of losing all dignity.”
Time’s Joe Klein called Clinton’s statements “sweaty and desperate.” Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic noted, "Some of her top advisers exuded a sense of entitlement: Clinton deserved to be president; it was her turn. They did not perceive any threat until it was almost too late."
In full damage-control mode by December 4, Clinton strategist Mark Penn went on MSNBC to claim that the attack on Obama’s kindergarten essay was “a joke.” But Boston Globe political reporter Scot Lehigh wrote that he had, on the day of the press release, asked the Clinton campaign whether the kindergarten attack was tongue-in-cheek, and did not get a response: “Asked for some indication that the reference to elementary-school essays was meant humorously, a Clinton press aide said he'd have to check and get back to me.”
Meanwhile, as Iowa polls generally show an Obama rise, a Clinton slide, and an Edwards hover close behind in third, Clinton campaign internet director Peter Daou circulated two Iowa polls that showed Clinton out front, sighing, “We'll see how much attention these polls get.” But it turned out that those polls were taken prior to the newer wave of surveys, one from November 7 to 25, the other from November 6 to 18. The bulk of the interviews on each were conducted before the meltdown began. Clinton aide Daou got caught trying to peddle older polls as new ones (an indication of just how important perceptions of inevitability are to the Clinton campaign not only on a propaganda level, but also for its self-image: after months of using Clinton’s lead in the polls to smack all criticism by rivals, the campaign is losing its number-one rationale for existing: it’s much-heralded lead in the polls.)
Clinton’s national lead has also begun to tank. As of December 6, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll had Clinton with 33 percent – her lowest support in the history of the tracking poll that began last July – with Obama at 26 and Edwards at 15 (prior to Thanksgiving, she enjoyed a 24-point lead over Obama; that’s been more than halved in less than two weeks). Typically, the “Iowa bounce” gives the caucus winner a 12 to 20 point surge in New Hampshire, which next year votes on January 8.
It may be that Clinton and her strategists have already written off Iowa and seek to diminish its importance so as to later be able to bounce back from a defeat there while attempting to influence which of her rivals emerges stronger on January 3. Her attacks on Obama are reminiscent of the famous “murder-suicide” crossfire, four years ago, between Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, who had been first and second in the polls until the week before the caucuses. Both went negative on the other and Iowa voters chose the more positive candidacies of John Kerry and Edwards over the frontrunners on caucus night. National Review’s Rick Lowry paraphrases Major Garrett on Fox News’ take on the Democratic contest: “Hillary is probably going after Obama so hard in Iowa because she can afford to have Edwards win there in a way she can't with Obama.”
I tend to agree with those conservative commentators: Clinton’s intent is to drag Obama into the mud pit with her. If she’s likely to crash in Iowa, why not set up the under-funded Edwards to emerge as her chief rival when she can bury Edwards later on from California to New York Island under an avalanche of TV ads? But Obama (who has slightly out-raised Clinton in the money race, and has the warchest to go toe-to-toe with her for months on end), also aware of caucus history, hasn’t bitten on that hook.
It may be that it was Clinton that fell into an Obama-laid trap when she launched the negative attacks. As Andrew Romano of Newsweek wrote, “while Obama's ‘politics of hope’ once prevented him from criticizing Clinton without appearing hypocritical, it now allows him to dismiss every clever (but ultimately insubstantial) Clinton charge as proof that she's playing ‘politics as usual’ – thereby boosting Obama's outsider appeal. What was bad for offense is now good for defense. Listening to Obama characterize Clinton as a typical pol is one thing; he did that for months to little effect. But watching him bait her into behaving like one is another. It's much more convincing.”
The Clinton attacks on a ten-year-old Obama, a third-grade Obama and Obama the kindergartner also carry the sleazy underside of thinly veiled back-up to right-wing smears suggesting that those years he spent abroad in an Islamic land mean he’s not really a Christian (Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ). The Washington Post’s November 28 page-one story on “Obama’s Muslim Ties,” which has now been openly criticized by two of the newspaper’s reporters, one of the daily’s cartoonists and even the editor of the same story (the Post ombudsman is expected to weigh in against the piece on Sunday) did not come out of thin air: the spin, as with all major works by over-extended daily newspaper political reporters, was pushed and spoon-fed by a rival campaign. There’s no way to prove or disprove which made the attack. But in that context came a December 5 revelation that an Iowa county chair for Clinton by the name of Judy Rose had forwarded an email that whacked Obama with the slur: “The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level - through the President of the United States, one of their own!!!!” The Clinton campaign called for that county chair’s resignation only after her emails became grist for political blogs on Wednesday.
When asked by reporters earlier this week to respond to the Clinton campaign’s kindergarten attack, Obama’s response suggests that he is aware that it comes with a backhanded attempt to reinforce the Manchurian Muslim argument: “It must be silly season,” Obama said. “I understand she's been quoting my kindergarten teacher in Indonesia.” He then resumed the theme of that day’s events: protecting consumers from predatory credit card company practices. But it’s significant that Obama, without prodding, brought up Indonesia, the unspoken part of the Clinton attacks on his childhood years. Rather than running from the four years of his autobiography that place him, as a kid, in the country with the world’s largest Islamic population, Obama has frequently pushed that experience – as well as the fact that his late immigrant father and his living grandmother in Kenya are Muslim – as a factor that would help him as president begin to undo the damage of the Bush-Clinton-Bush years between the US and the Islamic world.
Still, the glue that ties all these missteps by Clinton and company together is not the anti-Islamic undertone. The sticking point, and source of tremendous personal resentment against Obama, remains generational. The battering of a 10-year-old Obama and the subsequent slaps on his kindergarten and third-grade essays were so over-the-top as to reveal a very personal hatred on the part of Clinton toward the youthfulness that he represents. If a 46-year-old Obama annoys, the image of a K-6 Obama must really bother the aging boomer senator.
Clinton and her team exude a divine right to the Oval Office, a sense of entitlement, and that damn youngster Obama didn’t “wait his turn.” These latest foibles follow last summer’s string of Clintonian hits against Obama’s supposed “naïve” and “inexperienced” qualities, and her top staffers’ condescending complaint in November about Obama’s young supporters, that, “They look like Facebook.”
But the money point is how the Clinton hostility toward younger generations has now reached the extreme of corrupting her policy positions, with Clinton and her staff openly seeking to suppress and demonize young voter turnout in Iowa. (That’s also strategically stupid: the best way to get young people to do something is to tell them they shouldn’t or can’t do it. And Obama responded by touring five major Iowa universities on December 4 and 5, reminding the standing-room-only crowds that Clinton seeks to discourage them from participating in the caucuses.)
Thus, the Hillary Clinton that cut her political teeth as an advocate for children’s rights, as legal counsel to Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, as the self-proclaimed advocate, as First Lady in the 1990s, for kids, nears the possible twilight of her political career as a sneering adversary of youth and its voting rights.
The Iowa caucuses are four weeks away, but the curtain for major shifts in momentum will close in about two weeks when the mad shopping weekend before Christmas vacation begins. Then the campaign enters a twilight zone in which accurate polling cannot be done (with some demographic groups, particularly younger voters, traveling away from home more than others), when negative attacks and ads will not be possible (without the attacker painting herself as today’s Ebenezer Scrooge and suffering a yuletide backlash), when New Years and bowl games immediately precede the January 3 caucuses, and so the dynamics, beginning around December 19, will not be subject to major shifts.
At this point, if current trends continue, Senator Hillary Clinton (nee, Inevitable) may well be headed for a painful crash in the Iowa caucuses. The famed Clinton “War Room” has become the Panic Room. And if a black man wins the presidential caucuses in lily-white Iowa, the resulting shock won’t only inspire younger voters to flood the subsequent primaries and caucuses in the coming months. African-Americans and other alienated demographic groups will likely join the siege.
Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary, critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address: [email]narconews@gmail.com.[/email]
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano12062007.html
Counterpunch
December 6, 2007
From War Room to Panic Room
Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Character Assassination
By AL GIORDANO
Events have conspired to deepen my November 14 argument that a generational fault line is reshaping the Democratic presidential nomination contest (“Don’t Trust Anyone Over 50,” CounterPunch, November 14). To wit:
On November 20, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, the Democratic frontrunner, issued an awkward attack on presidential rival Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, based on his four childhood years as an American abroad in Indonesia. To an audience in Shenandoah, Iowa, via a telephone speaker call, Clinton spoke these words: "Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face.”
The whack wasn’t merely against a ten-year-old boy but also versus any other American citizen or immigrant that once lived elsewhere. It also played into the nasty whisper campaign on the right that attempts to paint Obama as the Manchurian Muslim that Fox News has falsely implied was trained since childhood to infiltrate and destroy Western Civilization. But in the context of other recent events, it was part and parcel of the pattern of hostility by Clinton and her lackeys toward youth, in general, and young voters in specific.
On December I, the Clinton campaign read a script to various political reporters about the Obama campaign’s efforts to raise voter turnout among university students in Iowa, making the (legally errant) claim that Hawkeye state students that live and study in Iowa but are from other states should not be able to vote in the January 3 caucuses: “We are not courting out-of-staters. The Iowa caucus ought to be for Iowans,” said a Clinton spokeswoman, adding, “We are not systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out of state people. We don’t have literature recruiting out of state college students.”
On December 2, Clinton gave an audience in Clear Lake Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register, an argument reminiscent of those for a poll-tax as a requirement to vote: “This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here.”
The Clinton camp has reason to be worried about the youth vote. The November 25-28 Des Moines Register poll that showed Obama ahead in Iowa with 28 percent, to 25 percent for Clinton and 23 percent for John Edwards – within the margin of error, but with Obama as the only candidate trending upward – noted Obama’s towering lead among younger voters: “Obama also dominates among younger caucusgoers, with support from 48 percent from those younger than 35. Clinton was the choice of 19 percent in that group and Edwards of 17 percent.”
That this year’s Iowa caucuses will be held during winter break, contrary to conventional wisdom, in fact makes the college student vote more potent on a statewide level by spreading it to all corners. Instead of, as in previous years, those votes being concentrated in Ames and other college towns, the students will be participating in their hometown caucuses throughout the state. In Iowa, the sum total of votes does not determine the statewide result. It is rather the sum of 1,700-plus local caucus results that will be added up to determine the winner. In rural Iowa, where three or four extra votes can dramatically change caucus results where, say, only 15 voters turn out to caucus, the decentralization of the university vote will likely have a greater impact on the statewide results than if it had been ghettoized only in college towns. In the academic centers, where, because of high caucus turnout in 2004 there will be a heavy concentration of delegates to be selected, university professors and staff will likely have a comparitavely greater influence than in other years: those are also very strong demographic groups for Obama (who, for example, widely leads among campaign contributions from employees of academic institutions, and in polls among the college educated). At issue in this dust-up is whether students who originate from Illinois and other states will come back to participate as well.
Efforts to disenfranchise student voters are more commonly the signature tactics of Republicans. Prior to the November 2004 elections, the executive director of the Iowa Republican party sent a mailer out to voters, with the images of Senators Clinton and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, proclaiming, “Would you let these two tell you how to vote?” The flyer added: “They’re not from here. They won’t stay here. But they’re voting here. As part of the Democrats plan, they have registered a large number of Grinnell College students from places like New York and Massachusetts to vote in Iowa… Then why would you let 1,000 east-coast college kids elect your State Representative?”
The ACLU, the Democratic Party, MTV’s Rock the Vote and other organizations that encourage young voter participation have historically challenged such voter repression stunts. The sudden adoption of the same anti-democratic tactics speaks volumes about the overriding character of Senator Clinton and her campaign in the home stretch: a paranoid obsession with, and resentment toward, the relative youth of Obama (who is 46 to Clinton’s 60) and his battalions of young supporters.
The Clinton campaign’s generational meltdown became visible to all on December 3, when in a press release that sought to paint Obama as an ambitious pol that had charted his rise to the presidency from the sandbox of his childhood, it wrote:
In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.’ "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." [AP, 1/25/07 ]
The press release included a similar paragraph about such an essay Obama reportedly penned in third grade, too.
Rival candidate John Edwards, when asked about Clinton’s kindergarten attack, told reporters in Clear Lake, Iowa, ''It's fine to talk about our records and about issues. But we probably ought to stop at age 14.'' Later, in Waterloo, he told voters, "I want to confess to all of you right now. In third grade I wanted to be two things: I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted to be Superman."
What some pundits called “Kinder-Gate” came on the heels of a buckshot-load of Clinton attacks on Obama’s “courage,” his “character,” and the policy differences between the two on health care and social security. “Now the fun part starts,” crowed Clinton on December 3, defending her escalation of attacks on Obama. But the resulting week has been anything but fun for Clinton and her campaign.
On the heels of her vanishing lead in Iowa and shrinking lead in first-in-the-nation primary state New Hampshire and nationwide, Clinton’s artless attacks generated a near consensus throughout the ideological spectrum that the frontrunner is blowing it. Former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich sharply rebutted what he called the “series of slurs” by his “old friend” Clinton against Obama. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto wrote that, “a desperate Mrs. Clinton stands on the brink of losing all dignity.”
Time’s Joe Klein called Clinton’s statements “sweaty and desperate.” Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic noted, "Some of her top advisers exuded a sense of entitlement: Clinton deserved to be president; it was her turn. They did not perceive any threat until it was almost too late."
In full damage-control mode by December 4, Clinton strategist Mark Penn went on MSNBC to claim that the attack on Obama’s kindergarten essay was “a joke.” But Boston Globe political reporter Scot Lehigh wrote that he had, on the day of the press release, asked the Clinton campaign whether the kindergarten attack was tongue-in-cheek, and did not get a response: “Asked for some indication that the reference to elementary-school essays was meant humorously, a Clinton press aide said he'd have to check and get back to me.”
Meanwhile, as Iowa polls generally show an Obama rise, a Clinton slide, and an Edwards hover close behind in third, Clinton campaign internet director Peter Daou circulated two Iowa polls that showed Clinton out front, sighing, “We'll see how much attention these polls get.” But it turned out that those polls were taken prior to the newer wave of surveys, one from November 7 to 25, the other from November 6 to 18. The bulk of the interviews on each were conducted before the meltdown began. Clinton aide Daou got caught trying to peddle older polls as new ones (an indication of just how important perceptions of inevitability are to the Clinton campaign not only on a propaganda level, but also for its self-image: after months of using Clinton’s lead in the polls to smack all criticism by rivals, the campaign is losing its number-one rationale for existing: it’s much-heralded lead in the polls.)
Clinton’s national lead has also begun to tank. As of December 6, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll had Clinton with 33 percent – her lowest support in the history of the tracking poll that began last July – with Obama at 26 and Edwards at 15 (prior to Thanksgiving, she enjoyed a 24-point lead over Obama; that’s been more than halved in less than two weeks). Typically, the “Iowa bounce” gives the caucus winner a 12 to 20 point surge in New Hampshire, which next year votes on January 8.
It may be that Clinton and her strategists have already written off Iowa and seek to diminish its importance so as to later be able to bounce back from a defeat there while attempting to influence which of her rivals emerges stronger on January 3. Her attacks on Obama are reminiscent of the famous “murder-suicide” crossfire, four years ago, between Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, who had been first and second in the polls until the week before the caucuses. Both went negative on the other and Iowa voters chose the more positive candidacies of John Kerry and Edwards over the frontrunners on caucus night. National Review’s Rick Lowry paraphrases Major Garrett on Fox News’ take on the Democratic contest: “Hillary is probably going after Obama so hard in Iowa because she can afford to have Edwards win there in a way she can't with Obama.”
I tend to agree with those conservative commentators: Clinton’s intent is to drag Obama into the mud pit with her. If she’s likely to crash in Iowa, why not set up the under-funded Edwards to emerge as her chief rival when she can bury Edwards later on from California to New York Island under an avalanche of TV ads? But Obama (who has slightly out-raised Clinton in the money race, and has the warchest to go toe-to-toe with her for months on end), also aware of caucus history, hasn’t bitten on that hook.
It may be that it was Clinton that fell into an Obama-laid trap when she launched the negative attacks. As Andrew Romano of Newsweek wrote, “while Obama's ‘politics of hope’ once prevented him from criticizing Clinton without appearing hypocritical, it now allows him to dismiss every clever (but ultimately insubstantial) Clinton charge as proof that she's playing ‘politics as usual’ – thereby boosting Obama's outsider appeal. What was bad for offense is now good for defense. Listening to Obama characterize Clinton as a typical pol is one thing; he did that for months to little effect. But watching him bait her into behaving like one is another. It's much more convincing.”
The Clinton attacks on a ten-year-old Obama, a third-grade Obama and Obama the kindergartner also carry the sleazy underside of thinly veiled back-up to right-wing smears suggesting that those years he spent abroad in an Islamic land mean he’s not really a Christian (Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ). The Washington Post’s November 28 page-one story on “Obama’s Muslim Ties,” which has now been openly criticized by two of the newspaper’s reporters, one of the daily’s cartoonists and even the editor of the same story (the Post ombudsman is expected to weigh in against the piece on Sunday) did not come out of thin air: the spin, as with all major works by over-extended daily newspaper political reporters, was pushed and spoon-fed by a rival campaign. There’s no way to prove or disprove which made the attack. But in that context came a December 5 revelation that an Iowa county chair for Clinton by the name of Judy Rose had forwarded an email that whacked Obama with the slur: “The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level - through the President of the United States, one of their own!!!!” The Clinton campaign called for that county chair’s resignation only after her emails became grist for political blogs on Wednesday.
When asked by reporters earlier this week to respond to the Clinton campaign’s kindergarten attack, Obama’s response suggests that he is aware that it comes with a backhanded attempt to reinforce the Manchurian Muslim argument: “It must be silly season,” Obama said. “I understand she's been quoting my kindergarten teacher in Indonesia.” He then resumed the theme of that day’s events: protecting consumers from predatory credit card company practices. But it’s significant that Obama, without prodding, brought up Indonesia, the unspoken part of the Clinton attacks on his childhood years. Rather than running from the four years of his autobiography that place him, as a kid, in the country with the world’s largest Islamic population, Obama has frequently pushed that experience – as well as the fact that his late immigrant father and his living grandmother in Kenya are Muslim – as a factor that would help him as president begin to undo the damage of the Bush-Clinton-Bush years between the US and the Islamic world.
Still, the glue that ties all these missteps by Clinton and company together is not the anti-Islamic undertone. The sticking point, and source of tremendous personal resentment against Obama, remains generational. The battering of a 10-year-old Obama and the subsequent slaps on his kindergarten and third-grade essays were so over-the-top as to reveal a very personal hatred on the part of Clinton toward the youthfulness that he represents. If a 46-year-old Obama annoys, the image of a K-6 Obama must really bother the aging boomer senator.
Clinton and her team exude a divine right to the Oval Office, a sense of entitlement, and that damn youngster Obama didn’t “wait his turn.” These latest foibles follow last summer’s string of Clintonian hits against Obama’s supposed “naïve” and “inexperienced” qualities, and her top staffers’ condescending complaint in November about Obama’s young supporters, that, “They look like Facebook.”
But the money point is how the Clinton hostility toward younger generations has now reached the extreme of corrupting her policy positions, with Clinton and her staff openly seeking to suppress and demonize young voter turnout in Iowa. (That’s also strategically stupid: the best way to get young people to do something is to tell them they shouldn’t or can’t do it. And Obama responded by touring five major Iowa universities on December 4 and 5, reminding the standing-room-only crowds that Clinton seeks to discourage them from participating in the caucuses.)
Thus, the Hillary Clinton that cut her political teeth as an advocate for children’s rights, as legal counsel to Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, as the self-proclaimed advocate, as First Lady in the 1990s, for kids, nears the possible twilight of her political career as a sneering adversary of youth and its voting rights.
The Iowa caucuses are four weeks away, but the curtain for major shifts in momentum will close in about two weeks when the mad shopping weekend before Christmas vacation begins. Then the campaign enters a twilight zone in which accurate polling cannot be done (with some demographic groups, particularly younger voters, traveling away from home more than others), when negative attacks and ads will not be possible (without the attacker painting herself as today’s Ebenezer Scrooge and suffering a yuletide backlash), when New Years and bowl games immediately precede the January 3 caucuses, and so the dynamics, beginning around December 19, will not be subject to major shifts.
At this point, if current trends continue, Senator Hillary Clinton (nee, Inevitable) may well be headed for a painful crash in the Iowa caucuses. The famed Clinton “War Room” has become the Panic Room. And if a black man wins the presidential caucuses in lily-white Iowa, the resulting shock won’t only inspire younger voters to flood the subsequent primaries and caucuses in the coming months. African-Americans and other alienated demographic groups will likely join the siege.
Al Giordano, the founder of Narco News, has lived in and reported from Latin America for the past decade. His opinions expressed in this column do not reflect those of Narco News nor of The Fund for Authentic Journalism, which supports his work. Al encourages commentary, critique, additional analysis and news tips for his continued coverage of the US presidential campaign to be sent to his email address: [email]narconews@gmail.com.[/email]
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano12062007.html
The Nation
OBAMA'S IOWA CHALLENGE: HE'S BOUGHT A POSITION, NOT THE LEAD...
Despite massive spending and attention to the state -- including an upcoming visit on his behalf by queen-of-all-media Oprah Winfrey -- Barack Obama cannot seem to open up a credible lead in what for his campaign has become the absolutely essential state of Iowa.
Everyone got exited a few days ago when a poll showed the senator marginally ahead New York Senator Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the first-caucus state. But Obama's "lead" fell well within the margin of error.
That reality is confirmed by a new poll from Iowa that shows Obama tied with Clinton, with Edwards very much in the competition.
The latest survey of likely Iowa Democratic caucus goers by Strategic Vision has Clinton and Obama tied at 29 percent, Edwards is at 23 percent. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's got 6 percent, Delaware Senator Joe Biden's got 4 percent. Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who has moved his family to Iowa, and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, are stuck at 1 percent a piece.
Those numbers offer little comfort for Obama, whose organization on the ground is a good deal less thorough than that of Clinton and dramatically less thorough than that of Edwards.
There is no doubt at this point that Obama will spend more than the other Democrats in Iowa. And he will, with the Oprah infusion, have more celebrity bling than any of his foes -- although Hillary still has Bill.
But whatever advantage Obama has been able to buy will now be challenged, as both Clinton and Edwards get more seriously into the media fight.
Up to this point, Obama has spent more than $5 million on Iowa television advertising -- almost double the expenditure for the entire media campaign of 2004 caucus winner John Kerry. Obama's spending is almost double that of Clinton. And the Illinoisan's advertising investment dramatically dwarfs that of Edwards, who did not even begin airing television ads in the state until this month.
There is no question that Obama has had an impact; he has purchased a competitive position in Iowa. What is remarkable, however, is that for all his investment he has not bought a lead. And now that Clinton and Edwards are moving to match Obama's expenditures, the Illinoisan's going to need more than big media expenditures -- and perhaps more than big media stars -- if he hopes to score the Iowa victory that he needs to position himself for the rest of the race.
Ultimately, Obama's big play for Iowa could come back to haunt him. A third place finish in the state, which is possible, would make it much harder for him to advance in New Hampshire, where he currently trails Clinton by a wide margin. And it would require the Illinoisan to score a big win someplace else -- perhaps South Carolina -- before the February 5 flurry of caucuses and primaries that could settle the race.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=254918
OBAMA'S IOWA CHALLENGE: HE'S BOUGHT A POSITION, NOT THE LEAD...
Despite massive spending and attention to the state -- including an upcoming visit on his behalf by queen-of-all-media Oprah Winfrey -- Barack Obama cannot seem to open up a credible lead in what for his campaign has become the absolutely essential state of Iowa.
Everyone got exited a few days ago when a poll showed the senator marginally ahead New York Senator Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards in the first-caucus state. But Obama's "lead" fell well within the margin of error.
That reality is confirmed by a new poll from Iowa that shows Obama tied with Clinton, with Edwards very much in the competition.
The latest survey of likely Iowa Democratic caucus goers by Strategic Vision has Clinton and Obama tied at 29 percent, Edwards is at 23 percent. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's got 6 percent, Delaware Senator Joe Biden's got 4 percent. Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who has moved his family to Iowa, and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, are stuck at 1 percent a piece.
Those numbers offer little comfort for Obama, whose organization on the ground is a good deal less thorough than that of Clinton and dramatically less thorough than that of Edwards.
There is no doubt at this point that Obama will spend more than the other Democrats in Iowa. And he will, with the Oprah infusion, have more celebrity bling than any of his foes -- although Hillary still has Bill.
But whatever advantage Obama has been able to buy will now be challenged, as both Clinton and Edwards get more seriously into the media fight.
Up to this point, Obama has spent more than $5 million on Iowa television advertising -- almost double the expenditure for the entire media campaign of 2004 caucus winner John Kerry. Obama's spending is almost double that of Clinton. And the Illinoisan's advertising investment dramatically dwarfs that of Edwards, who did not even begin airing television ads in the state until this month.
There is no question that Obama has had an impact; he has purchased a competitive position in Iowa. What is remarkable, however, is that for all his investment he has not bought a lead. And now that Clinton and Edwards are moving to match Obama's expenditures, the Illinoisan's going to need more than big media expenditures -- and perhaps more than big media stars -- if he hopes to score the Iowa victory that he needs to position himself for the rest of the race.
Ultimately, Obama's big play for Iowa could come back to haunt him. A third place finish in the state, which is possible, would make it much harder for him to advance in New Hampshire, where he currently trails Clinton by a wide margin. And it would require the Illinoisan to score a big win someplace else -- perhaps South Carolina -- before the February 5 flurry of caucuses and primaries that could settle the race.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=254918
Greg, please don't scare me!
Anyway, the Dems grow even lamer as a Republican candidate is saying the things they should be saying, and voting the way they should be voting. I can't even tell you guys how angry this makes me, especially the part where he talks about money for the war possibly being put towards education instead. This is something that has always baffled me. We are (or were, before the war) the richest nation the world has ever known. Why do all our measures for education and financial aid always include loan options for the average American student, who must then graduate with a ridiculous amount of debt?
I was fortunate that my parents' savings (plus a scholarship I'd won in high school) meant no student loans, but the average student is not so lucky. According to finaid.org, two thirds of undergraduates graduate with some debt, with over $20,000 in average student loans. That's insane for a country that could feasibly give $40,000 to every eligible college student, as Ron Paul correctly points out! The massive endowments for schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton mean those schools can give better financial aid packages to students whose families make less than $60,000 a year. These students are given minimal loan amounts and zero expected family contributions (as it should be!) and the only reason other schools can't do the same is because they don't have enough money. If the government actually put more money into education, college could be more affordable to the average family.
It's crazy that this discourse is never seriously taken up by major politicians. Or worse -- that banks and student loan organizations have politicians in their pockets, which is why options for eliminating student loans never actually surface. If and when universal healthcare (actual universal healthcare, and not Hillary's bogus plan) is implemented, the attention should really turn to education. In a country as rich as America, it's a moral disgrace that education remains a privilege and not a right.
The Nation
ruthdig by Robert Scheer
Cheering for Ron Paul
[posted online on November 21, 2007]
What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee (JEC). Or is it the $3.5-trillion figure cited by Ron Paul, whose concern about the true cost of this war for ordinary Americans shames the leading Democrats, who prattle on about needed domestic programs that will never find funding because of future war-related government debt?
Given that the overall defense budget is now double what it was when President Bush's father presided over the end of the cold war--even though we don't have a militarily sophisticated enemy in sight--you have to wonder how this president has managed to exceed cold war spending levels. What has he gotten for the trillions wasted? Nothing, when it comes to capturing Osama bin Laden, bringing democracy to Iraq or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the ayatollahs of Iran while messing up the American economy.
That money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here at home. As Rep. Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each family of four a check for $46,000--which exceeds the $43,000 median household income in his Texas district. He asks: "What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? Forty-six thousand dollars would cover 90 percent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we're sending them to Iraq, where the best news in a long time is they [the insurgents] aren't killing our men and women as fast as they were last month."
How damning that it takes a libertarian Republican to remind the leading Democratic candidates of the opportunity costs of a war that most Democrats in Congress voted for. But they don't need to take Paul's word for it; last week, the majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress came up with similarly startling estimates of the long-term costs of this war.
The White House has quibbled over the methods employed by the JEC to calculate the real costs of our two foreign wars, because the Democrats in the majority dared to include in their calculations the long-term care of wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt financing the war. Of course, you need to account for the additional debt run up by an administration that, instead of raising taxes to pay for the war, cut them by relying on the Chinese Communists and other foreigners who hold so much of our debt. As concluded by the JEC report, compiled by the committee's professional staff, "almost 10 percent of total federal government interest payments in 2008 will consist of payments on the Iraq debt accumulated so far."
However, even if you take the hard figure of the $804 billion the administration demanded for the past five years, and ignore all the long-run costs like debt service, we're still not talking chump change here. For example, Bush has asked for an additional $196 billion in supplementary aid for his wars, which is $60 billion more than the total spent by the US government last year on all of America's infrastructure repairs, the National Institutes of Health, college tuition assistance and the SCHIP program to provide health insurance to kids who don't have any.
On this matter of covering the uninsured, it should be pointed out to those who say we (alone among industrialized nations) can't afford it that we could have covered all 47 million uninsured Americans over the past six years for what the Iraq war cost us. How come that choice--war in Iraq or full medical coverage for all Americans--was never presented to the American people by the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this war and continue to finance it?
Those now celebrating the supposed success of the surge might note that, as the JEC report points out, "[m]aintaining post-surge troop levels in Iraq over the next ten years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion." Until the leading Democratic candidate faces up to the irreparable harm that will be done to needed social programs over the next decades by the red-ink spending she supported, I will be cheering for the libertarian Republican. At least he won't throw more money down some foreign rat hole.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/truthdig
Edited By Akash on 1195754396
Anyway, the Dems grow even lamer as a Republican candidate is saying the things they should be saying, and voting the way they should be voting. I can't even tell you guys how angry this makes me, especially the part where he talks about money for the war possibly being put towards education instead. This is something that has always baffled me. We are (or were, before the war) the richest nation the world has ever known. Why do all our measures for education and financial aid always include loan options for the average American student, who must then graduate with a ridiculous amount of debt?
I was fortunate that my parents' savings (plus a scholarship I'd won in high school) meant no student loans, but the average student is not so lucky. According to finaid.org, two thirds of undergraduates graduate with some debt, with over $20,000 in average student loans. That's insane for a country that could feasibly give $40,000 to every eligible college student, as Ron Paul correctly points out! The massive endowments for schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton mean those schools can give better financial aid packages to students whose families make less than $60,000 a year. These students are given minimal loan amounts and zero expected family contributions (as it should be!) and the only reason other schools can't do the same is because they don't have enough money. If the government actually put more money into education, college could be more affordable to the average family.
It's crazy that this discourse is never seriously taken up by major politicians. Or worse -- that banks and student loan organizations have politicians in their pockets, which is why options for eliminating student loans never actually surface. If and when universal healthcare (actual universal healthcare, and not Hillary's bogus plan) is implemented, the attention should really turn to education. In a country as rich as America, it's a moral disgrace that education remains a privilege and not a right.
The Nation
ruthdig by Robert Scheer
Cheering for Ron Paul
[posted online on November 21, 2007]
What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee (JEC). Or is it the $3.5-trillion figure cited by Ron Paul, whose concern about the true cost of this war for ordinary Americans shames the leading Democrats, who prattle on about needed domestic programs that will never find funding because of future war-related government debt?
Given that the overall defense budget is now double what it was when President Bush's father presided over the end of the cold war--even though we don't have a militarily sophisticated enemy in sight--you have to wonder how this president has managed to exceed cold war spending levels. What has he gotten for the trillions wasted? Nothing, when it comes to capturing Osama bin Laden, bringing democracy to Iraq or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the ayatollahs of Iran while messing up the American economy.
That money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here at home. As Rep. Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each family of four a check for $46,000--which exceeds the $43,000 median household income in his Texas district. He asks: "What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? Forty-six thousand dollars would cover 90 percent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we're sending them to Iraq, where the best news in a long time is they [the insurgents] aren't killing our men and women as fast as they were last month."
How damning that it takes a libertarian Republican to remind the leading Democratic candidates of the opportunity costs of a war that most Democrats in Congress voted for. But they don't need to take Paul's word for it; last week, the majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress came up with similarly startling estimates of the long-term costs of this war.
The White House has quibbled over the methods employed by the JEC to calculate the real costs of our two foreign wars, because the Democrats in the majority dared to include in their calculations the long-term care of wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt financing the war. Of course, you need to account for the additional debt run up by an administration that, instead of raising taxes to pay for the war, cut them by relying on the Chinese Communists and other foreigners who hold so much of our debt. As concluded by the JEC report, compiled by the committee's professional staff, "almost 10 percent of total federal government interest payments in 2008 will consist of payments on the Iraq debt accumulated so far."
However, even if you take the hard figure of the $804 billion the administration demanded for the past five years, and ignore all the long-run costs like debt service, we're still not talking chump change here. For example, Bush has asked for an additional $196 billion in supplementary aid for his wars, which is $60 billion more than the total spent by the US government last year on all of America's infrastructure repairs, the National Institutes of Health, college tuition assistance and the SCHIP program to provide health insurance to kids who don't have any.
On this matter of covering the uninsured, it should be pointed out to those who say we (alone among industrialized nations) can't afford it that we could have covered all 47 million uninsured Americans over the past six years for what the Iraq war cost us. How come that choice--war in Iraq or full medical coverage for all Americans--was never presented to the American people by the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this war and continue to finance it?
Those now celebrating the supposed success of the surge might note that, as the JEC report points out, "[m]aintaining post-surge troop levels in Iraq over the next ten years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion." Until the leading Democratic candidate faces up to the irreparable harm that will be done to needed social programs over the next decades by the red-ink spending she supported, I will be cheering for the libertarian Republican. At least he won't throw more money down some foreign rat hole.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/truthdig
Edited By Akash on 1195754396
This illustrates a suspicion I have that Dubya is waiting until, as he hopes, Hillary wins the nomination before he attacks Iran. He thinks the Republicans will most likely lose the White House; and, with Hillary being by far the most hawkish Democratic presidential candidate, she is the best chance he has to continue his foreign policy. As a result, he dosesn't want to attack Iran before the Democratic nomination is decided, as it might drive primary voters to vote for a more anti-war candidate.Akash wrote:President Bush is not so enamored of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”
This one's pretty good -- even if it is another attack on Hillary, at least it's a pointed one. Well done Maureen.
November 21, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
She’s No Morgenthau
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.
At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.
Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”
Everybody laughed, including Obama.
It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.
Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.
She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”
She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.
Obama’s one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.
“She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,” wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, adding: “She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that.”
The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her ginning up of gender has lost her male votes. Speaking around Iowa this week, Obama made the point that his exotic upbringing, family in Kenya and years as an outsider allow him to see the world with more understanding, and helped form his judgment about resisting the Iraq war.
“I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia,” he said. “If you don’t understand these cultures then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment.”
President Bush is not so enamored of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”
Asked by Charles Gibson about Obama’s offer to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, W. declared it “odd foreign policy.”
Laura Bush also gave Hillary a sisterly — and dynastic — plug when she told the anchor that living in the White House and meeting people everywhere would be “very helpful” to a first lady trading up.
Though he did not mention the quick “color me experienced” trip Hillary took with some Senate colleagues to Iraq and Afghanistan just before she started running, Obama might have been thinking of it when he mocked Kabuki Congressional junkets:
“You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance.”
Hillary pounced, knowing that her chief rival’s foreign policy résumé is as slender as his physique, once more conjuring a childish Obama. She brazenly borrowed Republican talking points, even though she accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” that was “right out of the Republican playbook.”
“With all due respect,” she told a crowd in Iowa. “I don’t think living in a foreign country between the ages of 6 and 10 is foreign policy experience.”
But is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007....=slogin
November 21, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
She’s No Morgenthau
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.
At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.
Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”
Everybody laughed, including Obama.
It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.
Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.
She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”
She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.
Obama’s one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.
“She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,” wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, adding: “She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that.”
The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her ginning up of gender has lost her male votes. Speaking around Iowa this week, Obama made the point that his exotic upbringing, family in Kenya and years as an outsider allow him to see the world with more understanding, and helped form his judgment about resisting the Iraq war.
“I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia,” he said. “If you don’t understand these cultures then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment.”
President Bush is not so enamored of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”
Asked by Charles Gibson about Obama’s offer to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, W. declared it “odd foreign policy.”
Laura Bush also gave Hillary a sisterly — and dynastic — plug when she told the anchor that living in the White House and meeting people everywhere would be “very helpful” to a first lady trading up.
Though he did not mention the quick “color me experienced” trip Hillary took with some Senate colleagues to Iraq and Afghanistan just before she started running, Obama might have been thinking of it when he mocked Kabuki Congressional junkets:
“You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance.”
Hillary pounced, knowing that her chief rival’s foreign policy résumé is as slender as his physique, once more conjuring a childish Obama. She brazenly borrowed Republican talking points, even though she accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” that was “right out of the Republican playbook.”
“With all due respect,” she told a crowd in Iowa. “I don’t think living in a foreign country between the ages of 6 and 10 is foreign policy experience.”
But is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007....=slogin
The Nation agrees with you Sabin.
BIDEN AND CLINTON SHINE IN NEVADA DEBATE...
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton shined in the presidential debate on Thursday night, as the leading Democratic candidates traded their sharpest barbs to date.
Biden outlined the most specific foreign policy agenda, advocating a reduction of Pakistan's military funding to force fair elections, and a new focus on eliciting support of the Pakistani middle class to counter militant extremism. He declared that he was the only candidate "on stage" to offer a regional plan since President Musharraf declared martial law, referring to a New Hampshire address last week, and stressed that unlike Obama and Clinton, he had actually voted to cut funding for the controversial Guantanamo prison.
Then Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, showed voters his commitment to confront the Bush Doctrine, recounting how he "personally" warned the President that an attack on Iran without congressional authorization would lead to impeachment.
Clinton, who had struggled to counter some attacks in the last debate, held strong the entire evening. She assailed Obama for failing to "step up" on universal health care and challenged Edwards' record on the issue from the 2004 Campaign. Then, casting herself as the true Democratic fighter in the ring, Clinton chided Edwards for adopting mud-slinging tactics "right out of the Republican playbook." It worked. Obama was overshadowed for much of the debate, only finding his voice near the end while discussing Iran and habeas corpus. Edwards' arguments showed some strain under pressure. He questioned Clinton's honesty and record as a "Corporate Democrat," but then assured the audience that his criticisms were not "personal."
Given Obama's sluggish performance, it's striking to see that he actually spoke more than any other candidate (18 minutes). This was the kind of performance that might give a campaign manager heartburn: a speaker who sounds worse in a small field, when the audience hears extended remarks. Yet CNN was still touting an "Obama-Clinton Slugfest" when the debate ended, and the emerging conventional wisdom, as Chuck Todd explains, is that Thursday night "will be known as the debate that seemed to sharpen the contrast between Clinton and Obama and create a gap between the big two and everyone else."
The gap for the "big two" is nothing new, of course, and it has little to do with debate performances. It's based on celebrity, fundraising and media attention, which reinforce each other in an autocatalytic political process that has left serious and more seasoned candidates in the dust. The media may be so beholden to this story about "the big two" -- remember when it was three? -- that what candidates actually do at debates will not be allowed to get in the way. But for voters who actually listened on Thursday, Joe Biden offered a bold and specific alternative foreign policy for the United States.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?pid=252173
BIDEN AND CLINTON SHINE IN NEVADA DEBATE...
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton shined in the presidential debate on Thursday night, as the leading Democratic candidates traded their sharpest barbs to date.
Biden outlined the most specific foreign policy agenda, advocating a reduction of Pakistan's military funding to force fair elections, and a new focus on eliciting support of the Pakistani middle class to counter militant extremism. He declared that he was the only candidate "on stage" to offer a regional plan since President Musharraf declared martial law, referring to a New Hampshire address last week, and stressed that unlike Obama and Clinton, he had actually voted to cut funding for the controversial Guantanamo prison.
Then Biden, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, showed voters his commitment to confront the Bush Doctrine, recounting how he "personally" warned the President that an attack on Iran without congressional authorization would lead to impeachment.
Clinton, who had struggled to counter some attacks in the last debate, held strong the entire evening. She assailed Obama for failing to "step up" on universal health care and challenged Edwards' record on the issue from the 2004 Campaign. Then, casting herself as the true Democratic fighter in the ring, Clinton chided Edwards for adopting mud-slinging tactics "right out of the Republican playbook." It worked. Obama was overshadowed for much of the debate, only finding his voice near the end while discussing Iran and habeas corpus. Edwards' arguments showed some strain under pressure. He questioned Clinton's honesty and record as a "Corporate Democrat," but then assured the audience that his criticisms were not "personal."
Given Obama's sluggish performance, it's striking to see that he actually spoke more than any other candidate (18 minutes). This was the kind of performance that might give a campaign manager heartburn: a speaker who sounds worse in a small field, when the audience hears extended remarks. Yet CNN was still touting an "Obama-Clinton Slugfest" when the debate ended, and the emerging conventional wisdom, as Chuck Todd explains, is that Thursday night "will be known as the debate that seemed to sharpen the contrast between Clinton and Obama and create a gap between the big two and everyone else."
The gap for the "big two" is nothing new, of course, and it has little to do with debate performances. It's based on celebrity, fundraising and media attention, which reinforce each other in an autocatalytic political process that has left serious and more seasoned candidates in the dust. The media may be so beholden to this story about "the big two" -- remember when it was three? -- that what candidates actually do at debates will not be allowed to get in the way. But for voters who actually listened on Thursday, Joe Biden offered a bold and specific alternative foreign policy for the United States.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?pid=252173
The Republicans are watching the debates and beating it raw.
Is it just me or is it so strange that Joe Biden is the hippest candidate? The one who seems to know how to work the questions, work the audience, and come across as the model of integrity better than Edwards, Clinton, and Obama combined? He not only won the debate, but he won it by being the smartest cat in class who's also too cool for school.
Guiliani is bound to be the nominee along with Huckabee, but at this point I'm starting to think that the Dems only chance of standing up to that pitbull is a Biden/Edwards ticket.
Edited By Sabin on 1195260141
Is it just me or is it so strange that Joe Biden is the hippest candidate? The one who seems to know how to work the questions, work the audience, and come across as the model of integrity better than Edwards, Clinton, and Obama combined? He not only won the debate, but he won it by being the smartest cat in class who's also too cool for school.
Guiliani is bound to be the nominee along with Huckabee, but at this point I'm starting to think that the Dems only chance of standing up to that pitbull is a Biden/Edwards ticket.
Edited By Sabin on 1195260141
"How's the despair?"
Well, it seems this debate had its fair share of planted questions, specifically the last one where some women was
made to ask Hillary if she preferred diamonds or pearls.
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archive....s_1.php
made to ask Hillary if she preferred diamonds or pearls.
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archive....s_1.php
I watched the CNN Democratic debate last night. Wolf Blitzer truly enraged me at how he would do everything in his capacity to not let Kucinich answer a question. Just who the hell does he think he is that gives him the right to decide for voters who counts as a "legitimate" candidate and who does not?
The Nation
DEMOCRATS STILL TIED IN IOWA...
Posted by Ari Berman at 11/14/2007 @ 2:08pm
A new New York Times poll confirms what we've known for months: that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is still basically tied. Clinton is at 25 percent, Edwards at 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, the differences all within the margin of error.
The real news is on the GOP side, where Mike Huckabee is surging and now trails Mitt Romney, who's dumped millions on the state, by only six points. Rudy Giuliani is in third but has all-but-decided to skip the caucuses, potentially negating the state's importance.
That's why the spotlight remains focused on the Democrats. A few weeks ago it looked like Clinton might be running away with a victory here. That no longer seems to be the case. It looked like Edwards might be slipping. Not true either, according to the poll.
Obama, meanwhile, remains in a position to pull out a victory on caucus night. He had the best speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner and the strongest organizational turnout.
Right now, the campaigns are searching for precious few undecided voters. At his Steak Fry back in September, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin estimated that half of Iowa Democrats had yet to settle on a candidate. Polls now show that number is down to 10 percent, though former Iowa Democratic Party chair Gordon Fischer, now an Obama supporter, says he believes about a third of caucus-goers are undecided or could change their minds. He predicts these people will choose someone other than Hillary, given everything they already know about her. "If you're not for Hillary now," Fischer says, "you're probably not going to be."
Finally, a disclaimer about the accuracy of these polls. It's worth remembering that the Iowa caucuses are famously difficult to predict. On the Sunday before the caucus in 2004, a Des Moines Register poll showed Dean, Edwards, Gephardt and Kerry in a dead heat. And we all know how that turned out.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=251698
DEMOCRATS STILL TIED IN IOWA...
Posted by Ari Berman at 11/14/2007 @ 2:08pm
A new New York Times poll confirms what we've known for months: that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is still basically tied. Clinton is at 25 percent, Edwards at 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, the differences all within the margin of error.
The real news is on the GOP side, where Mike Huckabee is surging and now trails Mitt Romney, who's dumped millions on the state, by only six points. Rudy Giuliani is in third but has all-but-decided to skip the caucuses, potentially negating the state's importance.
That's why the spotlight remains focused on the Democrats. A few weeks ago it looked like Clinton might be running away with a victory here. That no longer seems to be the case. It looked like Edwards might be slipping. Not true either, according to the poll.
Obama, meanwhile, remains in a position to pull out a victory on caucus night. He had the best speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner and the strongest organizational turnout.
Right now, the campaigns are searching for precious few undecided voters. At his Steak Fry back in September, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin estimated that half of Iowa Democrats had yet to settle on a candidate. Polls now show that number is down to 10 percent, though former Iowa Democratic Party chair Gordon Fischer, now an Obama supporter, says he believes about a third of caucus-goers are undecided or could change their minds. He predicts these people will choose someone other than Hillary, given everything they already know about her. "If you're not for Hillary now," Fischer says, "you're probably not going to be."
Finally, a disclaimer about the accuracy of these polls. It's worth remembering that the Iowa caucuses are famously difficult to predict. On the Sunday before the caucus in 2004, a Des Moines Register poll showed Dean, Edwards, Gephardt and Kerry in a dead heat. And we all know how that turned out.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=251698
Counterpunch
November 14, 2007
Don't Trust Anyone Over 50
The 2008 Campaign Offers the Sixties Generation a Shot at Redemption
By AL GIORDANO
The political pollster Peter D. Hart probably didn't mean to send shivers up the spines of baby boomers when he told NBC this month that the current Democratic presidential frontrunner "Hillary Clinton really is Richard Nixon, circa 1968." Hart, whose decades-long client list includes former vice president Hubert Humphrey (the Democrat that Nixon defeated for the White House), could have added that Senator Clinton is Nixon on steroids. The junior senator of New York has made a creepy science out of the control-freak politics that Nixon pioneered: the paranoia, the doubletalk, the situational ethics and the bellicose consequences of one ego's embattled insecurity on US policy from Vietnam to Iraq.
Clinton's Nixonian instincts flew into public view during the October 30 Democratic presidential debate when she offered stammering and contradicting positions on both sides of whether to keep US troops in Iraq, on whether she has a plan to fix Social Security, and on whether undocumented workers ought to have drivers' licenses. But as Ronald Reagan demonstrated, a candidate can win the presidency of the United States holding many positions that are at odds with public opinion, as long as he or she is forthright about declaring where he and she stand. Waffling provokes distrust much more than unpopular views, and the jig is almost up on the media-fed presumption that Clinton has the Democratic nomination in the bag.
The crack in the Clinton façade widened after her surrogates--including former president Bill Clinton--invoked post-debate victimhood and complained about "the politics of pile on" after her rivals questioned her honesty. The frontrunner slid in most national polls since then, and more dramatically in the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary states: Iowa and New Hampshire, which will kick off the voting less than two months from now. What the feigning pundits of the corporate news media had insisted for most of this year had been Clinton's "flawless" procession to power is now a rough-and-tumble street fight. Game on: it's a bona fide contest, kicking, screaming and elbow-jabbing up a greased poll toward the Democratic nomination.
That Nixon ran for president eight years after his vice presidency is only one of the historic parallels between him and Senator Clinton in 2008. To hear Clinton speak, she gained vast "experience" in the Clinton White House that ended that many years ago: she was the virtual vice president (much to Al Gore's chagrin) of Bill Clinton's administration. Nixon's denouement began with Vietnam just as Clinton's did with her authorization of the war in Iraq. Nixon, in 1968, campaigned as peace candidate against the war, airing a national TV advertisement titled "Vietnam" in which the candidate narrated over gruesome images of war:
NIXON: "Never has so much military, economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively as in Vietnam. If after all of this time and all of this sacrifice and all of this support there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership I pledge to you we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam."
Peace With Honor?
Nixon inherited that unpopular war from the opposing party, just as any Democratic president, if elected in 2008, will face, but he ramped up the war in Vietnam while expanding the battlefield with a secret bombing campaign, then an invasion of Cambodia, and dragged US military intervention into nearby Laos too.
Iran is the new Cambodia: Clinton, in 2007, has tried to distance herself from her 2002 vote in the US Senate to authorize the Iraq war but her September 27 vote in support of the saber-rattling Kyl-Lieberman Amendment--which the Bush administration may take as Congressional authorization to expand today's war into Iran--sets her far to the hawkish right of each of her Democratic rivals for the Oval Office, all of whom oppose the maneuver.
One of the defining moments of the 'o8 campaign came last July 23 and demonstrated that, when it comes to US foreign policy, Clinton today is in fact less progressive than was Nixon, who held historic face-to-face meetings with China's Mao Tse Tung and the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev. During a CNN-YouTube debate that evening, citizen Stephen Sixta asked the candidates via video if in their first year as president they would be willing to conduct direct talks with the heads of state of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria and Iran, "without preconditions." Three candidates had the chance to respond: Senator Barack Obama answered yes. Clinton answered no. And former senator John Edwards did not offer anything clearer than a maybe.
"The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them--which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration--is ridiculous," said Obama, lamenting the "disgrace that we have not spoken to them."
Clinton responded in the negative: "I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be."
After the debate, Clinton's chief strategist, pollster Mark Penn, took to the spin room floor to tag Obama's response as a sign of inexperience. (Commercial media reports did not mention that Penn was consultant to the unsuccessful effort by Venezuelan oligarchs to recall President Hugo Chavez in 2004, a venture in which his firm was caught red-handed cooking a false exit poll: an example of how the private sector agendas of this consultant-for-hire have straightjacketed Clinton on real policies.) A day later Clinton, speaking to the Quad City Times in Iowa, ripped into Obama's answer as "irresponsible and frankly naïve," while sending surrogates such as former secretary of state Madeline Albright out to praise her own closed-mindedness as "sophisticated." Undaunted, Obama, since then, has made his willingness to meet directly with the leaders of US-shunned nations a staple of his stump speeches.
The constant drumbeat by Clinton, 60, and her campaign to tag Obama, 46, as lacking the experience to be president has turned the '08 campaign, on the Democratic primary side, into a generational war. Obama has fired back, relishing the role of enfant terrible. As the gap narrows between the two in public opinion surveys, members of Clinton's baby boom generation will be confronted with their own, perhaps final, defining moment: Will 2008 mark the final sell-out in which they confirm that they are as pigheaded as they once believed their parents to be? Or will the presidential primaries bring a generational homecoming in which they willingly pass the torch that their own elders tried to withhold from them? For the sixties generation, it's déjà vu time.
The New Generation Gap
The true fault line of next year's Democratic nomination battle will not tremble because of Clinton's gender or Obama's pigmentation, both themes that the press obsesses upon. The demographic earthquake that quivers under the surface of the '08 campaign is generational.
Already, some boomers are squirming defensively over Obama's statements that a Clinton nomination will prolong the never-resolving, now calcified, arguments between right and left wings of the sixties generation and further stall authentic change. Some take umbrage at the suggestion that their generation--represented politically over the past 15 years by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - should cede the reigns of power to the next.
Some former youths that once cheered our late friend Abbie Hoffman's credo of "don't trust anyone over 30," now sound like their clueless parents of yore, scolding in response to the vocalization of today's generation gap. "Obama can kiss my hippy ass," snapped a Daily Kos diarist on November 9, offended by the junior senator of Illinois' recent statement to Fox News that "I think there's no doubt we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton can't deliver on and part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they've been fighting since the '60s, and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."
Tom Hayden, SDS-founder-turned-politician, is wincing, too. He wrote an open letter to Obama last week in The Huffington Post, imploring, "What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency."
Among Hayden's gripes is that Obama isn't running a campaign based on identity politics: "[T]he deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president." Omigod! Obama is black? Why he didn't tell us? We had no idea!
Those with historic memory know that Abbie considered Tom to be out-of-step with generational politics back then when they were quarreling young co-defendants in the Chicago 8 case. But even Hayden seems pulled in two directions, lecturing Obama: "[Y]ou could change America's dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect."
Neocon-turned-war-critic Andrew Sullivan made a similar generational argument for Obama in a cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic. But the focus on "rebranding" America misses the rationale for Obama's candidacy altogether: It's not the colored face that Obama would put on the USA brand, but his (and for many of us, our) generations' differing perception that a deeply flawed "product" has to be fixed rather than merely dressed up in new artificial packaging.
This generational fault line will shake more forcefully as the January 3 Iowa caucuses and subsequent primaries approach. Still, a great many boomers of conscience share the younger generations' disappointment in how their own hopes were dashed. They may find Obama's generational challenge to signal not the defeat of their original ideals but, rather, their fulfillment, or at least a catalyst to reopen the path.
The disillusion that so many of us under 50 have experienced crystallized with the failure of the first Clinton White House to make good on its own generational pitch after 1992. Many of us watched our elders drift from preaching peace and love and anti-capitalism to obsessing with consumerism, escapist spiritual fads and hedge funds. We kept as our own many of the counter-cultural pleasures that were won in the sixties (every generation since then has embraced sexual liberation and marijuana, among other so-called vices), the distrust and mockery of authority, the worry over the natural environment, and the strong distaste for war and discrimination that are among the proud legacies of the sixties youth movements. But many, probably most of us, deeply resent that we find ourselves trapped in a very limited set of political choices calcified by the boomer generation--Republican and Democrat - now in power.
The Politics of Sanctimony
Senator Clinton, on the merits, would not be a poster gal for her generation except for the corporate media's sustenance of such mythology. Her insider experience is at odds with--not part of--the best political and cultural yearnings of her generation. Forty-two years ago, as a Wellesley frosh, Clinton wrote to a pen pal in goody-two-shoes tones about a student that had been denounced for sleeping at her boyfriend's home. She defended the student's "right to do as she pleases" while also huffing, "I don't condone her actions." That, according to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich's July parsing of a pile of letters Clinton penned to an old high school buddy. As a sophomore, Clinton wrote to her friend about the "miserable weekend" she spent arguing with a peer against his LSD use and scoffing at his claim that "expanding my conscience" (sic) "is the way."
Clinton entered Wellesley from the Chicago suburbs as young Republican--a "Goldwater girl" who had campaigned for the GOP in 1964--and in college gravitated toward the Democrats. But the letters demonstrate that Clinton, even in the midst of the countercultural tumult of the times, had a sanctimonious way about her then as now. One of the paradoxes of the 2008 campaign is that her electoral base is considered to be fellow and sister members of the sixties generation and yet--like her spouse who "did not inhale" (it's one of the few statements that Bubba has made that I tend to believe; who else would fake smoking a joint?)--Clinton's path bypassed the pleasure politics that bonded so many of her peers, and, significantly, most of us that came afterwards.
So when a reporter asked Obama last year if he had ever done illegal drugs and the senator answered, "I inhaled frequently. That was the point," and he further volunteered that he had tried cocaine (an admission he had made previously in his autobiography) his lack of shame reminded us of our selves. In contrast, the Clintons have repeatedly shown condescension and hostility toward younger Americans. A recent example came in Iowa when, as has been widely reported, the Clinton campaign planted a question with a young supporter: "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change."
More telling than the embarrassment of getting caught planting questions was Clinton's canned answer to the youth (who, it can now be seen on YouTube, winked toward a Clinton staff member upon termination of her spoonfed script): "Well, you should be worried. You know, I find as I travel around Iowa that it's usually young people that ask me about global warming."
Clinton thus offered a caricature of "young people" and stuffed them into a pollster's box: You are young and therefore your "issue" is "global warming." How lame is that? After all, if it were true that young people "usually ask about global warming," there would be no need to plant the question, right? (A Clinton aide then claimed that the campaign had never planted a question before and that it wouldn't happen again, but quickly a similar incident resurfaced from press reports last April about another event in which the Clinton staff tried to plant a question at a campaign event, and then followed the same revelation from her 2000 US Senate campaign.)
"They Look Like Facebook"
On Saturday, November 10, the Obama campaign turned out 3,000 supporters at the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, one-third of the entire crowd, a demonstration of grassroots muscle in the first caucus state that was noted by virtually every political reporter covering the event. Clinton's top campaign spinners disparaged the Obama crowd for its youth. The pollster Penn, crestfallen by the visible depth of Obama's Iowa field organization, sniped, "Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state." And consultant Mandy Grunwald said, "Our people look like caucus-goers and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook." Many members of the elder generations that pitch was aimed to impress won't get the reference, unaware that Facebook is a website and, at that, is the seventh most visited on earth. Lo and behold: Nixon--who signed the law granting suffrage to 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds--turns out to have been more comfortable with young American voters than the boomers that run Clinton's campaign today.
A 2004 Edison/Mitofsky poll of Iowa caucus participants found that 21,000 young voters, ages 17 (anyone that will turn 18 by the November election is allowed to caucus) to 29, turned out, making for 17 per cent of caucus-goers, "a four-fold increase in youth participation since 2000." That trend continued to rise in the 2006 elections. Throughout 2007 Obama has drawn hordes of young voters and significant numbers of their elders, too, to big campaign rallies. If the Clinton campaign is really gambling - as do many survey research companies that are under-polling the under-30 vote in their samples,based on the yarn that young people don't vote -- it may well be in for a rude awakening when the real voting begins in January.
Following the Iowa and New Hampshire contests comes the South Carolina Democratic primary in late January, a state where African-Americans will constitute at least fifty percent of the voting pool. US Rep. James Clyburn of the Palmetto State, the House Majority Whip, and the most powerful black member of Congress who is neutral in the presidential primary, has said that an Obama victory in Iowa (or, by extension, in New Hampshire) would erase the fear among black voters that whites are not ready for a black president. "He does that," Clyburn has commented, and, "nobody beats him in South Carolina."
This is not to say that the senator from Illinois is a savior. He is not promising to end capitalism. Nor does this analysis reject the populist positions that other presidential candidates like Edwards and Dennis Kucinich have taken. Nor does your correspondent contest that history is usually better made outside of the snake pit of electoral politics and there are important sectors of the left that reject the two-party system in the US or that do not vote at all. They, too, are to be respected. But a larger swathe does tend to vote in presidential elections, and the upcoming Democratic primaries present the most interesting challenge to baby boomers that their juniors have ever witnessed.
We, their younger brothers and sisters (and in many cases their children), are at the edges of our seats, waiting to see how this chapter goes.
With the opportunity presented to reject a "Nixon on steroids" in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the sixties generation is being offered a shot a redemption, a chance to prevent a paranoid curse from striking the same country twice in a lifetime. And it is becoming increasingly evident that the only candidate positioned to derail the Clinton juggernaut--organizationally, financially (thanks to half-a-million small contributions), and riding this generational wave--is Obama. The most recent polls indicate that Clinton is losing support--she dropped ten percentage points in the first week of November in New Hampshire - most rapidly from boomers and older Democratic primary voters: signs that a critical mass may well be experiencing some buyer's remorse of what was sold to them as "their" generation of politicians. Maybe, just maybe, their original ideals still beat somewhere inside so many of those broken hearts.
When I published, in September, in The Boston Phoenix, my prediction that Obama will overtake Clinton's "inevitable" candidacy in the Democratic primaries, a lot of my elder colleagues laughed aloud. But the spin room has suddenly quieted to a hush. Yeah, we look like Facebook, whatever that is.
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano11142007.html
November 14, 2007
Don't Trust Anyone Over 50
The 2008 Campaign Offers the Sixties Generation a Shot at Redemption
By AL GIORDANO
The political pollster Peter D. Hart probably didn't mean to send shivers up the spines of baby boomers when he told NBC this month that the current Democratic presidential frontrunner "Hillary Clinton really is Richard Nixon, circa 1968." Hart, whose decades-long client list includes former vice president Hubert Humphrey (the Democrat that Nixon defeated for the White House), could have added that Senator Clinton is Nixon on steroids. The junior senator of New York has made a creepy science out of the control-freak politics that Nixon pioneered: the paranoia, the doubletalk, the situational ethics and the bellicose consequences of one ego's embattled insecurity on US policy from Vietnam to Iraq.
Clinton's Nixonian instincts flew into public view during the October 30 Democratic presidential debate when she offered stammering and contradicting positions on both sides of whether to keep US troops in Iraq, on whether she has a plan to fix Social Security, and on whether undocumented workers ought to have drivers' licenses. But as Ronald Reagan demonstrated, a candidate can win the presidency of the United States holding many positions that are at odds with public opinion, as long as he or she is forthright about declaring where he and she stand. Waffling provokes distrust much more than unpopular views, and the jig is almost up on the media-fed presumption that Clinton has the Democratic nomination in the bag.
The crack in the Clinton façade widened after her surrogates--including former president Bill Clinton--invoked post-debate victimhood and complained about "the politics of pile on" after her rivals questioned her honesty. The frontrunner slid in most national polls since then, and more dramatically in the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary states: Iowa and New Hampshire, which will kick off the voting less than two months from now. What the feigning pundits of the corporate news media had insisted for most of this year had been Clinton's "flawless" procession to power is now a rough-and-tumble street fight. Game on: it's a bona fide contest, kicking, screaming and elbow-jabbing up a greased poll toward the Democratic nomination.
That Nixon ran for president eight years after his vice presidency is only one of the historic parallels between him and Senator Clinton in 2008. To hear Clinton speak, she gained vast "experience" in the Clinton White House that ended that many years ago: she was the virtual vice president (much to Al Gore's chagrin) of Bill Clinton's administration. Nixon's denouement began with Vietnam just as Clinton's did with her authorization of the war in Iraq. Nixon, in 1968, campaigned as peace candidate against the war, airing a national TV advertisement titled "Vietnam" in which the candidate narrated over gruesome images of war:
NIXON: "Never has so much military, economic and diplomatic power been used so ineffectively as in Vietnam. If after all of this time and all of this sacrifice and all of this support there is still no end in sight, then I say the time has come for the American people to turn to new leadership I pledge to you we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam."
Peace With Honor?
Nixon inherited that unpopular war from the opposing party, just as any Democratic president, if elected in 2008, will face, but he ramped up the war in Vietnam while expanding the battlefield with a secret bombing campaign, then an invasion of Cambodia, and dragged US military intervention into nearby Laos too.
Iran is the new Cambodia: Clinton, in 2007, has tried to distance herself from her 2002 vote in the US Senate to authorize the Iraq war but her September 27 vote in support of the saber-rattling Kyl-Lieberman Amendment--which the Bush administration may take as Congressional authorization to expand today's war into Iran--sets her far to the hawkish right of each of her Democratic rivals for the Oval Office, all of whom oppose the maneuver.
One of the defining moments of the 'o8 campaign came last July 23 and demonstrated that, when it comes to US foreign policy, Clinton today is in fact less progressive than was Nixon, who held historic face-to-face meetings with China's Mao Tse Tung and the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev. During a CNN-YouTube debate that evening, citizen Stephen Sixta asked the candidates via video if in their first year as president they would be willing to conduct direct talks with the heads of state of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria and Iran, "without preconditions." Three candidates had the chance to respond: Senator Barack Obama answered yes. Clinton answered no. And former senator John Edwards did not offer anything clearer than a maybe.
"The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them--which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration--is ridiculous," said Obama, lamenting the "disgrace that we have not spoken to them."
Clinton responded in the negative: "I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be."
After the debate, Clinton's chief strategist, pollster Mark Penn, took to the spin room floor to tag Obama's response as a sign of inexperience. (Commercial media reports did not mention that Penn was consultant to the unsuccessful effort by Venezuelan oligarchs to recall President Hugo Chavez in 2004, a venture in which his firm was caught red-handed cooking a false exit poll: an example of how the private sector agendas of this consultant-for-hire have straightjacketed Clinton on real policies.) A day later Clinton, speaking to the Quad City Times in Iowa, ripped into Obama's answer as "irresponsible and frankly naïve," while sending surrogates such as former secretary of state Madeline Albright out to praise her own closed-mindedness as "sophisticated." Undaunted, Obama, since then, has made his willingness to meet directly with the leaders of US-shunned nations a staple of his stump speeches.
The constant drumbeat by Clinton, 60, and her campaign to tag Obama, 46, as lacking the experience to be president has turned the '08 campaign, on the Democratic primary side, into a generational war. Obama has fired back, relishing the role of enfant terrible. As the gap narrows between the two in public opinion surveys, members of Clinton's baby boom generation will be confronted with their own, perhaps final, defining moment: Will 2008 mark the final sell-out in which they confirm that they are as pigheaded as they once believed their parents to be? Or will the presidential primaries bring a generational homecoming in which they willingly pass the torch that their own elders tried to withhold from them? For the sixties generation, it's déjà vu time.
The New Generation Gap
The true fault line of next year's Democratic nomination battle will not tremble because of Clinton's gender or Obama's pigmentation, both themes that the press obsesses upon. The demographic earthquake that quivers under the surface of the '08 campaign is generational.
Already, some boomers are squirming defensively over Obama's statements that a Clinton nomination will prolong the never-resolving, now calcified, arguments between right and left wings of the sixties generation and further stall authentic change. Some take umbrage at the suggestion that their generation--represented politically over the past 15 years by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - should cede the reigns of power to the next.
Some former youths that once cheered our late friend Abbie Hoffman's credo of "don't trust anyone over 30," now sound like their clueless parents of yore, scolding in response to the vocalization of today's generation gap. "Obama can kiss my hippy ass," snapped a Daily Kos diarist on November 9, offended by the junior senator of Illinois' recent statement to Fox News that "I think there's no doubt we represent the kind of change that Sen. Clinton can't deliver on and part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they've been fighting since the '60s, and it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."
Tom Hayden, SDS-founder-turned-politician, is wincing, too. He wrote an open letter to Obama last week in The Huffington Post, imploring, "What I cannot understand is your apparent attempt to sever, or at least distance yourself, from the Sixties generation, though we remain your single greatest supporting constituency."
Among Hayden's gripes is that Obama isn't running a campaign based on identity politics: "[T]he deepest rationale for your running for president is the one that you dare not mention very much, which is that you are an African-American with the possibility of becoming president." Omigod! Obama is black? Why he didn't tell us? We had no idea!
Those with historic memory know that Abbie considered Tom to be out-of-step with generational politics back then when they were quarreling young co-defendants in the Chicago 8 case. But even Hayden seems pulled in two directions, lecturing Obama: "[Y]ou could change America's dismal role in the world. Because of what you so eloquently represent, you could convince the world to give America a new hearing, even a new respect."
Neocon-turned-war-critic Andrew Sullivan made a similar generational argument for Obama in a cover story for the latest issue of The Atlantic. But the focus on "rebranding" America misses the rationale for Obama's candidacy altogether: It's not the colored face that Obama would put on the USA brand, but his (and for many of us, our) generations' differing perception that a deeply flawed "product" has to be fixed rather than merely dressed up in new artificial packaging.
This generational fault line will shake more forcefully as the January 3 Iowa caucuses and subsequent primaries approach. Still, a great many boomers of conscience share the younger generations' disappointment in how their own hopes were dashed. They may find Obama's generational challenge to signal not the defeat of their original ideals but, rather, their fulfillment, or at least a catalyst to reopen the path.
The disillusion that so many of us under 50 have experienced crystallized with the failure of the first Clinton White House to make good on its own generational pitch after 1992. Many of us watched our elders drift from preaching peace and love and anti-capitalism to obsessing with consumerism, escapist spiritual fads and hedge funds. We kept as our own many of the counter-cultural pleasures that were won in the sixties (every generation since then has embraced sexual liberation and marijuana, among other so-called vices), the distrust and mockery of authority, the worry over the natural environment, and the strong distaste for war and discrimination that are among the proud legacies of the sixties youth movements. But many, probably most of us, deeply resent that we find ourselves trapped in a very limited set of political choices calcified by the boomer generation--Republican and Democrat - now in power.
The Politics of Sanctimony
Senator Clinton, on the merits, would not be a poster gal for her generation except for the corporate media's sustenance of such mythology. Her insider experience is at odds with--not part of--the best political and cultural yearnings of her generation. Forty-two years ago, as a Wellesley frosh, Clinton wrote to a pen pal in goody-two-shoes tones about a student that had been denounced for sleeping at her boyfriend's home. She defended the student's "right to do as she pleases" while also huffing, "I don't condone her actions." That, according to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich's July parsing of a pile of letters Clinton penned to an old high school buddy. As a sophomore, Clinton wrote to her friend about the "miserable weekend" she spent arguing with a peer against his LSD use and scoffing at his claim that "expanding my conscience" (sic) "is the way."
Clinton entered Wellesley from the Chicago suburbs as young Republican--a "Goldwater girl" who had campaigned for the GOP in 1964--and in college gravitated toward the Democrats. But the letters demonstrate that Clinton, even in the midst of the countercultural tumult of the times, had a sanctimonious way about her then as now. One of the paradoxes of the 2008 campaign is that her electoral base is considered to be fellow and sister members of the sixties generation and yet--like her spouse who "did not inhale" (it's one of the few statements that Bubba has made that I tend to believe; who else would fake smoking a joint?)--Clinton's path bypassed the pleasure politics that bonded so many of her peers, and, significantly, most of us that came afterwards.
So when a reporter asked Obama last year if he had ever done illegal drugs and the senator answered, "I inhaled frequently. That was the point," and he further volunteered that he had tried cocaine (an admission he had made previously in his autobiography) his lack of shame reminded us of our selves. In contrast, the Clintons have repeatedly shown condescension and hostility toward younger Americans. A recent example came in Iowa when, as has been widely reported, the Clinton campaign planted a question with a young supporter: "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change."
More telling than the embarrassment of getting caught planting questions was Clinton's canned answer to the youth (who, it can now be seen on YouTube, winked toward a Clinton staff member upon termination of her spoonfed script): "Well, you should be worried. You know, I find as I travel around Iowa that it's usually young people that ask me about global warming."
Clinton thus offered a caricature of "young people" and stuffed them into a pollster's box: You are young and therefore your "issue" is "global warming." How lame is that? After all, if it were true that young people "usually ask about global warming," there would be no need to plant the question, right? (A Clinton aide then claimed that the campaign had never planted a question before and that it wouldn't happen again, but quickly a similar incident resurfaced from press reports last April about another event in which the Clinton staff tried to plant a question at a campaign event, and then followed the same revelation from her 2000 US Senate campaign.)
"They Look Like Facebook"
On Saturday, November 10, the Obama campaign turned out 3,000 supporters at the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, one-third of the entire crowd, a demonstration of grassroots muscle in the first caucus state that was noted by virtually every political reporter covering the event. Clinton's top campaign spinners disparaged the Obama crowd for its youth. The pollster Penn, crestfallen by the visible depth of Obama's Iowa field organization, sniped, "Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state." And consultant Mandy Grunwald said, "Our people look like caucus-goers and his people look like they are 18. Penn said they look like Facebook." Many members of the elder generations that pitch was aimed to impress won't get the reference, unaware that Facebook is a website and, at that, is the seventh most visited on earth. Lo and behold: Nixon--who signed the law granting suffrage to 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds--turns out to have been more comfortable with young American voters than the boomers that run Clinton's campaign today.
A 2004 Edison/Mitofsky poll of Iowa caucus participants found that 21,000 young voters, ages 17 (anyone that will turn 18 by the November election is allowed to caucus) to 29, turned out, making for 17 per cent of caucus-goers, "a four-fold increase in youth participation since 2000." That trend continued to rise in the 2006 elections. Throughout 2007 Obama has drawn hordes of young voters and significant numbers of their elders, too, to big campaign rallies. If the Clinton campaign is really gambling - as do many survey research companies that are under-polling the under-30 vote in their samples,based on the yarn that young people don't vote -- it may well be in for a rude awakening when the real voting begins in January.
Following the Iowa and New Hampshire contests comes the South Carolina Democratic primary in late January, a state where African-Americans will constitute at least fifty percent of the voting pool. US Rep. James Clyburn of the Palmetto State, the House Majority Whip, and the most powerful black member of Congress who is neutral in the presidential primary, has said that an Obama victory in Iowa (or, by extension, in New Hampshire) would erase the fear among black voters that whites are not ready for a black president. "He does that," Clyburn has commented, and, "nobody beats him in South Carolina."
This is not to say that the senator from Illinois is a savior. He is not promising to end capitalism. Nor does this analysis reject the populist positions that other presidential candidates like Edwards and Dennis Kucinich have taken. Nor does your correspondent contest that history is usually better made outside of the snake pit of electoral politics and there are important sectors of the left that reject the two-party system in the US or that do not vote at all. They, too, are to be respected. But a larger swathe does tend to vote in presidential elections, and the upcoming Democratic primaries present the most interesting challenge to baby boomers that their juniors have ever witnessed.
We, their younger brothers and sisters (and in many cases their children), are at the edges of our seats, waiting to see how this chapter goes.
With the opportunity presented to reject a "Nixon on steroids" in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the sixties generation is being offered a shot a redemption, a chance to prevent a paranoid curse from striking the same country twice in a lifetime. And it is becoming increasingly evident that the only candidate positioned to derail the Clinton juggernaut--organizationally, financially (thanks to half-a-million small contributions), and riding this generational wave--is Obama. The most recent polls indicate that Clinton is losing support--she dropped ten percentage points in the first week of November in New Hampshire - most rapidly from boomers and older Democratic primary voters: signs that a critical mass may well be experiencing some buyer's remorse of what was sold to them as "their" generation of politicians. Maybe, just maybe, their original ideals still beat somewhere inside so many of those broken hearts.
When I published, in September, in The Boston Phoenix, my prediction that Obama will overtake Clinton's "inevitable" candidacy in the Democratic primaries, a lot of my elder colleagues laughed aloud. But the spin room has suddenly quieted to a hush. Yeah, we look like Facebook, whatever that is.
http://www.counterpunch.org/giordano11142007.html
The Nation published an article online (soon to be in its November 26th issue) where eight authors wrote in support of their favorite Democratic candidate. Here is a link to the article if you want to read any of the others, or all eight
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/intro
I, of course, will merely post the one written by Gore Vidal in favor of Dennis Kucinich. Both the author and the subject is the reason why.
Dennis Kucinich
by GORE VIDAL
[from the November 26, 2007 issue]
For the past two years I've been crisscrossing the United States speaking to crowds of people about our history and politics. At the same time, would-be Presidents of the greatest nation in the country, as silver-tongued Spiro Agnew used to say, have been crowding the trail, while TV journalists sadly shake their heads at how savage the politicos have become in their language. But then, it is the task of TV journalists to foment quarrels where often none properly exist.
As I pass through the stage door of one auditorium after another, I now hear the ominous name of Darth Vader, as edgy audiences shudder at the horrible direction our political discourse has taken. Ever eager as I am to shed light, I sometimes drop the name of the least publicized applicant to the creaky throne of the West: Dennis Kucinich. It takes a moment for the name to sink in. Then genuine applause begins. He is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain, and I work him into the text. A member of the House of Representatives for five terms since 1997, although many of his legislative measures have been too useful and original for our brain-dead media to comprehend. I note his well-wrought articles proposing the impeachment of Vice President Cheney, testing the patriotic nerves of his fellow Democrats, but then the fact of his useful existence often causes distress to those who genuinely hate that democracy he is so eager to extend. "Don't waste your vote," they whine in unison--as if our votes are not quadrennially wasted on those marvelous occasions when they are actually counted and recorded.
Meanwhile, Kucinich is now at least visible in lineups of the Democratic candidates; he tends to be the most eloquent of the lot. So who is he? Something of a political prodigy: at 31 he was elected mayor of Cleveland. Once he had been installed, in 1978, the city's lordly banks wanted the new mayor to sell off the city's municipally owned electric system, Muny Light, to a private competitor in which (Oh, America!) the banks had a financial interest. When Mayor Kucinich refused to sell, the money lords took their revenge, as they are wont to do: they refused to roll over the city's debt, pushing the city into default. The ensuing crisis revealed the banks' criminal involvement with the private utility of their choice, CEI, which, had it acquired Muny Light, would have become a monopoly, as five of the six lordly banks had almost 1.8 million shares of CEI stock: this is Enronesque before the fact.
Mayor Kucinich was not re-elected, but his profile was clearly etched on the consciousness of his city; and in due course he returned to the Cleveland City Council before being elected to the Ohio State Senate and then the US Congress. Kucinich has also written a description of his Dickensian youth, growing up in Cleveland. He has firsthand knowledge of urban poverty in the world's richest nation. Born in 1946 into a Croatian Catholic family, by the time he was 17 he and his family had lived in twenty-one different places, much of which he describes in Dreiserian detail in a just-published memoir.
Kucinich is opposed to the death penalty as well as the USA Patriot Act. In 1998 and 2004 he was a US delegate to the United Nations convention on climate change. At home he has been active in Rust Belt affairs, working to preserve the ninety-year-old Cleveland steel industry, a task of the sort that will confront the next President should he or she have sufficient interest in these details.
I asked a dedicated liberal his impression of Kucinich; he wondered if Kucinich was too slight to lead a nation of truly fat folk. I pointed out that he has the same physical stature as James Madison, as well as a Madisonian commitment to our 1789 Constitution; he is also farsighted, as demonstrated by his resolute opposition to Bush's cries for ever more funding for the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More to the point, in October 2002 he opposed the notion of a war then being debated. For those of us at home and in harm's way from disease, he co-wrote HR 676, a bill that would insure all of us within Medicare, just as if we were citizens of a truly civilized nation.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/vidal
Edited By Akash on 1194994661
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/intro
I, of course, will merely post the one written by Gore Vidal in favor of Dennis Kucinich. Both the author and the subject is the reason why.
Dennis Kucinich
by GORE VIDAL
[from the November 26, 2007 issue]
For the past two years I've been crisscrossing the United States speaking to crowds of people about our history and politics. At the same time, would-be Presidents of the greatest nation in the country, as silver-tongued Spiro Agnew used to say, have been crowding the trail, while TV journalists sadly shake their heads at how savage the politicos have become in their language. But then, it is the task of TV journalists to foment quarrels where often none properly exist.
As I pass through the stage door of one auditorium after another, I now hear the ominous name of Darth Vader, as edgy audiences shudder at the horrible direction our political discourse has taken. Ever eager as I am to shed light, I sometimes drop the name of the least publicized applicant to the creaky throne of the West: Dennis Kucinich. It takes a moment for the name to sink in. Then genuine applause begins. He is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain, and I work him into the text. A member of the House of Representatives for five terms since 1997, although many of his legislative measures have been too useful and original for our brain-dead media to comprehend. I note his well-wrought articles proposing the impeachment of Vice President Cheney, testing the patriotic nerves of his fellow Democrats, but then the fact of his useful existence often causes distress to those who genuinely hate that democracy he is so eager to extend. "Don't waste your vote," they whine in unison--as if our votes are not quadrennially wasted on those marvelous occasions when they are actually counted and recorded.
Meanwhile, Kucinich is now at least visible in lineups of the Democratic candidates; he tends to be the most eloquent of the lot. So who is he? Something of a political prodigy: at 31 he was elected mayor of Cleveland. Once he had been installed, in 1978, the city's lordly banks wanted the new mayor to sell off the city's municipally owned electric system, Muny Light, to a private competitor in which (Oh, America!) the banks had a financial interest. When Mayor Kucinich refused to sell, the money lords took their revenge, as they are wont to do: they refused to roll over the city's debt, pushing the city into default. The ensuing crisis revealed the banks' criminal involvement with the private utility of their choice, CEI, which, had it acquired Muny Light, would have become a monopoly, as five of the six lordly banks had almost 1.8 million shares of CEI stock: this is Enronesque before the fact.
Mayor Kucinich was not re-elected, but his profile was clearly etched on the consciousness of his city; and in due course he returned to the Cleveland City Council before being elected to the Ohio State Senate and then the US Congress. Kucinich has also written a description of his Dickensian youth, growing up in Cleveland. He has firsthand knowledge of urban poverty in the world's richest nation. Born in 1946 into a Croatian Catholic family, by the time he was 17 he and his family had lived in twenty-one different places, much of which he describes in Dreiserian detail in a just-published memoir.
Kucinich is opposed to the death penalty as well as the USA Patriot Act. In 1998 and 2004 he was a US delegate to the United Nations convention on climate change. At home he has been active in Rust Belt affairs, working to preserve the ninety-year-old Cleveland steel industry, a task of the sort that will confront the next President should he or she have sufficient interest in these details.
I asked a dedicated liberal his impression of Kucinich; he wondered if Kucinich was too slight to lead a nation of truly fat folk. I pointed out that he has the same physical stature as James Madison, as well as a Madisonian commitment to our 1789 Constitution; he is also farsighted, as demonstrated by his resolute opposition to Bush's cries for ever more funding for the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More to the point, in October 2002 he opposed the notion of a war then being debated. For those of us at home and in harm's way from disease, he co-wrote HR 676, a bill that would insure all of us within Medicare, just as if we were citizens of a truly civilized nation.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071126/vidal
Edited By Akash on 1194994661
I'm loving Biden more and more. I mean, I wouldn't vote for him. But he's turning into the "Eric" of these debates.
The Nation
Campaign 08
OBAMA STEPS IT UP IN IOWA--BUT SO DOES CLINTON...
It's past midnight and the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner is finally over. All of the six presidential candidates gave, to varying degrees, rousing speeches.
But the night came down to Clinton vs. Obama. After all, they were placed side-by-side in the lineup and both closed out a long night.
Obama gave his sharpest speech in a long time, perhaps since the '04 Democratic convention that put him on the map. He was blunt, specific, visionary and, though he didn't mention her by name, biting in his critique of Clintonism.
"The same old Washington textbook campaign just won't do it this election," Obama said, echoing a refrain throughout the speech. "That's why not answering questions because the answer may be unpopular just won't do it...Triangulation and poll-driven positions, because they're worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us, just won't do it."
Obama argued that Democrats needed to rally around a candidate who, unlike Clinton, wasn't bound by past mistakes. "When I'm your nominee, my opponent won't be able to say that I supported this war in Iraq' or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I support that Bush-Cheney diplomacy of not talking to leaders we don't like."
On the issue of foreign policy, in particular, he sought to distinguish himself from Clinton and tie her to Bush. "I am running for President because I am sick and tired of Democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security is by acting and voting like George Bush Republicans," he said.
Even as the auditorium was half full and the crowd was sleepy, Obama turned in a great performance.
Unfortunately for him, so did Hillary. She knew exactly who her audience was and tonight was nothing if not a partisan Democrat. She swatted away some of the emerging attacks from her opponents with ease. "Change is just a word," she said, "if you don't have the strength and the experience to enact it." It was as if she was telling Obama and Edwards: go to your room.
For once, she acknowledged her doubters. And she did her best to put those doubts to rest. "There are some who say you don't know where I stand. I think you know better than that. I stand where I've stood for 35 years--I stand with you!"
It's a corny line, but it was effective. The speech was designed to say: I'm a fighter.
At the same time, Clinton argued that the real fight needed to be with the Republicans. "I'm not interested in attacking my opponents," she claimed, while subtly attacking them. "We should be turning up the heat on the Republicans."
Hillary is sharpening her general election message while Obama is finally realizing he first needs to win the Democratic primary. It should be an interesting next 50 days.
Here's what happened earlier in the evening::
I am at the Iowa Democrats Jefferson-Jackson dinner, with over 9,000 very loud Democratic activists waiting to hear their candidates for president. Sitting in the press balcony behind throngs of Obama supporters dressed in red, chanting "ready to go!" (Their t-shirts say "I'm Fired Up," a play on a campaign story Obama liked to tell. They even have matching fortune cookies.)
The Hillary folks, who as large in number, are wearing Hawkeye gold. Their slogan: "turn up the heat, turn America around."
Anyway, the show is about to begin. I haven't been to a political event this big or crazy since the Democratic convention in '04.
I will be blogging the event this evening, in this space, so stay tuned...
8:50: John Edwards speaks first. He comes out on fire, wearing the proud populist mantle. He calls the Republican candidates "George Bush on steroids." Yet tonight Edwards sounds like Howard Dean on steroids, clearly influenced by former Dean strategist Joe Trippi. "It is time for the Democratic party to stand up with some backbone and strength!" he says near the beginning of his speech. He doesn't talk about the war in Iraq or foreign policy. Instead, the core of his remarks is a sharp anti-corporate message. "We desperately need to elect a Democratic president," Edwards says. "But it isn't enough." And then he takes a crack at Clintonism. "Look at what happened in the 1990s. We had a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. But still drug company lobbyists killed universal healthcare." We need a President, Edwards says, who will take on these lobbyists and entrenched interests and "give 'em hell." In closing, he says he's running for president "on behalf of the people this government has forgotten."
9:10: Bill Richardson. If Edwards is running as the populist in the race, then Richardson wants to be the antiwar candidate. "The most important issue effecting this race is the war," he says at the outset. He praises the other Democratic candidates but says "there is a different with the candidates on how to end the war." The leading candidates, he says, "are talking about leaving troops [in Iraq] until 2013. I will end the war within one year."
Other than his sharp antiwar critique, though, Richardson played a familiar role: peacemaker. "It is critically important that Democrats not tear each other down," he says. "It's ok to point out policy differences--on Iraq, Iran, education. But it's important to remember that voters in Iowa want a positive campaign."
9:25: Biden is up and once again delivers what will likely be the line of the night. "I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani," he jokes at the beginning. "I said his campaign was a noun, a verb and 9/11...I was wrong. He called me to tell me that after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an 'Amen' in there."
10:35: It's getting late and the event is running over. Chris Dodd just spoke. He is the "Constitution candidate." "On very first hour, on very first day," he said, "I will restore the Constitution of the United States."
Posted by Ari Berman at 11/11/2007 @ 12:09pm |
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=250795
The Nation
Campaign 08
OBAMA STEPS IT UP IN IOWA--BUT SO DOES CLINTON...
It's past midnight and the Iowa Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner is finally over. All of the six presidential candidates gave, to varying degrees, rousing speeches.
But the night came down to Clinton vs. Obama. After all, they were placed side-by-side in the lineup and both closed out a long night.
Obama gave his sharpest speech in a long time, perhaps since the '04 Democratic convention that put him on the map. He was blunt, specific, visionary and, though he didn't mention her by name, biting in his critique of Clintonism.
"The same old Washington textbook campaign just won't do it this election," Obama said, echoing a refrain throughout the speech. "That's why not answering questions because the answer may be unpopular just won't do it...Triangulation and poll-driven positions, because they're worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us, just won't do it."
Obama argued that Democrats needed to rally around a candidate who, unlike Clinton, wasn't bound by past mistakes. "When I'm your nominee, my opponent won't be able to say that I supported this war in Iraq' or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I support that Bush-Cheney diplomacy of not talking to leaders we don't like."
On the issue of foreign policy, in particular, he sought to distinguish himself from Clinton and tie her to Bush. "I am running for President because I am sick and tired of Democrats thinking that the only way to look tough on national security is by acting and voting like George Bush Republicans," he said.
Even as the auditorium was half full and the crowd was sleepy, Obama turned in a great performance.
Unfortunately for him, so did Hillary. She knew exactly who her audience was and tonight was nothing if not a partisan Democrat. She swatted away some of the emerging attacks from her opponents with ease. "Change is just a word," she said, "if you don't have the strength and the experience to enact it." It was as if she was telling Obama and Edwards: go to your room.
For once, she acknowledged her doubters. And she did her best to put those doubts to rest. "There are some who say you don't know where I stand. I think you know better than that. I stand where I've stood for 35 years--I stand with you!"
It's a corny line, but it was effective. The speech was designed to say: I'm a fighter.
At the same time, Clinton argued that the real fight needed to be with the Republicans. "I'm not interested in attacking my opponents," she claimed, while subtly attacking them. "We should be turning up the heat on the Republicans."
Hillary is sharpening her general election message while Obama is finally realizing he first needs to win the Democratic primary. It should be an interesting next 50 days.
Here's what happened earlier in the evening::
I am at the Iowa Democrats Jefferson-Jackson dinner, with over 9,000 very loud Democratic activists waiting to hear their candidates for president. Sitting in the press balcony behind throngs of Obama supporters dressed in red, chanting "ready to go!" (Their t-shirts say "I'm Fired Up," a play on a campaign story Obama liked to tell. They even have matching fortune cookies.)
The Hillary folks, who as large in number, are wearing Hawkeye gold. Their slogan: "turn up the heat, turn America around."
Anyway, the show is about to begin. I haven't been to a political event this big or crazy since the Democratic convention in '04.
I will be blogging the event this evening, in this space, so stay tuned...
8:50: John Edwards speaks first. He comes out on fire, wearing the proud populist mantle. He calls the Republican candidates "George Bush on steroids." Yet tonight Edwards sounds like Howard Dean on steroids, clearly influenced by former Dean strategist Joe Trippi. "It is time for the Democratic party to stand up with some backbone and strength!" he says near the beginning of his speech. He doesn't talk about the war in Iraq or foreign policy. Instead, the core of his remarks is a sharp anti-corporate message. "We desperately need to elect a Democratic president," Edwards says. "But it isn't enough." And then he takes a crack at Clintonism. "Look at what happened in the 1990s. We had a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress. But still drug company lobbyists killed universal healthcare." We need a President, Edwards says, who will take on these lobbyists and entrenched interests and "give 'em hell." In closing, he says he's running for president "on behalf of the people this government has forgotten."
9:10: Bill Richardson. If Edwards is running as the populist in the race, then Richardson wants to be the antiwar candidate. "The most important issue effecting this race is the war," he says at the outset. He praises the other Democratic candidates but says "there is a different with the candidates on how to end the war." The leading candidates, he says, "are talking about leaving troops [in Iraq] until 2013. I will end the war within one year."
Other than his sharp antiwar critique, though, Richardson played a familiar role: peacemaker. "It is critically important that Democrats not tear each other down," he says. "It's ok to point out policy differences--on Iraq, Iran, education. But it's important to remember that voters in Iowa want a positive campaign."
9:25: Biden is up and once again delivers what will likely be the line of the night. "I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani," he jokes at the beginning. "I said his campaign was a noun, a verb and 9/11...I was wrong. He called me to tell me that after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an 'Amen' in there."
10:35: It's getting late and the event is running over. Chris Dodd just spoke. He is the "Constitution candidate." "On very first hour, on very first day," he said, "I will restore the Constitution of the United States."
Posted by Ari Berman at 11/11/2007 @ 12:09pm |
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=250795