"I Am Barack Obama, I Am Barack Obama"

The other day in my car, I was listening to my favorite radio station, XM-radio's POTUS '08 (Politics of the United States), dedicated entirely to the 2008 political cycle. A media consultant named Thom Mozloom happened to be on the air, waxing indignant about the Obama media strategy. The gist of Mozloom's argument was that given the economic circumstances of the day, Obama should be looking at a landslide victory; according to Mozloom, it was Obama's deficient campaign that was keeping the election close.

My reaction was strong and immediate: "What in the world is this guy thinking?" We live in a country that has been closely ideologically divided for decades. Barack Obama is a 47 year old African-American, who, when he first announced his candidacy in February of 2007, was given virtually no shot at winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. In small town America, journalists repeatedly show us that there are significant pockets of resistance to the idea of a president of color. The mere fact that Obama is poised to win this election is amazing. Landslide, indeed!

Just this week, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus visited a Walmart in Logan County, West Virginia, to examine citizens' views about Obama. Here is a sample of what she found:

"If I do vote, it will be Republican," said Charles Mount, a 31-year-old mechanic and registered Democrat. "There's just something about Obama. You hear so much about him being a Muslim. I don't personally believe that but I don't know that. I'm not going to take a chance on the leader of our country." "

"If Barack Obama gets in, it basically will be giving our America away to whatever . . . ," said Jamie Willis, 42, who voted for Clinton in the primary. Her husband, Brent Willis, 37, a contractor and registered Democrat, filled in the blank. "To be brutally honest with you, if Obama goes in there the [blacks] are going to go crazy -- and I'm not a prejudiced person."

Terry Sanders, a court clerk, said he "wouldn't vote for Obama if he was running for dog catcher. His values are completely different from mine. Why's he got a problem with the flag? He wouldn't put his hand over his heart. It casts a lot of doubt about what kind of man is this fellow."

Even more striking is Marcus' comment about these quotes:

These are not incendiary quotes cherry-picked from among multiple interviews or cajoled out of people reluctant to express a view. They came from the first eight people who stopped to answer my questions -- of whom just one said she supported Obama, citing the backing of the mineworkers union.

Obviously, Obama has had to face hurdles that no white presidential candidate would have to confront. If Obama were not black, the internet slurs--"he's a Muslim," "he doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance," "he doesn't respect the flag," or more generally, in the parlance of Sarah Palin, "He doesn't see America the way we do"--would never have gained any traction whatsoever. The fact that two years into Obama's candidacy, these myths still exist, is best explained by Obama's wry comment, "I don't look like the other presidents on the currency."

Thom Mozloom's criticisms notwithstanding, for almost two years, Obama has run a campaign with virtually no margin for error, an incredible feat. To drive home this point, let's try a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that Obama carried with him the following baggage:

1) He finished fifth from the bottom of his class in college (McCain).

2) His spouse previously had a drug addiction that led her to steal drugs from her own medical foundation (McCain).

3) He has a daughter who is pregnant out of wedlock (Palin).

4) He has a spouse who for years belonged to group that advocated the secession of his home state from the Union (Palin).

5) He played an unethical role in a previous financial meltdown that cost the taxpayers billions (McCain).

Can you imagine what the right-wing attack machine would do with these facts? FOX News would be beating these issues to death. Well, actually they wouldn't, because no black candidate could survive a presidential race for five minutes with such baggage. The pregnant daughter alone would have people saying, "He's devaluing the presidency with his hip-hop values." That is why I would never saddle Obama with the absurd expectation that "he should win by a landslide." If Obama gets 270 electoral votes, it will be the most remarkable accomplishment in American electoral history. It will be a seismic paradigm shift. The good news, however, is that once a new paradigm is created, it is amazing how we as a country adapt to it, even to the point of forgetting—or perhaps repressing—that the old paradigm ever existed. Let me expand on this point with a brief story:

In 1939, two African-American men, Clarence M. Davenport and Robert B. Tresville, entered West Point, among the first black men to have done so. Their presence evoked outrage. After all, who really believed that black men had the courage, intelligence, values or patriotism to assume such roles? While it was standard for cadets to be assigned roommates, Davenport and Tresville were not only not allowed to room with white cadets, they were also not allowed to room with each other. So each roomed alone. For four years they endured a form of treatment called "silencing," in which white cadets would not speak to them unless for official business. Even in the chapel, white cadets would not sit with them. When Life magazine came to take a picture of Davenport's graduating class, he was excluded from the picture.

Both men became model soldiers. In the 1960's, Davenport was given the Legion of Merit for his command of the 10th Artillery Group, 32nd Army Air Defense Command in Europe. and retired from the Army in 1972 as a full colonel. And Tresville? He became the commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen's 100th Fighter Squadron, and in 1944, was killed on a mission off the coast of Italy. I mention these men for two reasons. The first reason is that these men are great heroes, unsung heroes, men who created a new paradigm, a new narrative about our military. The military is now perhaps the most integrated institution in our country, and many cannot even remember a time when blacks were shunned at West Point, and seen as lacking "good American values." The second reason is that Robert Tresville was married to my mom when his plane was lost over the Mediterranean Sea. It is because of the exploits of Tresville and Davenport that we now take for granted the Colin Powells of our nation.

Speaking of Powell, I agree completely with his assessment on Meet the Press that an Obama presidency will be "transformational." A world wide Gallup poll recently showed that three-quarters of the citizens in the 70 countries that they polled are hoping for an Obama presidency. This was true from Asia to Africa to Western Europe. In fact, Gallup only managed to find two countries where McCain was preferred: Georgia, and the Philippines.

This leads me to conclude that--in contrast to the overwrought warnings of Joe Biden--Obama will actually get the benefit of a global honeymoon period once he is elected. Temporarily at least, Al-Qaeda will be defanged, because it will become much harder to recruit terrorists when the American president is a role model in both developed and developing nations. When Obama is elected, black kids will start sitting up straighter in the classroom, and the notion that being studious is somehow "acting white," will lose all its destructive power. And instead of hearing the cynical and confused slogan, "I am Joe the plumber," we will hear children of all colors and creeds from all over the world saying, "I am Barack Obama, I am Barack Obama."
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 8:12 AM

 
John McCain and the Politics of Dishonor

John McCain likes to use words like "duty," "honor," and "putting America first," to describe the heart of his presidential campaign. It is clear that McCain sees himself as a lonely island of principle surrounded by a sea of corruption. And there have been occasions--as McCain will be quick to tell you--when he has taken difficult and principled positions on issues: originally opposing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, standing up for campaign finance reform, and taking, by Republican standards, a humane position on immigration.

But McCain's lofty rhetoric hides the fact that in the real world, acting in a principled way can be difficult and elusive. The same person who is a loving father and husband may become a destructive maniac when on the road in traffic; the same person who gives lavishly to his church is also quite capable of embezzling money from the office. The problem for John McCain, is that all too often in his life, when principle and personal gain have collided, it is the principle that has been thrown aside. In life, even the highest ideals often give way to factors like stress, ambition, and greed. For all his high-toned rhetoric, John McCain is a classic example of this. Let's look at some examples of McCain's lapses of honor:

1) The 2000 South Carolina Primary. In January of 2000, George W. Bush and John McCain were locked in a battle for the Republican nomination. The stakes were particularly high for Bush, who had just lost to McCain in New Hampshire by 18 percentage points. Bush had to win, but McCain had the early momentum. Suddenly, a new campaign strategy was hatched by the Bush team. In 1993, Cindy McCain had traveled to Bangladesh and adopted a Bangladeshi child named Bridget. Bridget had a cleft palate which needed medical treatment, and she had dark skin. The Bush partisans saw an opportunity there. During the campaign, South Carolina citizens suddenly began getting phone calls at dinner time, asking:

Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

Other calls mused about Cindy McCain's drug use, and referred to McCain as the "fag candidate." The view of those on the ground in 2000 is that these calls were the work of Karl Rove, and of Charlie Condon, a Bush supporter and former South Carolina Attorney General. Not surprisingly, both men deny involvement in the vicious and well-orchestrated campaign, but here is what Condon had to say when asked about the smear campaign:

Our primaries have a way of doing that. There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works. There are no regrets about 2000. To this day I don’t have one. If someone did those things, shame on them. But I did see that there was a need for bringing up issues.

So, under attack in South Carolina with poll numbers dropping, what did McCain do? He suddenly became a supporter of the confederate flag. McCain dropped his previous opposition to the confederate flag flying atop the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina. Asked by a reporter about his position on the flag, McCain expressed a newfound openness to it:

Personally, I see the flag as symbol of heritage.

McCain went on to lose the South Carolina primary by 11 points. By April of 2000, Bush had become the presumptive nominee. The campaign now over, and with the pressure off, John McCain had yet another change of heart about the confederate flag. In April of 2000, he returned to South Carolina and apologized for his support of the flag:

I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles...I believe the flag should be removed from your Capitol, and I am encouraged that fair-minded people on both sides of the issue are working hard to define an honorable compromise.


This is the quintessential John McCain: No one issues a more remorseful apology than John McCain. The problem throughout his political career is that when he is confronted with the prospect of losing, his principles collapse like an old lounge chair. Shortly after the South Carolina episode, McCain commented to an interviewer that there must be "a special place in hell" for those who had perpetrated the smear against him and his family. Remarkably, however, after blasting the villains who had sabotaged his campaign, McCain had another change of heart, and hired Charlie Condon, the likely culprit in the affair. Ann Banks describes it best in her article in The Nation:

Seven years later, who is running McCain's South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting [McCain’s daughter] Bridget. If you can't beat them, hire them--even if they've launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

Hiring the guy who smeared your own daughter with racist phone calls, ranks pretty high on my scale of dishonorable acts. The frightening thing about McCain, is that he apparently believes that if the apology is contrite enough, it wipes the slate clean on the bad act that preceded it.

2) The Keating Scandal Take the case of the Keating Five. McCain, along with four other senators, intervened with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a man who bilked investors out of billions in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Scandal. Keating was a friend and contributor of McCain, who had given him over $112,000 in contributions, and $13,000 in free trips to the Bahamas. (McCain reimbursed Keating only after Keating became a target of investigators). The intervention of the five senators kept the regulators at bay for two years, allowing Keating’s fraud to continue, which of course worsened the financial tragedy for unwitting investors. Predictably, here is the McCain mea culpa:

The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do…. It was the worst mistake of my life.

He gives great after-the-fact apologies, doesn’t he?

At the Rick Warren values forum, McCain was asked to describe his greatest moral failing. He responded:

My greatest moral failing, and I have been a very imperfect person, is the failure of my first marriage.

Of course, what he really meant by this, is that he had taken up with a hotter, richer woman, after his wife had been seriously injured in a car accident, had spent 6 months in the hospital and had 23 surgeries.

Based on this, I’ll make a wager right now: After he loses the presidential election, McCain will offer a full-throated apology for his campaign’s use of words like “socialist,” “terrorist, and “celebrity” to describe Barack Obama. But I guarantee that it will be a good apology. That’s what McCain does best…
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 4:37 PM

 
Obama Wins the Final Debate

In this election cycle, the conventional wisdom about the presidential debates is that they have been forgettable, poorly moderated, and gave us little new insight into the candidates. After last night's third and final debate, NBC's Tom Brokaw commented, "It seems unlikely that anything we heard tonight really did move the needle." Many pundits have suggested that the debates have been an irrelevant sideshow that has not told us much about the candidates. I beg to differ.

Regardless of the format, or quality of the moderator, debates always serve as a kind of trial by ordeal, an inkblot test for the candidates to reveal who they really are. In this regard, the three presidential debates were a tremendous success. When people criticize the debates, what they usually mean is that this or that debate didn't meet modern standards of entertainment; it didn't divert us in the manner of CSI, Dancing with the Stars, or for that matter WWE wrestling. But such critiques miss the point. I would submit that along with the economic crisis, historians will look back on the debates as the most decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.

The question going into the first debate in Oxford, Mississippi was, would Obama show the maturity and command that we look for in a president? Would McCain show the grace under pressure and independence from George W. Bush necessary to right the wrongs of the past eight years? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Barring any gross factual or rhetorical flubs--like Gerald Ford liberating Poland in 1976, or Bob Dole complaining about "Democrat wars"--style, or more accurately put, character, trumps substance every time.

And during the debates, character was revealed in spades. From the first debate to the last night's final one--ably guided by Bob Schieffer of CBS--there was utter thematic consistency: Barack Obama was even and reassuring, John McCain was seething and angry. There have long been whispers from McCain's fellow senators about his temper, his tendency to lose control, diss, and berate his colleagues. Before the debates, however, it was easily to dismiss such charges as hype and political jockeying. But the John McCain who couldn't bring himself to look at Obama in the first debate (something he categorically denied when asked about it by George Stephanopoulos afterward), the John McCain who contemptuously referred to Obama as "that one" in the second debate, and the John McCain we saw last night, were all of a piece. This is a man whose emotions are barely in check, who at times looked like he wanted to take a swing at Obama rather than engage him in debate.

McCain was not helped last night by the abundant use of split screen, repeatedly showing McCain while Obama was talking. The television audience was treated to a succession of blinks, eye rolls, flushed faces, and looks of pique from McCain that did nothing to comfort the viewer about his self-control. He looked like the principal of a high school in one of those teen movies who had been challenged by one of his know-it-all students, and was now caught between his desire to maintain his dignity and his desire to strangle the student.

It doesn't surprise me at all that the flash polls showed Obama winning the debate by upwards of 60-30. The situation set up perfectly for him. Obama is far more comfortable as the counter-puncher than as the aggressor. While some pundits judged him as too passive last night, what Obama did was employ a classic rope-a-dope technique: Allow your opponent to keep punching until he becomes increasingly tired, frustrated, and reckless. By the time McCain launched into his pre-scripted speech about William Ayres, millions of viewers, fresh off the latest stock market 700 point downer, were asking, "What's this got to do with the price of tea in China?"

It is ironic that John McCain experienced the same frustration with Obama that Hillary Clinton did. Just as Hillary complained repeatedly about Obama being "just speeches," I knew that McCain had lost it last night when he started referring derisively to Obama's "eloquence." And when McCain groused about Obama's "eloquence" just after Obama had stood up for the right of a woman to have a late-term abortion if her health were imperiled, McCain seemed particularly churlish.

The bottom line is that it is now Obama's race to lose. CNN has him ahead by a staggering 10 points in Virginia, a state where Bush defeated Kerry by 9 points. Obama is ahead by 4 points in Colorado, which hasn't gone Democratic in 16 years. And the Democrats are poised to get some sweet revenge in Florida where Obama has opened up a 5 point lead on McCain. And all of this is partly due to what the three debates revealed: Barack Obama is one of the most reasoned, steady, and disciplined candidates in our lifetime.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 9:09 AM

 
The Vice Presidential Debate: Where Was Gwen Ifill?

Back in the 70's, the tongue-in-cheek, anti-war question was, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" In an embarrassing variation on that theme, the question taken from last night's vice presidential debate was, "What if they gave a debate and the moderator didn't show up?" Simply put, moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS was missing-in-action.The rhetorical battle between Biden and Palin was so unusual that it may have changed the nature of debate as we know it. Palin's strategy was ingeniously simple: If the moderator asks you a question about which you know nothing, simply refuse to answer it, and instead answer one of your own making. The Palin strategy produced a bizarre back and forth in which one never knew what Palin was going to say, because she paid so little attention to the question at hand, preferring instead to simply recite pre-rehearsed monologues. As a result, it wasn't long before the inmates, or should I say the inmate, was running the asylum, and the moderator had abdicated control.

I would grade the participants as follows:

Biden: B+ Biden was as disciplined and on point as I've ever seen him, making his points with a crispness and seriousness befitting a vice-presidential debate, even while Palin tried to distract him with a procession of winks, quips, jokes, shout-outs, and misstatements of fact that sometimes came so fast and furious that it was hard to keep up with her. Biden's grade would be higher if he hadn't seemed so nervous through much of the debate, leading to occasionally garbled sentences.

Palin: C Just for showing up and surviving the ninety mintues, Palin gets a C, though her survival depended largely on being able to dismiss any question that did not conform to the talking points that she had previously memorized. Early on in the proceedings she gave warning that the debate questions were in her view, an evil creation of the mainstream media, and that answering the moderator's questions was optional:

I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record...

Toward the end of the debate, in an oblique reference to her disastrous Katie Couric interviews, Palin continued her criticism of the mainstream press:

I like being able to answer these tough questions without the filter, even, of the mainstream media kind of telling viewers what they've just heard. I'd rather be able to just speak to the American people like we just did.

Ifill: F I'm not sure I've ever seen a debate in which the moderator was as docile as Ifill was last night.There are three basic tasks for the moderator of any major political debate: 1) Set an agenda by raising serious and relevant questions 2) Keep the participants on task so that they follow the agenda at hand. 3) Highlight any lapses of clarity, factual accuracy, or candor with follow-up questions. I don't believe that Ifill managed to accomplish any of these tasks last night.

Ifill was almost certainly affected by pressure from conservative groups, who viewed her upcoming book, Breakthough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, as a serious conflict of interest. In the view of Ifill's critics, her book, due to be released on inauguration day, would obviously be more relevant and more financially successful if Obama won the presidency, than if he did not. There is some truth to this complaint, so it is not unreasonable to conclude that Ifill felt the need to overcompensate during the debate by giving Palin free rein to pick and choose which questions she would answer.

Early on in the debate, I knew that things had gone awry when Joe Biden, in responding to a question about the subprime mortgage crisis, described John McCain as one of the biggest advocates for market deregulation. Ifill offered Palin a chance to respond to Biden's criticisms, and here was Palin's response:

I would like to respond about the tax increases. We can speak in agreement here that darn right we need tax relief for Americans so that jobs can be created here. Now, Barack Obama and Sen. Biden also voted for the largest tax increases in U.S. history. Barack had 94 opportunities to side on the people's side and reduce taxes and 94 times he voted to increase taxes or not support a tax reduction, 94 times.

For a moment I thought I was losing my mind. Tax increases? Who said anything about tax increases!? Am I already losing my memory at such a young age!? Clearly, tax increases were the first line on Palin's list of talking points, and she was determined to raise the issue, come hell or high water.

One of Ifill's many shortcomings during the debate was her inability to ask a question without simultaneously providing multiple choice answers. So she couldn't simply ask something like, "Who was at fault in the subprime mortgage meltdown? Instead, Ifill coddled Palin with this formulation:

Who do you think was at fault? I start with you, Gov. Palin. Was it the greedy lenders? Was it the risky home-buyers who shouldn't have been buying a home in the first place? And what should you be doing about it?

Every time she got such a multiple choice question, Palin breathed a sigh of relief, because she then knew that she could circle "all of the above." Likewise, Ifill didn't ask how Palin would facilitate peace in the Middle East; instead, she threw her a lifeline by suggesting "...is a two-state solution the solution?" Was anyone surprised by Palin's response: "A two-state solution is the solution." Bravo!

In the category of dumb questions, Ifill asked Biden about his statement that he, "would not be vice president under any circumstances." The problem with this question is that Biden said that when he was still a presidential candidate. Show me a presidential candidate anywhere who would say, "Yes, I'm willing to take the second job." It was later, after he had ended his campaign, that Biden told Brian Williams on Meet the Press that he didn't want the job, but if asked, he would accept:

SEN. BIDEN: Unlike most other people, I'm being straight with you. If asked, I will do it. I've made it clear I do not want to be asked.

MR. WILLIAMS: Do not want to be asked. But if asked, the answer, of course, would be yes.

SEN. BIDEN: Of course it would, because the--if the president--if the presidential nominee thought I could help him win, am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, "No, I will not help you out like you want me to"? Of course, I'm--I'll say yes.

I watched the interview live on July 22, and found it to be a candid and sincere statement by Biden. Palin was apparently referencing this comment by Biden in trying to defend her own statement that she didn't know what a vice president actually did:

In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it. Of course we know what a vice president does.

Huh? Biden's comments to Brian Williams on Meet the Press were dead serious. This is just another example of Palin winging it with no real knowledge of what she's talking about. Conservative writer Kathleen Parker put if perfectly when she wrote: "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." By the end of the debate, when Palin had relaxed a bit, she started to tap into her inner Tina Fey, getting more cutesy and folksy by the minute. I hope I never again have to watch a debate where I hear a "shout-out" to the third grade of Gladys Wood Elementary School. I hope I never have to hear canned lines again like "say it aint so, Joe." I hope I never hear the word "maverick" again. And I hope that the Commission on Presidential Debates thinks long and hard before giving another debate to Gwen Ifill.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 5:24 PM