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By Swopa May 20 2008 - 11:02pm Barack Obama returned Tuesday night to Iowa, where the incredibly long Democratic nomination campaign began. He may not have officially declared victory, but he did unveil a new speech laying out his themes for the general election against John McCain: . . . this year’s Republican primary was a contest to see which candidate could out-Bush the other, and that is the contest John McCain won. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans that once bothered Senator McCain’s conscience are now his only economic policy. The Bush health care plan that only helps those who are already healthy and wealthy is now John McCain’s answer to the 47 million Americans without insurance and the millions more who can’t pay their medical bills. The Bush Iraq policy that asks everything of our troops and nothing of Iraqi politicians is John McCain’s policy too, and so is the fear of tough and aggressive diplomacy that has left this country more isolated and less secure than at any time in recent history. The lobbyists who ruled George Bush’s Washington are now running John McCain’s campaign, and they actually had the nerve to say that the American people won’t care about this. Talk about out of touch! I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don’t represent is change. Change is a tax code that rewards work instead of wealth by cutting taxes for middle-class families, and senior citizens, and struggling homeowners; a tax code that rewards businesses that create good jobs here in America instead of the corporations that ship them overseas. That’s what change is. Change is a health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it; that brings down premiums for every family who needs it; that stops insurance companies from discriminating and denying coverage to those who need it most. Change is an energy policy that doesn’t rely on buddying up to the Saudi Royal Family and then begging them for oil – an energy policy that puts a price on pollution and makes the oil companies invest their record profits in clean, renewable sources of energy that will create five million new jobs and leave our children a safer planet. That’s what change is. Change is giving every child a world-class education by recruiting an army of new teachers with better pay and more support; by promising four years of tuition to any American willing to serve their community and their country; by realizing that the best education starts with parents who turn off the TV, and take away the video games, and read to our children once in awhile. Change is ending a war that we never should’ve started and finishing a war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that we never should’ve ignored. Change is facing the threats of the twenty-first century not with bluster, or fear-mongering, or tough talk, but with tough diplomacy, and strong alliances, and confidence in the ideals that have made this nation the last, best hope of Earth. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That is what change is. That is the choice in this election. As I wrote in mid-February, "connecting his candidacy with the specific agenda of problems America needs solved will make it harder for the Republican sludge machine to win by eviscerating him personally." Now that the battle has been more or less officially joined, I think each passing week will make it clearer that this is the tug-of-war that will define the presidential contest. Harold Meyerson put it well in the Washington Post last week: There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there's not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of "What are you going to do for America?" rather than "Are you a real American?" Republicans are doomed. So I'm glad to see that Barack Obama embracing a more issue-based campaign strategy. Of course, having finally (if indirectly) taken my advice, he damn well better win. I don't want to have to deal with both another Republican president and being proved wrong. (Cross-posted at Firedoglake.) By Swopa May 19 2008 - 9:23pm  "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" "Your winnings, sir." From the New York Times this evening: Sorting out the lobbying entanglements of his campaign advisers is proving to be a messy business for Senator John McCain. On Monday, just days after it issued new rules to address conflicts of interest, the McCain campaign was furiously sifting through the business records of aides and advisers. The new rules were prompted by disclosures that led to the abrupt departure from the campaign of a number of aides who worked as lobbyists, including some with ties to foreign governments. Mr. McCain’s political identity has long been defined by his calls for reducing the influence of special interests in Washington. But as he heads toward the general election as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, he has increasingly confronted criticism that his campaign staff is stocked with people who have made their living as lobbyists or in similar jobs, leaving his credentials as a reformer open to attack. The process of trying to purge the campaign of conflicts that in appearance or reality might violate Mr. McCain’s stated principles or cause him political trouble has so far focused only more attention on the backgrounds of his aides and advisers. The delicate task of writing and enforcing the new conflict-of-interest policy has fallen to Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, who was himself a lobbyist until he took a leave of absence from his firm, Davis Manafort, two years ago. . . . Another senior McCain campaign aide who has lobbied on behalf of foreign governments over the past seven years is Randy Scheunemann, the chief foreign policy adviser. Over the past several years, Mr. Scheunemann met several times with Mr. McCain to discuss his clients’ interests. . . . The campaign’s new policy could affect people at all levels of the McCain operation. Wayne Berman, the campaign’s deputy finance chairman, has lobbied for the governments of Cyprus and Trinidad and Tobago, along with many other corporate clients. Christian Ferry, who is a lobbyist for Mr. Davis’s firm, is Mr. McCain’s deputy campaign manager. Susan Nelson, the finance director of the campaign, was as recently as last year a registered lobbyist for the Loeffler Group, for companies, including AT&T that have had business before Mr. McCain on the Commerce Committee. John Green, who has been reported to be coordinating the campaign’s efforts with congressional Republicans, is registered as a lobbyist for Ogilvy Government Relations, Mr. Berman’s firm. Carlos Bonilla, described by the McCain Web site as an economic adviser, is also a registered lobbyist. In Washington, an entire establishment cycles between campaign work in the even numbered years and lobbying in the odd — a combination pioneered by Charlie Black, who is now serving as a senior adviser to Mr. McCain. The reason McCain & Co. are willing to tolerate this bloodletting among his top staff now is because they know it's better to suffer damage in May than in August or October. By the same token, though, it's important for Obama's campaign to make sure they maximize the pain the McCainiacs feel. The earlier and more vividly they nail down the narrative of McCain as a hypocritical Washington, D.C. blowhard, the better. By Swopa May 18 2008 - 11:45pm  The bold decision by Barack Obama's campaign to expand its appeal to working-class voters by changing its slogan from "Change You Can Believe In" to "Free Beer" drew immediate results in Portland, OR today. (Photo by Chris Carlson of the Associated Press, via the New York Times.) By Swopa May 17 2008 - 12:28pm  (Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki with a translator in Baghdad, via Agence France Presse.) By Swopa May 15 2008 - 5:41pm  Around the blogs today, there's a good deal of commentary, consternation, and near-confusion over the hallucinatory vision laid out today (and already memorialized in an online ad) by Mr. Double-Talk Express, John McCain, today: By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role. In my periodic missives on political framing, one of the themes I've explored is the GOP effort to maintain its perceived position (as George Lakoff has famously identified) as the daddy party. McCain's speech is an attempt to reach those voters who, consciously or not, would prefer to be ruled than governed -- to elect not a representative, but a supreme authority whom we need only to obey. The implicit message is that if we elect McCain as our national father figure, the goals he describes will come about by sheer force of his determination, with no further thought or effort on our part. As I wrote more than two years ago, the rhetorical strategy is to "Remind everyone that they're the strong daddy, and as long as they're in charge, the children (also known as us) shouldn't waste time second-guessing about what they're doing." Of course, I wrote that about our current president, making this stylistic choice another way that -- surprise! -- McCain is turning out to be just a would-be extended version of George Bush. What to do about it? Well, since this is such a timeworn GOP approach, I've written about that, too, here in early 2007: The absurdity of such spin after all this time shows us what the antidotes are: facing reality, appropriate derision of those who would rather live in a fantasy... and, above all, communicating to the broader public that they -- we -- are fully equipped to judge reality and determine the best response to it, rather than waiting for some Wizard of Oz-like daddy to tell us what to believe. (Cross-posted at Firedoglake.) By Swopa May 12 2008 - 9:24am   The New York Times reported over the weekend from Baghdad: The Iraqi government and leaders of the movement of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Saturday to a truce, brokered with help from Iran, that would end more than a month of bloody fighting in the vast, crowded Sadr City section of Baghdad. . . . The deal would allow the sides to pull back from what was becoming a messy and unpopular showdown in the months leading up to crucial provincial elections. It is not clear who won, how long it would take for the truce to take effect or how long it would hold. But at least for now it would end the warfare among Shiite factions. . . . The decision to negotiate a cease-fire came as both parties appeared to realize that they were losing ground. Civilians in Sadr City blame both sides for their suffering. The Iraqi government has done little to ease the crisis and allow medical and other aid to reach people. There has been almost no effort to repair the shattered neighborhood, where burned-out cars and piles of bricks from bomb-damaged houses are common sights.. For the Shiite militias, losses have been rising as well. They are suffering more casualties and are also being blamed for the deaths of some civilians, who frequently bear the brunt of the gun battles. For the Team (some-)Shiites government, you had the awful spectacle of intentionally inflicting carnage on one of your own major cities. . . . For the Sadrists, as proud as they may be of their defiant stand, it does them little good to be seen as wanting to draw the government (no matter how clumsy and corrupt it might be) into a civil war. That's the box Mookie is in... to maintain his popular political support, he needs to restrict himself to being a political actor. But if he does, the government (and the Americans) will use their official military leverage to whittle away at his ability to act politically. As for the box the rest of Iraq is in, this plaintive Washington Post story today puts it well: [Emad T.] Yousif enjoyed some personal prosperity and a whispered, furtive liberty under the Baathist regime [of Saddam Hussein], always striving to avoid any undue attention from the vast intelligence apparatus that helped keep Hussein in power. Balding, oval-faced, eyes slightly downcast, Yousif played the gray man well. Five years into the U.S. effort to remake his country, Yousif, now 53, plays that role still. If the essence of freedom is the opportunity to assert oneself, Iraq has a long way to go. Now as then, Iraqis who want to survive shrink back into themselves, lie low, let attention find someone else. . . . Material ostentation draws kidnappers, political engagement invites assassination, and time spent outside the seeming safety of four walls carries the risk of being caught in the middle of horrific violence. . . . The chaotic aftermath of an invasion intended, in part, to promote democracy has convinced Yousif to stay as far away as possible from power: "We are people not involved in hot issues, which is politics or religion or whatever it is. We are normal, neutral people. I believe most of Iraq is like this. And we got experience from the old regime how we can manage ourselves." By Swopa May 10 2008 - 5:18pm An even more-random-than-usual hodgepodge of links found while updating the Needlenose blogroll for the forthcoming WordPress version of the site: -- Fafblog on the pieing of Thomas Friedman: "Fafblog would like to Officially Condemn this wanton and aggressive misuse of pie, almost as much as we'd like to Officially Condemn how much we enjoyed it." -- Brian Beutler passes along a photo of a bar in Italy with (I hope) an unclear grasp on what the Ku Klux Klan is. -- Via Chris Andersen, did you ever notice the "Garfield" comic strip's dark, Beckett-like undercurrents? Well, it helps if you remove Garfield:  -- The King of Zembla reports on the quiet evisceration of the GI Bill, underscoring an important GOP philosophical tenet: "Government programs that work must be watered down, undermined, or dismantled altogether, lest citizens draw the naive and dangerous conclusion that government programs can work." -- Former Pennsylvania resident Dick Destiny on "codgers and uneducated for Clinton" ("Barack Obama had it right when he pegged small-town Pennsyltuckians. They just didn't like hearing it. They're poorer than the average, less educated, and they don't like those who tell them so in any form. Like many Americans, they can't take criticism."), as well as Obama Girl's racist hometown and "Republicrat barflies" ("white men who turn into Republicans the instant they find a candidate on the other side of the fence who seems like a strong and manly daddy-figure"). By Swopa May 9 2008 - 1:15pm An inadvertently revealing moment -- though revealing of what, I'm not sure -- from the Associated Press today: Perhaps Barack Obama's competitive juices need new outlets now that he has expanded his lead over Democratic presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. On a five-hour flight from Washington to Oregon late Thursday, the Illinois senator came to the back of his charter plane for a spirited word game against reporters . . . In "Taboo," a player under time constraints must prompt teammates to guess words or names without using obvious hints. For instance, in giving clues for "equator," the player is penalized if he says "Earth,""center" or "line." . . . When Obama was giving clues, he ventured: "Thomas Jefferson called for it once in a while." Seeing the blank looks, he admitted, "that's too obscure." He then tried, "the Beatles did a song about it," and a teammate correctly answered, "Revolution." By Swopa May 8 2008 - 4:16pm  (Image via The Phoenix.) On the same day that $100 million-plus heiress/candidate spouse Cindy McCain says, "How about never? Is never a good time for you?" with regard to when she'll release her tax returns, the Associated Press profiles the most fearsome financial powerhouse of the 2008 election: Kriss Riggs isn't one to spend her money on politicians. "Even the place you can donate a dollar on your taxes, I refuse to do it," says the 60-year-old photographer from Blue River, Ore. Likewise for Kate Schwartz, a 24-year-old marketing expert from Chicago. Past elections, she says, always seemed far removed from young people. "A lot of people felt like it wasn't happening in my demographic," Schwartz said. Not this time. Riggs and Schwartz are foot soldiers in Barack Obama's 1.5-million-strong army of campaign contributors. Dozens of Associated Press interviews with donors, and an AP financial analysis show how contributions that make only a soft ca-ching by themselves, arriving in increments of $10, $15 and $50, have collectively swelled into a financial roar that has helped propel Obama toward the Democratic president nomination. Altogether, Obama's campaign has taken in an unprecedented $226 million, most of it contributed online. His donor base is larger than the one the Democratic National Committee had for the 2000 election. These are hardly political fat cats. Ninety percent of his donors give $100 or less, and 41 percent have given $25 or less, according to the Obama campaign. Then he can add, "If John McCain wants to accuse me of being beholden to the nearly 2 million Americans of all backgrounds who have donated money to my campaign, mostly in amounts ranging from 10 to 100 dollars, my answer is... yes! I'm indebted to them, and those are the people whose interests I'll serve as President." Go for it, John... I dare you. (Cross-posted at Firedoglake.) By Swopa May 6 2008 - 11:23pm  Looks like she's waving goodbye... In the wake of the primary election results in Indiana and North Carolina -- a barely discernible win in the former, and a substantial defeat in the latter -- Hillary Clinton has reportedly cancelled all public appearances tomorrow, and David Niewert writes at Firedoglake about her "victory" speech: She vowed to keep fighting on. Florida and Michigan and all that. But it sure sounded, and looked, and felt like a concession speech. The thank-yous. Bill crying (at least it looked like it from certain shots). The resigned tone. She certainly didn't sound like someone who was fighting any longer. That last item may be the clearest indicator that we won't have Clinton to kick around much longer. You may recall her well-publicized dip into her and Bill's private finances back in January, and it always made me wonder if part of her motivation for staying in the race was to recoup her "investment." Seen in that light, the most damaging thing about the IN/NC returns isn't that she can't spin the media or superdelegates on a plausible path to the nomination; it's that she can't drum up the kind of fundraising spike her victories in Ohio and Pennsylvania brought. And so, having gotten back as close to even as she's going to get, now might be a good time to withdraw rather than go back to running on her own dime. Update: Okay, so maybe she's been running on her own dime again for a while. And maybe she's not shutting down her campaign totally, and not withdrawing just yet. But at some point you've got to figure Chelsea will step in and tell her mom to stop spending her inheritance. By Swopa May 5 2008 - 8:12pm One advantage of not posting much lately about the long-running Democratic nomination race is that I don't share the apparent hysteria its continuation has induced in other writers. Consider this freak-out headline from the most popular story on the Huffington Post today: Clinton Camp Says It Will Use The Nuclear Option Hillary Clinton's campaign has a secret weapon to build its delegate count, but her top strategists say privately that any attempt to deploy it would require a sharp (and by no means inevitable) shift in the political climate within Democratic circles by the end of this month. With at least 50 percent of the Democratic Party's 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee committed to Clinton, her backers could -- when the committee meets at the end of this month -- try to ram through a decision to seat the disputed 210-member Florida and 156-member Michigan delegations. Such a decision would give Clinton an estimated 55 or more delegates than Obama, according to Clinton campaign operatives. The Obama campaign has declined to give an estimate. Using the Rules and Bylaws Committee to force the seating of two pro-Hillary delegations would provoke a massive outcry from Obama forces. Such a strategy would, additionally, face at least two other major hurdles, and could only be attempted, according to sources in the Clinton camp, under specific circumstances: First, this coming Tuesday, Clinton would have to win Indiana and lose North Carolina by a very small margin - or better yet, win the Tar Heel state. She would also have to demonstrate continued strength in the contests before May 31. Second, and equally important, her argument that she is a better general election candidate than Obama -- that he has major weaknesses which have only been recently revealed -- would have to rapidly gain traction, not only within the media, where she has experienced some success, but within the broad activist ranks of the Democratic Party. . . . the balance of power will be held by delegates appointed by DNC chair Howard Dean. For the scenario to work, then, Dean would have to be convinced of Clinton's superior viability in the general election, and that she has a strong chance of defeating McCain next November. As I wrote in a comment two months ago, "The purpose of her staying in... isn't to try to steal the nomination through a brokered convention. It's to hang around just in case those photos of Obama having sex with a goat become public -- i.e., some sort of scandal/meltdown that causes a genuine buyer's-remorse situation." I don't foresee a meltdown like that happening, but I also accept that this is the closest primary contest of my lifetime, so I don't begrudge Clinton her right to hang around just in case. That said, I'm not a fan of some of the tactics Hillary & Co. have used in trying to stay afloat, but let's keep things in perspective. First, as anyone who's been watching the NBA playoffs (or the NCAA tournament earlier) knows, a team that's losing in the final minutes is going to take some seemingly unwise gambles -- committing fouls to prolong the game, etc. And as far as I can tell, nothing Team Clinton has launched at Obama has been as hard-hitting as this ad from last fall, which was by John Edwards against Hillary... and which, in fact, she never fully recovered from. (Howard Dean rightly commented that even Clinton's famous "3 A.M." ad pales in comparison with the treatment he got in 2003-04.) So it's hard for me to buy the caricature of Clinton as a singularly vicious and ruthless candidate who will stop at nothing to win the nomination. If Obama's victory is as inevitable as his supporters claim -- and, in fact, I think it is -- then they should stop freaking out over the imagined schemes of an opponent they insist is irrelevant. Because as long as Barack stays focused on the ultimate goal and doesn't get rattled, Clinton will be irrelevant soon enough... and her last-ditch aggressiveness will have provided useful practice for the real fight to come.  |
 If Dean Broder, who has been covering Washington since 1820, can’t sit through a 45 minute speech on energy policy, and the press on Air Force One would rather watch King Kong than the Hayden hearings, while they devote their time and resources to a long 50-source article about how often the Clintons are getting busy, then we have a problem, and it’s not something we’re going to clear up at a blogger ethics panel.
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