Being out of the country at the time of the Ashley Todd hoax, I missed the right wing frenzy. Their frothing at the mouth came back to bite them. It just goes to demonstrate how desperate the right wing is for a narrative to justify their lies. The bankruptcy of their ideas is now evident to the world. They need a thread and that's what they got with the Ashley Todd story. Unfortunately for them, that was all that it was. On this issue they were discredited. That includes James Moody of Fox Noise who develops the scripts to be followed by Fox on-air. The fact is that right wing ideas are the real hoax. RGN
The aftermath of Ashley Todd’s story
By Jay Bookman | Friday, October 24, 2008, 04:50 PM
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
McCain volunteer Ashley Todd has now confessed that she made up the story about being attacked by a large black man who carved the letter “B” into her cheek.
The young lady has issues, and I hope she gets the help she needs. End of story.
But let’s talk in a little more depth about the eagerness and even glee with which some in the right-wing blogosphere jumped on that story and immediately claimed it as proof of their worst nightmares coming true. So much of that story was unbelievable from the very beginning, yet certain people wanted to believe it so badly that they ignored all the warning signs and launched into full battle cry.
Andy McCarthy at the National Review’s Corner responded with a post so embarrassing he has now taken it down so nobody can see it.
Dan Riehl at riehlworldview.com posted under the headline “Thugs for change,” claiming that “Obama’s run his campaign just like a street thug out of Chicago. Now we get to see what some of his worst supporters are like.”
Noel Sheppard at newsbusters.org chastized AP for daring to be skeptical of the initial report. Most of all, he wanted to know why the AP didn’t report that the alleged perp was black. How dare they exclude a detail that had no bearing whatsoever on the alleged crime!!
Josh Painter at redstate.com blamed the attack on Barack Obama, suggesting an “Obama thugocracy” was coming: When Obama “urged his supporters to get in their face, did it not occur to him that some of his more deranged followers might take him literally?” Painter asked.
He was echoed by fellow redstater Erick Erickson, who wrote: “Hey! The dude was just doing what The One asked him to. Full pardon on January 21st.”
At Atlas Shugs, they posted the woman’s photo and called it “the new face of the Republican Party.”
“Shame on those that doubted this poor girl,” the post read. “Always ready to jump on the side of the leftists and thugs. ugh. Americans, I implore you to get off your asses and save this country from the radical left coup on the White House, Senate and House…. Perhaps the Obots misunderstood Obama urging his followers to Get In Their Face and GET IN THEIR FACES!” They got the advanced course of Camp Obama to cut up their faces.”
But perhaps the most interesting response came from John Moody, executive vice president at Fox News:
“If Ms. Todd’s allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee,” Moody wrote. “If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”
Now, that is utter nonsense on two counts. First, while the incident did indeed turn out to be a hoax, it has in no way linked McCain to racebaiting and will have no impact whatsoever on the outcome of this race.
But Moody’s claim that Obama supporters might have revisited their position if the story were true is more intriguing, and more revealing as well. Moody claims that under those circumstances, people might suddenly feel they know less about Obama and thus change their vote. But what is the logical trail between those two thoughts?
Such an attack would tell people absolutely nothing about Obama.
The real explanation lies in the answer that Moody rejects: racism. A lot of white Americans voting for Obama have had to overcome various degrees of racism to get themselves to that point. That doesn’t make them bad people; to the contrary, they’re thinking things through, and that’s great.
However, for many of those people, an attack of the sort described by Ashley Todd would heighten those internal, emotional obstacles to voting for Obama. That’s precisely why some on the right — with notable exceptions such as Michelle Malkin, a person I do not ordinarily respect much — were so quick to try to make it a huge deal.
They ought to be ashamed.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Is Barack's Story an American Story???
Below Roger Cohen paints a very interesting picture of Barack Obama and his story. He begins by testing Barack Obama’s assertion that “in no other country on earth is my story possible.” Having just returned from South Africa, one wonders if Nelson Mandela, a black man, felt the same way when he became president of a white supremacist capitalist nation? While there may be some parallels, Nelson Mandela’s presidency was to quell a more bloody transition in a nation in which blacks are 90% of the population. Though having a white supremacist past, the United States has a very different history with blacks as a gross minority. To have a majority white nation with such strong ties to a white Europe elect a black man president is unique. Nowhere else could this happen. As Cohen notes the election of Obama would be that of a man “…whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation...toward building change….” To the extent that is reality, Barack’s story is a new American story and represents a new chapter in American history. RGN
October 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
American Stories
By ROGER COHEN
Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.
Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.
Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.
Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.
It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.
What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.
I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.
But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.
Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”
Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.
Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.
October 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
American Stories
By ROGER COHEN
Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.
Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.
Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.
Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.
It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.
What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.
I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.
But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.
Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”
Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.
Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
More Than Bradley????
“The Bradley Effect?” This article may partially explain the so-called “Bradley Effect.” The study presents data about the so-called racial bias that Barack is up against. However, as Barack said to John Stewart on the “Daily Show,” it’s possible that many whites did not get the memo. RGN
October 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
What? Me Biased?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.
The scholars used a common research technique, the implicit association test, to measure whether people regarded Mr. Obama and other candidates as more foreign or more American. They found that research subjects — particularly when primed to think of Mr. Obama as a black candidate — subconsciously considered him less American than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Indeed, the study found that the research subjects — Californian college students, many of them Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama — unconsciously perceived him as less American even than the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It’s not that any of them actually believed Mr. Obama to be foreign. But the implicit association test measured the way the unconscious mind works, and in following instructions to sort images rapidly, the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American. This result mattered: The more difficulty a person had in classifying Mr. Obama as American, the less likely that person was to support Mr. Obama.
It’s easy to be skeptical of such research, so test for your own unconscious biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo or at http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect.
Race is a controversial, emotional subject in America, particularly in the context of this campaign. Many Obama supporters believe that their candidate would be further ahead if it were not for racism, while many McCain supporters resent the insinuations and believe that if Mr. Obama were white, he wouldn’t even be considered for the presidency.
Yet with race an undercurrent in the national debate, that also makes this a teachable moment. Partly that’s because of new findings both in neurology, using brain scans to understand how we respond to people of different races, and social psychology, examining the gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate.
Incidentally, such discrimination is not only racial. We also have unconscious biases against the elderly and against women seeking powerful positions — biases that affect the Republican ticket.
Some scholars link racial attitudes to a benefit in evolutionary times from an ability to form snap judgments about who is a likely friend and foe. There may have been an evolutionary advantage in recognizing instantaneously whether a stranger was from one’s own tribe or from an enemy tribe. There’s some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look “different.”
Yet our biases are probably largely cultural. One reason to think that is that many African-Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias. All told, considerable evidence suggests that while the vast majority of Americans truly believe in equality and aspire to equal opportunity for all, our minds aren’t as egalitarian as we think they are.
“To me, this study really reveals this gap between our minds and our ideals,” said Thierry Devos, a professor at San Diego State University who conducted the research on Mr. Obama, along with Debbie Ma of the University of Chicago. “Equality is very much linked to ideas of American identity, but it’s hard to live up to these ideas. Even somebody like Barack Obama, who may be about to become president — we have a hard time seeing him as American.”
A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian-Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”
One might argue that Mr. Obama registers as foreign in our minds because he does have overseas family connections, such as his father’s Kenyan ancestry. But similar experiments have found the same outcome with famous African-American sports figures.
Moreover, Professor Devos found that when participants in the latest study were told to focus on the age of each candidate, or on the political party of each candidate, then Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were perceived as equally American. It was only when people were prompted to focus on skin color and to see Mr. Obama as black that he was perceived as foreign.
This 2008 election is a milestone and may put a black man in the White House. That creates an opportunity for an adult conversation about the murky complexities of race, in part because there’s evidence that when people become aware of their unconscious biases, they can overcome them.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
October 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
What? Me Biased?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.
The scholars used a common research technique, the implicit association test, to measure whether people regarded Mr. Obama and other candidates as more foreign or more American. They found that research subjects — particularly when primed to think of Mr. Obama as a black candidate — subconsciously considered him less American than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Indeed, the study found that the research subjects — Californian college students, many of them Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama — unconsciously perceived him as less American even than the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It’s not that any of them actually believed Mr. Obama to be foreign. But the implicit association test measured the way the unconscious mind works, and in following instructions to sort images rapidly, the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American. This result mattered: The more difficulty a person had in classifying Mr. Obama as American, the less likely that person was to support Mr. Obama.
It’s easy to be skeptical of such research, so test for your own unconscious biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo or at http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect.
Race is a controversial, emotional subject in America, particularly in the context of this campaign. Many Obama supporters believe that their candidate would be further ahead if it were not for racism, while many McCain supporters resent the insinuations and believe that if Mr. Obama were white, he wouldn’t even be considered for the presidency.
Yet with race an undercurrent in the national debate, that also makes this a teachable moment. Partly that’s because of new findings both in neurology, using brain scans to understand how we respond to people of different races, and social psychology, examining the gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate.
Incidentally, such discrimination is not only racial. We also have unconscious biases against the elderly and against women seeking powerful positions — biases that affect the Republican ticket.
Some scholars link racial attitudes to a benefit in evolutionary times from an ability to form snap judgments about who is a likely friend and foe. There may have been an evolutionary advantage in recognizing instantaneously whether a stranger was from one’s own tribe or from an enemy tribe. There’s some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look “different.”
Yet our biases are probably largely cultural. One reason to think that is that many African-Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias. All told, considerable evidence suggests that while the vast majority of Americans truly believe in equality and aspire to equal opportunity for all, our minds aren’t as egalitarian as we think they are.
“To me, this study really reveals this gap between our minds and our ideals,” said Thierry Devos, a professor at San Diego State University who conducted the research on Mr. Obama, along with Debbie Ma of the University of Chicago. “Equality is very much linked to ideas of American identity, but it’s hard to live up to these ideas. Even somebody like Barack Obama, who may be about to become president — we have a hard time seeing him as American.”
A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian-Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”
One might argue that Mr. Obama registers as foreign in our minds because he does have overseas family connections, such as his father’s Kenyan ancestry. But similar experiments have found the same outcome with famous African-American sports figures.
Moreover, Professor Devos found that when participants in the latest study were told to focus on the age of each candidate, or on the political party of each candidate, then Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were perceived as equally American. It was only when people were prompted to focus on skin color and to see Mr. Obama as black that he was perceived as foreign.
This 2008 election is a milestone and may put a black man in the White House. That creates an opportunity for an adult conversation about the murky complexities of race, in part because there’s evidence that when people become aware of their unconscious biases, they can overcome them.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Out Mavericking the Maverick: A Maureen Dowd Screenplay
It takes Maureen to put Sarah into perspective. The play below. RGN
October 29, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
For Your Consideration
By MAUREEN DOWD
THE MAVERICK WEARS PRADA
Screenplay by
Maureen Dowd
Revised third draft
© Oct. 29, 2008
FADE IN:
INT. A HOTEL SUITE — in the middle of the day in the middle of Ohio.
NICOLLE WALLACE, a slender, preppie-looking blonde wearing a string of pearls is pacing and frantically thumbing her BlackBerry. She is a top McCain adviser under STEVE SCHMIDT who has been seconded to SARAH PALIN. On the TV, MSNBC’s DAVID SHUSTER is asking ANNE KORNBLUT about rumors that PALIN has gone AWOL after McCain advisers anonymously labeled her a rogue “diva” and a “whack job.”
NICOLLE
(hissing)
How’d she get away?
TRACEY SCHMITT, another blonde sorority type in pearls, also a Bush person who became a McCain person who was then sent over to manage PALIN as her press secretary, sits slumped in a chair, dejectedly checking her BlackBerry messages.
How the heck should I know? She told me she was going to the bathroom to change out of the Jimmy Choos into something more Target for the Joe the Plumber “They’re Not Smears, They’re Just Facts” Bus Tour. She never came back. I called Todd. He’s not picking up.
NICOLLE
Steve’s freaking out. You know how he is about message discipline, much less completely losing a candidate. He’s got enough on his plate scaring the nursing-home Jews in Florida and painting Obama as a Palestinian Marxist Madrassa Child. Maybe all of those dudes painting their chests for Sarah and screaming “2012!” have her looking past the old man. Steve says he will annihilate her if she sabotages this campaign to get started on the next one, or if she plants negative stories about me — I mean McCain — with the base. Are the clothes gone from the belly of the plane?
TRACEY
It’s not like we were ever gonna return them anyway.
NICOLLE
Think like a diva. Where would you go rogue?
TRACEY
Sean Hannity’s pocket. Could he pant over her more? Or maybe she’s hiding in Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s dressing room at “The View.”
NICOLLE
She’s probably at The Weekly Standard, plotting her shining city on the tundra with Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol. I can’t believe Barnes called me a coward because I tried to update that $30 Wasilla beehive that made her look like the girlfriend in an Elvis movie and upgrade her from pleather to leather. And besides, she’s not going to find real Americans at Saks and Neiman’s. She’s got to go to Barneys and Armani for that.
TRACEY
Between us, Nicolle, she doesn’t look $150,000 different. Maybe we should have spent that money on getting Henry Kissinger to put on his snowshoes and best leer and tutor her.
NICOLLE
Look, Tracey, maybe Sarah doesn’t know who Berlusconi is, but she does know who Valentino is. She saw those labels. She knew we were being sartorial socialists and spreading the wealth to Neiman’s and Saks. She liked being pampered like a movie star. We should have learned from W. If you can keep a war off budget, why can’t you keep a wardrobe off budget? I told the press if someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is lie there.
TRACEY
That’ll be the day.
NICOLLE
I’ll be glad when this blind date from hell is over and I can get away from the dysfunctional Palin clan and back to walking my dog, Lily, in Central Park with my pinko liberal friends. I knew Katie would be brutal, but thank God I arranged that interview because now I can go back to my gig as a political analyst at CBS.
TRACEY
I’m gonna miss Todd. He’s hot.
NICOLLE
I won’t miss him or his 20 calls a day playing stage dad. He’s probably the one who masterminded her breakout.
(Her BlackBerry rings to the tune of “Eye of the Tiger.”)
Uh-oh, it’s Steve.
(She listens and then hangs up.)
TRACEY
(sardonically)
Does McCain know the maverick’s maverick has gone all mavericky on him?
NICOLLE
McCain is calling off the search.
TRACEY
(shocked)
Huh?
NICOLLE
He’s fed up with her getting bigger crowds and contradicting his message. He’s fed up with her interrupting him on TV interviews and taking them over. He’s fed up with her drilling him on drilling. He’s fed up with never being able to discuss anything with her, like the latest violence in the Congo. He’s weirded out by the way she keeps trying to explain the Rapture to him. His exact words to Steve were: “For my End of Days, I’d prefer to finish the race with Lieberman.” So forget Sarah. Let’s find Joe.
TRACEY
You betcha!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Death of the Politics of Racial Division????
Bob Herbert says the days of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove are over. I have long argued that this election is a referendum on white nationalism and it will be defeated. Barack Obama has insisted that America try a new kind of politics and the body politic has been receptive. On the eve of an overwhelming victory over the old politics of conservatism and division, there is every reason to believe that on Tuesday November 4, 2008 we can begin to address the real problems in our society. The continuing widening inequality gap can begin to be abated. Notions of justice can again be what our government stands for. The “Reagan Revolution” was built on lies and racism. The Reagan Revolution is dead!!! At this writing, I am in South Africa and reminded that Reagan and Cheney opposed the sanctions to bring down that dreadful Apartheid regime. As stated by the former prisoners of Robben Island and now the prisons’ tour guides, the role of the U.S. was key to ending that racist police state. The racist conservatives in America supported those fascists. Though still troubled, South Africa now has a chance for the new beginning and they are trying hard to bring about a non-racist economic justice. They, like the U.S., have a long way to go, but on the road they are. As a white South African said to me this morning on the elevator, “It is about time America had an African American president.” The enthusiasm and hope that the South Africans, black and white, have for an Obama presidency cannot be overstated. Our futures are intertwined and the defeat of the ideas and tactics of the Karl Roves, Lee Atwater and John McCain will provide that “hope” for a “change we need.” It is the Barack Obama campaign that offers hope for a new America and a new world. RGN
October 28, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
A Choice and an Echo
By BOB HERBERT
It seems to have taken forever (the seasons have changed, and changed and changed again), but this long presidential campaign is finally coming to an end. In January, with snow blanketing the trail in Iowa and New Hampshire, I wrote of the Barack Obama phenomenon: “Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here.”
I didn’t mean that Senator Obama would win the election. He still seemed like a long shot to me. But it was clear that the message, style and strategy of his campaign pointed to a new direction for American politics, and that a new generation of voters — younger, smarter, more diverse, more open-minded — was anxious to follow his lead.
I remember talking with a voter named Debra Gable, who had driven from central Vermont to attend an Obama rally in Derry, N.H. “I dislike politics,” she told me, “because we focus on our differences even though we have so many more commonalities. That’s what I think I’m hearing from Obama, so I want to see how he is in person.”
Ms. Gable had not made up her mind, and the other candidate she was seriously considering — in a Republican field that was still wide open — was John McCain.
This election is hardly over, despite the impulse of the pundits to write the McCain campaign’s obituary. But Senator McCain has diminished his chances of winning the presidency in many ways, the most important of which was his failure to grasp the most significant new trend in American politics.
With the country facing enormous problems (even before the meltdown of the credit and financial markets in recent months), the voters wanted more substance from their candidates. They wanted a greater sense of maturity and a more civil approach to campaigning. They were tired of the politics of personal destruction and the playbook that counseled “attack, attack, attack.”
Senator Obama was perfectly suited to this new approach. He told the crowd that trekked through the cold and snow to hear his victory speech at the Iowa caucuses:
“You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington. To end the political strategy that’s been all about division, and instead make it about addition. To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states.”
John McCain didn’t get it. He seemed as baffled by the new politics as an Al Jolson aficionado trying to make sense of the Beatles.
He answered the desire for a higher tone in politics with ads that likened Senator Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and with attacks that questioned Mr. Obama’s patriotism, blamed him for high gasoline prices and all-but-accused him of being a socialist.
Mr. Obama, said Mr. McCain, would convert the Internal Revenue Service into “a giant welfare agency.”
Get it?
Whether this is admirable or honorable is not the question here. In the current political and economic atmosphere, it seems very much like a roadmap to defeat.
The heyday of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is over. Yet Senator McCain handed the reins of his campaign to Rove’s worshipful acolytes. With the nation in a high state of anxiety over the conflagration in the credit and financial markets, Senator McCain traveled the country ranting Rovelike about Bill Ayers, trying to instill a bogus belief that the onetime ’60s radical and Senator Obama were good buddies and perhaps involved in some nefarious doings together. Senator Obama was about 8 years old when Mr. Ayers was engaged in his nefarious doings.
It was the classic fear card that the Republicans have played to such brilliant effect for years. But times have changed. (Lately Senator McCain has been obsessively invoking the name of “Joe the Plumber” at his campaign appearances, as if that might be the phrase that finally sways the electorate in a way that the Bill Ayers mantra did not.)
Senator Hillary Clinton helped define the new political atmosphere with her own historic run for the White House. Senator McCain, demonstrating again his tone-deafness to the new reality, tried to capitalize on Mrs. Clinton’s remarkable achievement by cynically selecting Sarah Palin, the anti-Hillary, as his running mate.
Mr. McCain must never have noticed that the public turned overwhelmingly against the Bush administration because of its repeatedly demonstrated incompetence. Now here is Senator McCain, in the midst of a national crisis, with a running mate who is demonstrably incompetent to serve the nation as its president.
Ms. Palin is a walking affront to the many Republican women (not to mention women in general) who are, in fact, qualified to hold the highest office in the land.
John McCain could have traveled a higher road. He chose not to. He bet instead on one last gasping triumph of the politics of the past.
The Real Sickness of White Supremacy..
It is unfortunate to have to report such bizarre happenings, but this report on the plot is consistent with what we know the be an integral aspect of white supremacy. The sickness of these people cannot be overstated. These are the misanthropes of the world. Their history is long and the depths of their deranged mentality has played a major role in our history. At this writing I am in Cape Town, South Africa. Just to think that people such as these have such a long history, even to the point having state power in the past, means that we must be vigilant to stamping out these opponents of justice and democracy. RGN
ATF: Plot to kill Obama is foiled
Two Neo-Nazis held in Tennessee; allegedly also planned to kill dozens
The Associated Press
updated 7:04 p.m. ET, Mon., Oct. 27, 2008
WASHINGTON - Law enforcement agents have broken up a plot by two neo-Nazi skinheads to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 88 black people, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday.
In court records unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn., federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school in a murder spree that was to begin in Tennessee. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.
Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of ATF's Nashville field office, said the two men planned to kill 88 African Americans, including 14 by beheading. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.
The men also sought to go on a national killing spree after the Tennessee murders, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.
"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."
*No immediate comment
*An Obama spokeswoman traveling with the senator in Pennsylvania had no immediate comment.
The men, Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., are being held without bond. Agents seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men when they were arrested. Authorities alleged the two men were preparing to break into a gun shop to steal more.
The two men were arrested Oct. 22 by the Crockett County, Tenn., Sheriff's Office. "Once we arrested the defendants and suspected they had violated federal law, we immediately contacted federal authorities," said Crockett County Sheriff Troy Klyce.
Cowart and Schlesselman are charged with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms from a federally licensed gun dealer, and threatening a candidate for president.
The investigation is continuing, and more charges are possible, Cavanaugh said.
The court records say Cowart and Schlesselman also bought nylon rope and ski masks to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund their spree, during which they allegedly planned to go from state to state and kill people.
*Ram vehicle into Obama?
*For the Obama plot, the legal documents show, Cowart and Schlesselman "planned to drive their vehicle as fast as they could toward Obama shooting at him from the windows."
"Both individuals stated they would dress in all white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt," the court complaint states.
"Both individuals further stated they knew they would and were willing
to die during this attempt."
Cavanaugh said there's no evidence — so far — that others were willing to assist Cowart and Schlesselman with the plot.
He said authorities took the threats very seriously.
"They seemed determined to do it," Cavanaugh said. "Even if they were just to try it, it would be a trail of tears around the South."
The court documents say the two men met about a month ago on the Internet and found common ground in their shared "white power" and "skinhead" philosophy.
*14, 88 are skinhead symbols*
The numbers 14 and 88 are symbols in skinhead culture, referring to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two "8"s or "H"s stand for "Heil Hitler."
Helena-West Helena, on the Mississippi River in east Arkansas' Delta, is in one of the nation's poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living. Police Chief Fred Fielder said he had never heard of Schlesselman.
However, the reported threat of attacking a school filled with black students worried Fielder. Helena-West Helena, with a population of 12,200, is 66 percent black. "Predominantly black school, take your pick," he said.
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27405681/
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ATF: Plot to kill Obama is foiled
Two Neo-Nazis held in Tennessee; allegedly also planned to kill dozens
The Associated Press
updated 7:04 p.m. ET, Mon., Oct. 27, 2008
WASHINGTON - Law enforcement agents have broken up a plot by two neo-Nazi skinheads to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 88 black people, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said Monday.
In court records unsealed Monday in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn., federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school in a murder spree that was to begin in Tennessee. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.
Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of ATF's Nashville field office, said the two men planned to kill 88 African Americans, including 14 by beheading. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.
The men also sought to go on a national killing spree after the Tennessee murders, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.
"They said that would be their last, final act — that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."
*No immediate comment
*An Obama spokeswoman traveling with the senator in Pennsylvania had no immediate comment.
The men, Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., are being held without bond. Agents seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men when they were arrested. Authorities alleged the two men were preparing to break into a gun shop to steal more.
The two men were arrested Oct. 22 by the Crockett County, Tenn., Sheriff's Office. "Once we arrested the defendants and suspected they had violated federal law, we immediately contacted federal authorities," said Crockett County Sheriff Troy Klyce.
Cowart and Schlesselman are charged with possessing an unregistered firearm, conspiring to steal firearms from a federally licensed gun dealer, and threatening a candidate for president.
The investigation is continuing, and more charges are possible, Cavanaugh said.
The court records say Cowart and Schlesselman also bought nylon rope and ski masks to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund their spree, during which they allegedly planned to go from state to state and kill people.
*Ram vehicle into Obama?
*For the Obama plot, the legal documents show, Cowart and Schlesselman "planned to drive their vehicle as fast as they could toward Obama shooting at him from the windows."
"Both individuals stated they would dress in all white tuxedos and wear top hats during the assassination attempt," the court complaint states.
"Both individuals further stated they knew they would and were willing
to die during this attempt."
Cavanaugh said there's no evidence — so far — that others were willing to assist Cowart and Schlesselman with the plot.
He said authorities took the threats very seriously.
"They seemed determined to do it," Cavanaugh said. "Even if they were just to try it, it would be a trail of tears around the South."
The court documents say the two men met about a month ago on the Internet and found common ground in their shared "white power" and "skinhead" philosophy.
*14, 88 are skinhead symbols*
The numbers 14 and 88 are symbols in skinhead culture, referring to a 14-word phrase attributed to an imprisoned white supremacist: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H. Two "8"s or "H"s stand for "Heil Hitler."
Helena-West Helena, on the Mississippi River in east Arkansas' Delta, is in one of the nation's poorest regions, trailing even parts of Appalachia in its standard of living. Police Chief Fred Fielder said he had never heard of Schlesselman.
However, the reported threat of attacking a school filled with black students worried Fielder. Helena-West Helena, with a population of 12,200, is 66 percent black. "Predominantly black school, take your pick," he said.
© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27405681/
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© 2008 MSNBC.com
Monday, October 27, 2008
Delusions: McCain's Problem
Talk about delusions!!! McCain was confused when he picked Sarah Palin to be his VP running mate. Now he is confused about the political climate in this country. The Reagan Revolution is over! Thanks God! For McCain to guarantee victory shows that he is not in touch with the real world. Barack draws 100,000 in St. Louis a few weeks ago. Then he bests that in Denver. America is ready for “change we need.” Republicans have done so much harm to this nation that McCain is facing a historic defeat but cannot recognize an overwhelming defeat when it is staring him in the face. They get what they deserve. RGN
McCain guarantees victory
By: Mike Allen and Lisa Lerer
October 26, 2008 01:55 PM EST
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he can “guarantee” a win on Nov. 4 in a squeaker victory that won’t be clear until late that night.
McCain spoke amid signs of a tightening race, and reports of renewed determination among his staff, which is badly outgunned in both money and manpower.
“I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I'm going to win it,” McCain told interim "Meet" moderator Tom Brokaw. “We're going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We're going to win it, and it's going to be tight, and we're going to be up late.”
McCain was down just 5 points in the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Sunday, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) leading by 49 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in the daily tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points.
Reuters reported that Obama's lead has dropped over the last three days after hitting a high of 12 points on Thursday. Pollster John Zogby said: "Things are trending back for McCain. His numbers are rising and Obama's are dropping on a daily basis. There seems to be a direct correlation between this and McCain talking about the economy."
The Washington Post reported Sunday: "[I]nside the McCain campaign the mood remains one of gritty resolve. Top aides know they are behind, but they hold out hope and, like their candidate, stubbornly refuse to give up."
McCain told Brokaw in Waterloo, Iowa, that he feels "like Knute Rockne ... go out there and get one for the Gipper."
“We are very competitive in battleground states," McCain said. "Obviously, I choose to trust my senses as well as polls. The enthusiasm at almost all of our [events] is at a higher level than I've ever seen, and I've been in a lot of presidential campaigns, usually as the warm-up act. ... And I see intensity out there, and I see passion. So we're very competitive.”
McCain added: “We're going to have to just get out our vote, work hard over the next nine days, and make sure that people know that there'll be a better future. People are very worried now — very, very worried, and have every reason to be. I think it's all about who can assure a better future.”
On the endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, McCain said: "I'm disappointed in Gen. Powell, but I'm very, very happy to know that [I'm endorsed by] five former secretaries of states who I admire enormously.”
McCain defended Republican National Committee clothing purchases on behalf of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Politico revealed during the past week that the RNC spent $150,000 on designer outfits at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for the vice presidential nominee and members of her family.
"She lives a frugal life,” he said. “She and her family are not wealthy. She and her family were thrust into this and there was some — and some third of that money is given back. The rest will be donated to charity. ... She is a role model to millions and millions and millions of Americans."
McCain appeared in a gracious mood, saying to Brokaw at the end: "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you have never forgotten where you come from.”
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
McCain guarantees victory
By: Mike Allen and Lisa Lerer
October 26, 2008 01:55 PM EST
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he can “guarantee” a win on Nov. 4 in a squeaker victory that won’t be clear until late that night.
McCain spoke amid signs of a tightening race, and reports of renewed determination among his staff, which is badly outgunned in both money and manpower.
“I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I'm going to win it,” McCain told interim "Meet" moderator Tom Brokaw. “We're going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We're going to win it, and it's going to be tight, and we're going to be up late.”
McCain was down just 5 points in the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Sunday, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) leading by 49 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in the daily tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points.
Reuters reported that Obama's lead has dropped over the last three days after hitting a high of 12 points on Thursday. Pollster John Zogby said: "Things are trending back for McCain. His numbers are rising and Obama's are dropping on a daily basis. There seems to be a direct correlation between this and McCain talking about the economy."
The Washington Post reported Sunday: "[I]nside the McCain campaign the mood remains one of gritty resolve. Top aides know they are behind, but they hold out hope and, like their candidate, stubbornly refuse to give up."
McCain told Brokaw in Waterloo, Iowa, that he feels "like Knute Rockne ... go out there and get one for the Gipper."
“We are very competitive in battleground states," McCain said. "Obviously, I choose to trust my senses as well as polls. The enthusiasm at almost all of our [events] is at a higher level than I've ever seen, and I've been in a lot of presidential campaigns, usually as the warm-up act. ... And I see intensity out there, and I see passion. So we're very competitive.”
McCain added: “We're going to have to just get out our vote, work hard over the next nine days, and make sure that people know that there'll be a better future. People are very worried now — very, very worried, and have every reason to be. I think it's all about who can assure a better future.”
On the endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, McCain said: "I'm disappointed in Gen. Powell, but I'm very, very happy to know that [I'm endorsed by] five former secretaries of states who I admire enormously.”
McCain defended Republican National Committee clothing purchases on behalf of his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Politico revealed during the past week that the RNC spent $150,000 on designer outfits at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue for the vice presidential nominee and members of her family.
"She lives a frugal life,” he said. “She and her family are not wealthy. She and her family were thrust into this and there was some — and some third of that money is given back. The rest will be donated to charity. ... She is a role model to millions and millions and millions of Americans."
McCain appeared in a gracious mood, saying to Brokaw at the end: "I appreciate your many years of informing the American people. You've come a long way from South Dakota, but you have never forgotten where you come from.”
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
Friday, October 24, 2008
Barack Obama: America Will Have a New Face
October 23, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Rebranding the U.S. With Obama
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.
She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.
In his endorsement of Mr. Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.” That’s not because we crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.
In his endorsement, Mr. Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, I think it’ll electrify the world.” You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain in every single country — by four to one over all. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Mr. Obama, an African-American, would “fundamentally change” their perceptions of the United States.
Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: “Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania.”
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
“It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge
that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.
In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Op-Ed Columnist
Rebranding the U.S. With Obama
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.
She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.
In his endorsement of Mr. Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.” That’s not because we crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.
In his endorsement, Mr. Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, I think it’ll electrify the world.” You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain in every single country — by four to one over all. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Mr. Obama, an African-American, would “fundamentally change” their perceptions of the United States.
Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: “Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania.”
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
“It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge
that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.
In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.
Stolen Elections: Is the Past Prologue????
Amy Goodman exposes continuing election problems. In 2004 there were counties in Ohio in which Bush got more votes than there were voters. By interviewing Mark Crispin, the author of "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too," Democracy Now! provides some insights on what is happening now and the past as a warning that the Obama campaign needs to guard against in this election. Fortunately, Barack’s campaign has been so brilliant, the possibility of this election being stolen is lessened when compared to 2000 and 2004. Check out the details of the shenanigans and be forewarned. RGN
Early Voting Sees Reports of Voter Intimidation, Machine Malfunctions
Wednesday 22 October 2008
by: Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
A few days into early voting, reports of voting machine problems and intimidation at the polls are surfacing. (Photo: Remy de la Mauviniere / AP)
Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.
Just days after reports that six early voters in at least two West Virginia counties claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican, a couple in Nashville, Tennessee reported similar problems with paperless voting machines. In West Virginia, one voter said, "I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines."
In Tennessee, a filmmaker couple also had difficulties casting their vote for the Democratic candidate, the Brad Blog reports. They had to hit the Obama button several times before it actually registered, and in one case it momentarily flipped from Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. Patricia Earnhardt said, "The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button." The couple in Nashville were using machines made by the same company as those in the counties in West Virginia-by Election Systems and Software.
Meanwhile, there are reports of long lines at early voting sites in several other states, including some counties in Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic who's been focused on voter problems and election fraud in this country. He's a professor at New York University, author of several books. Most recently he edited Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.
Mark Crispin Miller now joins us in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your concerns right now, Mark?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, you've referred to a couple of them already. We now see a burst of vote flipping by machines, electronic voting machines in a couple of states. This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward to say, "I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up." So, clearly, this was a systematic programming decision by the people in charge of the machines, which in that case and this one is the Republican Party. We're also seeing systematic shortages of working voting machines in Democratic precincts only. This is also something that did not happen only in Ohio in 2004, but happened nationwide. That election was, in fact, stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I know because there's been an audit of the vote in eighteen counties of Ohio by a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips, who had his team literally scrutinize every single ballot that was warehoused in eighteen Ohio counties. They took over 30,000 digital photographs. This is not speculation, Amy. This is a meticulous, careful, specific and conclusive demonstration that John Kerry actually won some 200,000 votes in those eighteen counties only that were taken away from him. Bush's official victory margin, you may recall, was about 118,000. So there is no question about it. Ohio was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: When they-OK, so they have the pictures of all these-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Pictures, there's a CD with this book that you can-
AMY GOODMAN: But they have the pictures of the ballots.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Of the variously altered, mutilated ballots, yes. Ballots with stickers placed over the square that people had blacked in for Kerry/Edwards; somebody else blacks in Bush/Cheney. Thousands and thousands of ballots that were pre-marked before they were distributed, so that people would mark different boxes on them, and then they would be invalidated.
Even more chilling is the fact that after Phillips did his research, the boards of elections in fifty-five Ohio counties destroyed all or some of their ballots in defiance of a court order. So we have criminal behavior here of a kind of grand and systematic kind. But the point is-not to engage in what Sarah Palin calls finger-pointing backwards, the point here is to note that we're dealing with a consistent pattern of subversive behavior by the Republican Party since 2000 and extending all the way up to the present. What we're seeing now is an especially brazen and diverse range of dirty tricks and tactics that are being used both to suppress the vote and also to enable election fraud.
AMY GOODMAN: Ohio has been very much in the news this past week, not around the issue of voter suppression, but around the issue of fraudulent registration forms, the concern about them being handed in by the organization ACORN.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, the whole ACORN thing is a first-class propaganda drive. ACORN has done nothing wrong. ACORN has, however, been guilty of trying to register low-income citizens to vote. Because they've been in the sights of the Republican Party for several years now, they've always been extremely scrupulous about checking the registration forms that they garner from their volunteers.
You know, they pay people, basically, to register other voters. So, naturally, from time to time, some volunteer who wants the money will fill out a registration form, you know, with Mickey Mouse or the names of the Dallas Cowboys, something like that. Precisely because that is an ever-present possibility, the people at ACORN have always scrupulously checked the forms before submitting them.
And ten days ago, what they did was, in Las Vegas, their office in Las Vegas, they found a number of these suspicious forms, handed them over directly to the Secretary of State in Nevada, and his response was to turn around and say, "Aha! Here is evidence that you're conspiring to commit voter fraud." Now, that effort, that drive went from Nevada to Missouri to Ohio, and now we hear that the FBI is investigating ACORN.
The important point here, Amy, is that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Several studies have taken a close look at this and found that there really is no voter fraud of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films has put out a new short film about ACORN and the attacks against them. Let me play an excerpt.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
GOV. SARAH PALIN: John and I are calling on the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group and to do so immediately.
CARMEN ARIAS: These attacks on ACORN are part of a pattern of voter suppression that the GOP has been carrying on for a long time.
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The McCain campaign has now two camps. And one of them is already assuming that he's lost, and he's aiming for the post-election warfare in the Republican Party, and part of that is the ACORN strategy, which is trying to delegitimize the result in advance, if Obama were to win, by saying it was rigged by minority voters. That's what this is about.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Someone here keeps yelling "ACORN, ACORN." Now, let me just say to you, there are serious allegations of voter fraud in the battleground states across America. They must be investigated.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: Let's look at North Carolina. We turned in 28,000 applications in North Carolina, and there are investigations into four of them right now. Over 95 percent of the cards we turned in were error-free. So we're talking about an extremely small percentage of the overall 1.3 million cards collected. To suggest that this is some kind of widespread criminal conspiracy is just absurd.
MONTAGE OF NEWSCASTERS: ACORN. ACORN. ACORN-is a left-wing-radical-extremist community group.
CARMEN ARIAS: This is hardly the first time that these Rove-style tactics have been used to suppress low-income minorities.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2000.
GREG PALAST: Voters were being removed from the registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2004.
UNIDENTIFIED: Evidence has emerged that in the last presidential election the Republican Party organized efforts to suppress the votes of active-duty military, low-income and minority voters by challenging their registrations. The Republicans put in motion a plan to hold down the Democratic vote in key battleground states. Many are convinced that Republican officials broke the law.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: And they're doing it again right now.
CARMEN ARIAS: Suppressing the low-income minority voters can swing an entire
election. A handful of improperly filled-out voter registration cards cannot.
AMY GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a piece by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Professor Mark Crispin Miller?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The important point to get here is that the party that is itself engaging in disenfranchisement on a massive scale, the deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of arguably millions of Americans, is clouding the issue by accusing-essentially accusing its victims of doing the same thing. OK?
Voter fraud-I want to repeat this-is virtually nonexistent. There have been several academic studies of this notion of whether individuals actually stuffed ballot boxes or show up at polling places pretending to be somebody else. There's actually not a single known case of any such type of voter fraud being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. And yet, that notion of voter fraud is used as the pretext for taking steps that do demonstrably result in tens of thousands of people being unable to vote, you see? It's a really masterful strategy. And I only wish that the Democratic Party had all this time been aggressive in pointing out that the Republicans are the party engaged in disenfranchisement.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about a man named Stephen Spoonamore-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: -a prominent expert, supposedly, on computer fraud, and what he has to say. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University is our guest. His most recent book, Loser Take All. Who is Stephen Spoonamore?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and, most importantly, a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. That's his profession. He works for major banks. He works for foreign governments. He works for the Secret Service. Those are his clients.
He knows personally the principal players in Bush-Cheney's conspiracy to subvert our elections through electronic means since 2000, and he has named these principal players. Specifically, he has named a man named Mike Connell. Mike Connell, according to Spoonamore, is Karl Rove's computer guru. This is the guy who has helped Bush-Cheney fix election results through computers since Florida 2000, in Ohio in 2004, also in the stolen re-election of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama in 2002, also in the stolen re-election of Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, basically, they use a kind of architecture that's called Man in the Middle, and it involves shunting election returns data through a separate computer somewhere else. This is something that computer criminals do all the time with banks. Spoonamore explains that the Man in the Middle setup is extremely effective and basically undetectable as a way to change election results.
Now, the scariest thing is that Connell told Spoonamore that the reason why he has helped Bush-Cheney still these elections for the last eight years has been to save the babies. See? We have to understand that there's a very powerful component of religious fanaticism at work in the election fraud conspiracy. We saw a little bit of that in Greenswald's film, where Paul Weyrich was talking about how we don't want people voting.
AMY GOODMAN: The conservative activist.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, because the majority is a majority of unbelievers. They're pro-choice. They're corrupt. They're evil. They don't get it. It's therefore necessary to fix election results in order to prevent the unjust and the unrighteous from taking over.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, you keep saying the election was clearly stolen in 2004. This is not a widely held belief. Why do you think more information is not known about this?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Because the press and the Democratic Party have steadfastly refused simply to mention, much less discuss, the evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: You talked to John Kerry.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: I talked to John Kerry. In fact, the last time I was with you, I was here to talk about that conversation with him. On October 28th, 2005, we met. I gave him a copy of my book Fooled Again, and we discussed the last election, and he told me, with some vehemence, that he believed it was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio in 2004-and Ohio, key battleground state right now-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And we remember at Kenyon, for example, those long, long lines in 2004, people waiting for hours.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about the computer setup for 2004, explain further.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, what happened was, with the election results that were coming into Ken Blackwell's website, right, in real time-
AMY GOODMAN: The former Secretary of State of Ohio.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The former Secretary of State.
AMY GOODMAN: The former chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign there.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And co-chair of Bush-Cheney and a big-time election thief and an ardent theocrat, by the way. The election returns went basically from his website to another computer that was in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of Spoonamore and a guy with another private company, another evangelical. The data was shunted through that computer and then back to the Secretary of State's website.
Spoonamore says that this Man in the Middle setup has only one purpose, and that is fraud. There's no other reason to do it. And he believes that such a system is still in place in Ohio, it's in place in a number of other states. And the crucial fact to bear in mind here, since we're talking about John McCain attacking ACORN and so on, is that Mike Connell is now working for John McCain.
Now, on the strength of Spoonamore's testimony, right, it's driving a RICO lawsuit in Ohio. On the strength of his testimony, Connell has been subpoenaed. He was subpoenaed last week for a deposition, so that he can answer questions on the record, under oath, about what he's been up to. He and a bevy of Republican lawyers have been very, very vigorously fighting this subpoena, because, of course, they don't want him to testify 'til after Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, the Bradley Effect that is being discussed, explain what it is and how you feel it's being used.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The Bradley Effect is a theory which holds that African American candidates do better in pre-election polls than they do in elections, because white racists are shy about admitting to pollsters that they wouldn't vote for a black man. So they will tell pollsters, "Sure, I'll vote for him." Then they sneak into the polling booth and listen to the inner Klansman, you know, they vote as racists.
Now, the problem with this theory is that there are almost no examples of its having happened. It's named for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, who ran for the governor of California and did much better in polls beforehand than he did on Election Day. Well, it turns out, if you study that race, that the reason why he lost was that a lot of bad news about his tenure in Los Angeles came out just before the election. That's the reason why people often lose elections. There are only two races that we know of where the Bradley Effect may arguably have obtained, both in 1989: Doug Wilder's run for the governor of Virginia and David Dinkins's first run for the mayor of New York, where Dinkins didn't do as well as we thought he would. Well, in his second run, the polls were dead on.
The point is, we're talking about two races that may form the basis for this idea that Barack Obama, with his enormous lead, may lose because of millions and millions of closet racists, you know, who will say one thing to pollsters, out of a fear of not seeming politically correct, and then vote a different way. I'll tell you why I worry about this. Something that you very, very badly need to steal elections, aside from the apparatus and the volunteers and all the money and everything, is a narrative. You have to have a convincing rationale to explain an upset victory. Four years ago, the rationale was millions of values voters materialized on the horizon at the end of the day, and like Jesus with loaves and fishes, they suddenly multiplied and voted for Bush, and then they disappeared. Well, there's no evidence that that actually happened. But it served as a narrative. This time, I'm afraid the primary narrative will be racism: Barack Obama actually lost, despite all predictions, because so many Americans are racist.
I think that this is, first of all, unverifiable. We don't know that it's true, whereas we do know all the stuff about vote suppression and election fraud. But I'm afraid that people will be encouraged to accept this line to prevent them from taking a hard look at the real reasons why Obama may have "lost"-and I put "lost" in quotation marks.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you for being with us. Mark Crispin Miller is a professor at New York University and author of, well, the latest book he edited, this came out just this summer, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.
Early Voting Sees Reports of Voter Intimidation, Machine Malfunctions
Wednesday 22 October 2008
by: Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
A few days into early voting, reports of voting machine problems and intimidation at the polls are surfacing. (Photo: Remy de la Mauviniere / AP)
Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.
Just days after reports that six early voters in at least two West Virginia counties claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican, a couple in Nashville, Tennessee reported similar problems with paperless voting machines. In West Virginia, one voter said, "I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines."
In Tennessee, a filmmaker couple also had difficulties casting their vote for the Democratic candidate, the Brad Blog reports. They had to hit the Obama button several times before it actually registered, and in one case it momentarily flipped from Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. Patricia Earnhardt said, "The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button." The couple in Nashville were using machines made by the same company as those in the counties in West Virginia-by Election Systems and Software.
Meanwhile, there are reports of long lines at early voting sites in several other states, including some counties in Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic who's been focused on voter problems and election fraud in this country. He's a professor at New York University, author of several books. Most recently he edited Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.
Mark Crispin Miller now joins us in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your concerns right now, Mark?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, you've referred to a couple of them already. We now see a burst of vote flipping by machines, electronic voting machines in a couple of states. This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward to say, "I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up." So, clearly, this was a systematic programming decision by the people in charge of the machines, which in that case and this one is the Republican Party. We're also seeing systematic shortages of working voting machines in Democratic precincts only. This is also something that did not happen only in Ohio in 2004, but happened nationwide. That election was, in fact, stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I know because there's been an audit of the vote in eighteen counties of Ohio by a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips, who had his team literally scrutinize every single ballot that was warehoused in eighteen Ohio counties. They took over 30,000 digital photographs. This is not speculation, Amy. This is a meticulous, careful, specific and conclusive demonstration that John Kerry actually won some 200,000 votes in those eighteen counties only that were taken away from him. Bush's official victory margin, you may recall, was about 118,000. So there is no question about it. Ohio was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: When they-OK, so they have the pictures of all these-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Pictures, there's a CD with this book that you can-
AMY GOODMAN: But they have the pictures of the ballots.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Of the variously altered, mutilated ballots, yes. Ballots with stickers placed over the square that people had blacked in for Kerry/Edwards; somebody else blacks in Bush/Cheney. Thousands and thousands of ballots that were pre-marked before they were distributed, so that people would mark different boxes on them, and then they would be invalidated.
Even more chilling is the fact that after Phillips did his research, the boards of elections in fifty-five Ohio counties destroyed all or some of their ballots in defiance of a court order. So we have criminal behavior here of a kind of grand and systematic kind. But the point is-not to engage in what Sarah Palin calls finger-pointing backwards, the point here is to note that we're dealing with a consistent pattern of subversive behavior by the Republican Party since 2000 and extending all the way up to the present. What we're seeing now is an especially brazen and diverse range of dirty tricks and tactics that are being used both to suppress the vote and also to enable election fraud.
AMY GOODMAN: Ohio has been very much in the news this past week, not around the issue of voter suppression, but around the issue of fraudulent registration forms, the concern about them being handed in by the organization ACORN.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, the whole ACORN thing is a first-class propaganda drive. ACORN has done nothing wrong. ACORN has, however, been guilty of trying to register low-income citizens to vote. Because they've been in the sights of the Republican Party for several years now, they've always been extremely scrupulous about checking the registration forms that they garner from their volunteers.
You know, they pay people, basically, to register other voters. So, naturally, from time to time, some volunteer who wants the money will fill out a registration form, you know, with Mickey Mouse or the names of the Dallas Cowboys, something like that. Precisely because that is an ever-present possibility, the people at ACORN have always scrupulously checked the forms before submitting them.
And ten days ago, what they did was, in Las Vegas, their office in Las Vegas, they found a number of these suspicious forms, handed them over directly to the Secretary of State in Nevada, and his response was to turn around and say, "Aha! Here is evidence that you're conspiring to commit voter fraud." Now, that effort, that drive went from Nevada to Missouri to Ohio, and now we hear that the FBI is investigating ACORN.
The important point here, Amy, is that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Several studies have taken a close look at this and found that there really is no voter fraud of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films has put out a new short film about ACORN and the attacks against them. Let me play an excerpt.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
GOV. SARAH PALIN: John and I are calling on the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group and to do so immediately.
CARMEN ARIAS: These attacks on ACORN are part of a pattern of voter suppression that the GOP has been carrying on for a long time.
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The McCain campaign has now two camps. And one of them is already assuming that he's lost, and he's aiming for the post-election warfare in the Republican Party, and part of that is the ACORN strategy, which is trying to delegitimize the result in advance, if Obama were to win, by saying it was rigged by minority voters. That's what this is about.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Someone here keeps yelling "ACORN, ACORN." Now, let me just say to you, there are serious allegations of voter fraud in the battleground states across America. They must be investigated.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: Let's look at North Carolina. We turned in 28,000 applications in North Carolina, and there are investigations into four of them right now. Over 95 percent of the cards we turned in were error-free. So we're talking about an extremely small percentage of the overall 1.3 million cards collected. To suggest that this is some kind of widespread criminal conspiracy is just absurd.
MONTAGE OF NEWSCASTERS: ACORN. ACORN. ACORN-is a left-wing-radical-extremist community group.
CARMEN ARIAS: This is hardly the first time that these Rove-style tactics have been used to suppress low-income minorities.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2000.
GREG PALAST: Voters were being removed from the registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2004.
UNIDENTIFIED: Evidence has emerged that in the last presidential election the Republican Party organized efforts to suppress the votes of active-duty military, low-income and minority voters by challenging their registrations. The Republicans put in motion a plan to hold down the Democratic vote in key battleground states. Many are convinced that Republican officials broke the law.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: And they're doing it again right now.
CARMEN ARIAS: Suppressing the low-income minority voters can swing an entire
election. A handful of improperly filled-out voter registration cards cannot.
AMY GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a piece by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Professor Mark Crispin Miller?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The important point to get here is that the party that is itself engaging in disenfranchisement on a massive scale, the deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of arguably millions of Americans, is clouding the issue by accusing-essentially accusing its victims of doing the same thing. OK?
Voter fraud-I want to repeat this-is virtually nonexistent. There have been several academic studies of this notion of whether individuals actually stuffed ballot boxes or show up at polling places pretending to be somebody else. There's actually not a single known case of any such type of voter fraud being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. And yet, that notion of voter fraud is used as the pretext for taking steps that do demonstrably result in tens of thousands of people being unable to vote, you see? It's a really masterful strategy. And I only wish that the Democratic Party had all this time been aggressive in pointing out that the Republicans are the party engaged in disenfranchisement.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about a man named Stephen Spoonamore-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: -a prominent expert, supposedly, on computer fraud, and what he has to say. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University is our guest. His most recent book, Loser Take All. Who is Stephen Spoonamore?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and, most importantly, a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. That's his profession. He works for major banks. He works for foreign governments. He works for the Secret Service. Those are his clients.
He knows personally the principal players in Bush-Cheney's conspiracy to subvert our elections through electronic means since 2000, and he has named these principal players. Specifically, he has named a man named Mike Connell. Mike Connell, according to Spoonamore, is Karl Rove's computer guru. This is the guy who has helped Bush-Cheney fix election results through computers since Florida 2000, in Ohio in 2004, also in the stolen re-election of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama in 2002, also in the stolen re-election of Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, basically, they use a kind of architecture that's called Man in the Middle, and it involves shunting election returns data through a separate computer somewhere else. This is something that computer criminals do all the time with banks. Spoonamore explains that the Man in the Middle setup is extremely effective and basically undetectable as a way to change election results.
Now, the scariest thing is that Connell told Spoonamore that the reason why he has helped Bush-Cheney still these elections for the last eight years has been to save the babies. See? We have to understand that there's a very powerful component of religious fanaticism at work in the election fraud conspiracy. We saw a little bit of that in Greenswald's film, where Paul Weyrich was talking about how we don't want people voting.
AMY GOODMAN: The conservative activist.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, because the majority is a majority of unbelievers. They're pro-choice. They're corrupt. They're evil. They don't get it. It's therefore necessary to fix election results in order to prevent the unjust and the unrighteous from taking over.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, you keep saying the election was clearly stolen in 2004. This is not a widely held belief. Why do you think more information is not known about this?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Because the press and the Democratic Party have steadfastly refused simply to mention, much less discuss, the evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: You talked to John Kerry.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: I talked to John Kerry. In fact, the last time I was with you, I was here to talk about that conversation with him. On October 28th, 2005, we met. I gave him a copy of my book Fooled Again, and we discussed the last election, and he told me, with some vehemence, that he believed it was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio in 2004-and Ohio, key battleground state right now-
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And we remember at Kenyon, for example, those long, long lines in 2004, people waiting for hours.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about the computer setup for 2004, explain further.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, what happened was, with the election results that were coming into Ken Blackwell's website, right, in real time-
AMY GOODMAN: The former Secretary of State of Ohio.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The former Secretary of State.
AMY GOODMAN: The former chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign there.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And co-chair of Bush-Cheney and a big-time election thief and an ardent theocrat, by the way. The election returns went basically from his website to another computer that was in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of Spoonamore and a guy with another private company, another evangelical. The data was shunted through that computer and then back to the Secretary of State's website.
Spoonamore says that this Man in the Middle setup has only one purpose, and that is fraud. There's no other reason to do it. And he believes that such a system is still in place in Ohio, it's in place in a number of other states. And the crucial fact to bear in mind here, since we're talking about John McCain attacking ACORN and so on, is that Mike Connell is now working for John McCain.
Now, on the strength of Spoonamore's testimony, right, it's driving a RICO lawsuit in Ohio. On the strength of his testimony, Connell has been subpoenaed. He was subpoenaed last week for a deposition, so that he can answer questions on the record, under oath, about what he's been up to. He and a bevy of Republican lawyers have been very, very vigorously fighting this subpoena, because, of course, they don't want him to testify 'til after Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, the Bradley Effect that is being discussed, explain what it is and how you feel it's being used.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The Bradley Effect is a theory which holds that African American candidates do better in pre-election polls than they do in elections, because white racists are shy about admitting to pollsters that they wouldn't vote for a black man. So they will tell pollsters, "Sure, I'll vote for him." Then they sneak into the polling booth and listen to the inner Klansman, you know, they vote as racists.
Now, the problem with this theory is that there are almost no examples of its having happened. It's named for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, who ran for the governor of California and did much better in polls beforehand than he did on Election Day. Well, it turns out, if you study that race, that the reason why he lost was that a lot of bad news about his tenure in Los Angeles came out just before the election. That's the reason why people often lose elections. There are only two races that we know of where the Bradley Effect may arguably have obtained, both in 1989: Doug Wilder's run for the governor of Virginia and David Dinkins's first run for the mayor of New York, where Dinkins didn't do as well as we thought he would. Well, in his second run, the polls were dead on.
The point is, we're talking about two races that may form the basis for this idea that Barack Obama, with his enormous lead, may lose because of millions and millions of closet racists, you know, who will say one thing to pollsters, out of a fear of not seeming politically correct, and then vote a different way. I'll tell you why I worry about this. Something that you very, very badly need to steal elections, aside from the apparatus and the volunteers and all the money and everything, is a narrative. You have to have a convincing rationale to explain an upset victory. Four years ago, the rationale was millions of values voters materialized on the horizon at the end of the day, and like Jesus with loaves and fishes, they suddenly multiplied and voted for Bush, and then they disappeared. Well, there's no evidence that that actually happened. But it served as a narrative. This time, I'm afraid the primary narrative will be racism: Barack Obama actually lost, despite all predictions, because so many Americans are racist.
I think that this is, first of all, unverifiable. We don't know that it's true, whereas we do know all the stuff about vote suppression and election fraud. But I'm afraid that people will be encouraged to accept this line to prevent them from taking a hard look at the real reasons why Obama may have "lost"-and I put "lost" in quotation marks.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you for being with us. Mark Crispin Miller is a professor at New York University and author of, well, the latest book he edited, this came out just this summer, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.
Jock the Vote: The Jordan Era a Thing of the Past
“Republicans buy sneakers too,” is evidently a thing of the past in the NBA. That was the copout used by His Highness Michael Jordan when he refused to follow his mother’s advice to support African American, Harvey Gantt, in his race for the Senate in North Carolina against that racist Neanderthal Jesse Helms back in the 1990s. Obviously, Jordan’s brand name was more important than the principle of fighting racism. Thankfully, today’s NBA players, including the Piston’s Chauncey Billups and many others, are showing their humanity and responsibility as citizens by taking a stand in this historic election. The importance of electing Barack Obama has impacted what Michael Lee has labeled “Jock the Vote.” Many current stars in the NBA are following the lead of athletes Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar who have not been afraid to join the struggle. RGN
Jock the Vote: NBA Players Raise Their Voices
Defying Political Convention, Some Star Athletes Choose Sides in Presidential Race
By Michael Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2008; E01
Etan Thomas emerged from the Washington Wizards' locker room at Verizon Center this week looking like a walking campaign advertisement. He wore a black T-shirt adorned with a picture of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and the words "Yes We Can" in bright gold lettering.
It's not uncommon for the Wizards center to publicly express his political leanings. An outspoken opponent of the Iraq war since it began, Thomas has participated in several Democratic campaign events, including attending the party's convention in Denver and teaming with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean at voter registration rallies in Northern Virginia.
But Thomas, 30, has discovered that during this presidential campaign he is one of several NBA players taking an active role. "Everybody knows where I stand, but it's great to see other players involved," Thomas said. "The guys I admire did that. The Jim Browns, the Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar]s, the Muhammad Alis. They used their position as a platform. Now, a lot of different athletes are coming out."
This presidential election, featuring an African American nominee for president and a female nominee for vice president, has prompted even NBA players, known for their political apathy in recent years, to take interest.
"Guys are paying attention to what's going on in the world, and I think that many players realize the impact our voice can have," said Los Angeles Clippers point guard Baron Davis, an Obama supporter, who recently spoke at a "Women for Obama" rally in Los Angeles. "We should take it upon ourselves to educate and inspire others about issues that are important to us. We shouldn't wait for someone else to stand up and try to make a difference."
Support for Obama is far from unanimous around the league. Spencer Hawes, a second-year center with the Sacramento Kings, created a Facebook page for fans of conservative pundit Ann Coulter and had a bumper sticker on his car in high school that read, "God Bless George W. Bush." Hawes, 20, said he is backing Republican nominee John McCain and is excited about voting for president for the first time.
Hawes hasn't campaigned on behalf of McCain but said, "but I'd be ready and willing if I was asked."
But most players interviewed for this story said they were backing Obama.
Los Angeles Lakers guard Derek Fisher and New York Knicks point guard Chris Duhon were also at the Democratic convention in Denver. Duhon, a teammate of Obama personal aide Reggie Love at Duke, attended the final presidential debate between Obama and McCain at Hofstra University last week.
New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul encouraged people to vote in a Web commercial for the Obama campaign-sponsored Web site. Detroit Pistons guard Chauncey Billups introduced Obama at a rally in Michigan. Greg Oden, Jerryd Bayless and Channing Frye of the Portland Trail Blazers spoke on behalf of Obama at a voter registration drive at Portland State University.
Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James donated $20,000 to the Democratic White House Victory Fund, a joint committee set up by Obama and the Democratic Party for the presidential race, and gave the Illinois senator an autographed basketball when both appeared on CBS's "Late Night With David Letterman" in September. James recently participated in a voter registration rally in Cleveland with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and told an adoring crowd, "All of us want change."
Although the NBA is predominantly African American, the Wizards' Thomas said the enthusiasm for Obama has less to do with him being black than with his views on the economy, health care and education. Obama "is . . . laying out the plans. He's not talking around the issues. There is a sense that things will be different."
Political activism among athletes today doesn't come close to that of the 1960s and 1970s, but it does contrast with the past 20 years, when athletes often chose not to take a stand or share their beliefs for fear of ridicule or financial hits.
In the early 1990s, Michael Jordan famously refused to publicly support Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat running against Republican Jesse Helms in a North Carolina U.S. Senate race, saying, "Republicans buy sneakers, too." Jordan eventually donated money to Gantt, and also contributed to the presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley in 2000 and Obama.
Steve Nash sparked a minor controversy when he showed up at the 2003 All-Star Game in Atlanta wearing a T-shirt that read, "No War. Shoot for Peace." Orlando Magic center Adonal Foyle, another critic of the Iraq war, said athletes shouldn't be afraid to share their political views.
"There is some risk, there is no doubt about that, but I think that's part of the responsibility," said Foyle, 33, who in 2001 founded Democracy Matters, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that works on campaign finance reform. "Saying what you think is going to come with a certain amount of people being mad at you, but so what? People are mad at you when you beat them at a basketball game anyway. They boo you anyway.
Really, what has changed? I think it all depends on how you do it."
Foyle, a native of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean, recently became a U.S. citizen and plans to vote for Obama. "This is truly a remarkable time to be involved in politics. I feel absolutely honored and special to be voting at this particular juncture," Foyle said.
The political climate has led to debates in locker rooms around the league. "Those are the hot topics because that's where all the news is from," Hawes, who is white, said, adding that he takes some heat from teammates for his views. "You see the 'Saturday Night Live' sketches. It's not really just politics right now. It's become intertwined with pop culture as a whole."
However, some players still refuse to get excited about the election. "People get sour-faced when you talk about politics and voting," said Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas, adding that he doesn't plan to vote.
Arenas, who is slated to earn $14.5 million this season after signing a six-year, $111 million contract this past summer to remain with the Wizards, said he is fearful that both candidates will raise his taxes.
"The first Bush said he wasn't going to tax nobody," Arenas said. "It doesn't really matter who the president is. They say whatever they need to say to get in office."
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
Jock the Vote: NBA Players Raise Their Voices
Defying Political Convention, Some Star Athletes Choose Sides in Presidential Race
By Michael Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 23, 2008; E01
Etan Thomas emerged from the Washington Wizards' locker room at Verizon Center this week looking like a walking campaign advertisement. He wore a black T-shirt adorned with a picture of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and the words "Yes We Can" in bright gold lettering.
It's not uncommon for the Wizards center to publicly express his political leanings. An outspoken opponent of the Iraq war since it began, Thomas has participated in several Democratic campaign events, including attending the party's convention in Denver and teaming with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean at voter registration rallies in Northern Virginia.
But Thomas, 30, has discovered that during this presidential campaign he is one of several NBA players taking an active role. "Everybody knows where I stand, but it's great to see other players involved," Thomas said. "The guys I admire did that. The Jim Browns, the Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar]s, the Muhammad Alis. They used their position as a platform. Now, a lot of different athletes are coming out."
This presidential election, featuring an African American nominee for president and a female nominee for vice president, has prompted even NBA players, known for their political apathy in recent years, to take interest.
"Guys are paying attention to what's going on in the world, and I think that many players realize the impact our voice can have," said Los Angeles Clippers point guard Baron Davis, an Obama supporter, who recently spoke at a "Women for Obama" rally in Los Angeles. "We should take it upon ourselves to educate and inspire others about issues that are important to us. We shouldn't wait for someone else to stand up and try to make a difference."
Support for Obama is far from unanimous around the league. Spencer Hawes, a second-year center with the Sacramento Kings, created a Facebook page for fans of conservative pundit Ann Coulter and had a bumper sticker on his car in high school that read, "God Bless George W. Bush." Hawes, 20, said he is backing Republican nominee John McCain and is excited about voting for president for the first time.
Hawes hasn't campaigned on behalf of McCain but said, "but I'd be ready and willing if I was asked."
But most players interviewed for this story said they were backing Obama.
Los Angeles Lakers guard Derek Fisher and New York Knicks point guard Chris Duhon were also at the Democratic convention in Denver. Duhon, a teammate of Obama personal aide Reggie Love at Duke, attended the final presidential debate between Obama and McCain at Hofstra University last week.
New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul encouraged people to vote in a Web commercial for the Obama campaign-sponsored Web site. Detroit Pistons guard Chauncey Billups introduced Obama at a rally in Michigan. Greg Oden, Jerryd Bayless and Channing Frye of the Portland Trail Blazers spoke on behalf of Obama at a voter registration drive at Portland State University.
Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James donated $20,000 to the Democratic White House Victory Fund, a joint committee set up by Obama and the Democratic Party for the presidential race, and gave the Illinois senator an autographed basketball when both appeared on CBS's "Late Night With David Letterman" in September. James recently participated in a voter registration rally in Cleveland with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and told an adoring crowd, "All of us want change."
Although the NBA is predominantly African American, the Wizards' Thomas said the enthusiasm for Obama has less to do with him being black than with his views on the economy, health care and education. Obama "is . . . laying out the plans. He's not talking around the issues. There is a sense that things will be different."
Political activism among athletes today doesn't come close to that of the 1960s and 1970s, but it does contrast with the past 20 years, when athletes often chose not to take a stand or share their beliefs for fear of ridicule or financial hits.
In the early 1990s, Michael Jordan famously refused to publicly support Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat running against Republican Jesse Helms in a North Carolina U.S. Senate race, saying, "Republicans buy sneakers, too." Jordan eventually donated money to Gantt, and also contributed to the presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley in 2000 and Obama.
Steve Nash sparked a minor controversy when he showed up at the 2003 All-Star Game in Atlanta wearing a T-shirt that read, "No War. Shoot for Peace." Orlando Magic center Adonal Foyle, another critic of the Iraq war, said athletes shouldn't be afraid to share their political views.
"There is some risk, there is no doubt about that, but I think that's part of the responsibility," said Foyle, 33, who in 2001 founded Democracy Matters, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that works on campaign finance reform. "Saying what you think is going to come with a certain amount of people being mad at you, but so what? People are mad at you when you beat them at a basketball game anyway. They boo you anyway.
Really, what has changed? I think it all depends on how you do it."
Foyle, a native of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean, recently became a U.S. citizen and plans to vote for Obama. "This is truly a remarkable time to be involved in politics. I feel absolutely honored and special to be voting at this particular juncture," Foyle said.
The political climate has led to debates in locker rooms around the league. "Those are the hot topics because that's where all the news is from," Hawes, who is white, said, adding that he takes some heat from teammates for his views. "You see the 'Saturday Night Live' sketches. It's not really just politics right now. It's become intertwined with pop culture as a whole."
However, some players still refuse to get excited about the election. "People get sour-faced when you talk about politics and voting," said Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas, adding that he doesn't plan to vote.
Arenas, who is slated to earn $14.5 million this season after signing a six-year, $111 million contract this past summer to remain with the Wizards, said he is fearful that both candidates will raise his taxes.
"The first Bush said he wasn't going to tax nobody," Arenas said. "It doesn't really matter who the president is. They say whatever they need to say to get in office."
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Joe Klein on Why Obama is Winning
Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008
Why Barack Obama Is Winning
By Joe Klein
General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for "maximum flexibility" going forward.
Obama had a choice at that moment. He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views "under advisement." Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind. "You know, if I were in your shoes, I would be making the exact same argument," he began. "Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential Commander in Chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security." Obama talked about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the financial costs of the occupation of Iraq, the stress it was putting on the military.
A "spirited" conversation ensued, one person who was in the room told me. "It wasn't a perfunctory recitation of talking points. They were arguing their respective positions, in a respectful way." The other two Senators — Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed — told Petraeus they agreed with Obama. According to both Obama and Petraeus, the meeting — which lasted twice as long as the usual congressional briefing — ended agreeably. Petraeus said he understood that Obama's perspective was, necessarily, going to be more strategic. Obama said that the timetable obviously would have to be flexible. But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.
Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain's peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama's quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public's choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully.
There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he's far more comfortable when he's able to think things through. "He has learned to trust his gut," an Obama adviser told me. "He wasn't so confident in his instincts last year. It's been the biggest change I've seen in him."
I asked Obama about gut decisions, in an interview on his plane 17 days before the election. It was late on a Saturday night, and he looked pretty tired, riddled with gray hair and not nearly as young as when I'd first met him four years earlier. He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I'd ever seen at a campaign event, and he would be endorsed by Colin Powell the next morning. He seemed as relaxed as ever, though, unfazed by the hoopla or the imminence of the election. Our conversation was informal but intense. He seemed to be thinking in my presence, rather than just reciting talking points, and it took him some time to think through my question about gut decisions. He said the first really big one was how to react when incendiary videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons surfaced last spring. "The decision to make it big as opposed to make it small," Obama said of the landmark speech on race relations he delivered in Philadelphia. "My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like ... they were adults and could understand the complexities of race, I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership."
The speech was followed by a more traditional form of damage control when Wright showed up in Washington still spewing racial nonsense: Obama cut him loose. And while Obama has followed a fairly traditional political path in this campaign, his strongest — and most telling — moments have been those when he followed his natural no-drama instincts. This has been confusing to many of my colleagues and to me, at times, as well: his utter caution in the debates, his decision not to zing McCain or even to challenge him very much, led me to assume — all three times — that he hadn't done nearly as well as the public ultimately decided he had. McCain was correct when he argued that Obama's aversion to drama led him to snuggle a bit too close to the Democratic Party's orthodoxy. But one of the more remarkable spectacles of the 2008 election — unprecedented in my time as a journalist — was the unanimity among Democrats on matters of policy once the personality clash between Obama and Hillary Clinton was set aside. There was no squabbling between old and new Dems, progressives and moderates, over race or war or peace. This was a year for no-drama Democrats, which made Obama as comfortable a fit for them as McCain was awkward for the Republican base.
And at the crucial moment of the campaign — the astonishing onset of the financial crisis — it was Obama's gut steadiness that won the public's trust, and quite possibly the election. On the afternoon when McCain suspended his campaign, threatened to scuttle the Sept. 26 debate and hopped a plane back to Washington to try to resolve the crisis, Obama was in Florida doing debate prep with his top advisers. When he was told about McCain's maneuvers, Obama's first reaction — according to an aide — was, "You gotta be kidding. I'm going to debate. A President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time." But there was a storm brewing among Obama's supporters in Congress and the Beltway establishment. "My BlackBerry was exploding," said an Obama aide. "They were saying we had to suspend. McCain was going to look more like a statesman, above the fray."
"I didn't believe it," Obama told me. "I have to tell you, one of the benefits of running this 22-month gauntlet is that ... you start realizing that what seems important or clever or in need of some dramatic moment a lot of times just needs reflection and care. And I think that was an example of where my style at least worked." Obama realized that he and McCain could be little more than creative bystanders — and one prominent Republican told me that McCain was "the least creative person in the room at the President's White House meeting. He simply had no ideas. He didn't even have any good questions." Obama had questions for the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chairman, but he was under no illusions: he didn't have the power to influence the final outcome, so it was best to stay calm and not oversell his role. It was an easy call, his natural bias. But, Obama acknowledged, "There are going to be some times where ... I won't have the luxury of thinking through all the angles."
Which is why the Petraeus moment is so interesting. Obama's gut reaction was to go against his normal palliative impulse and to challenge the general instead. "I felt it was necessary to make that point ... precisely because I respect Petraeus and [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker," Obama said, after he reluctantly acknowledged that my reporting of the meeting was correct. "Precisely because they've been doing a good job ... And I want them to understand that I'm taking their arguments seriously." Obama endorses Petraeus' new post, as the commanding general at Central Command, with responsibility for overseeing both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "He's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons why I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan."
Actually, Obama and Petraeus seem to be thinking along similar lines with regard to Afghanistan. I mentioned that Petraeus had recently given a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in which he raised the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. "You know, I think this is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq," Obama said without hesitation. "The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally," he said, referring to the Petraeus-led effort to turn the Sunni tribes away from the more radical elements of the insurgency. "Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored," he said. In fact, senior U.S. military officials have told me that there is a possibility of splitting Pashtun tribes away from the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan. "But we have to do it through the Karzai government," a senior officer told me, referring to the fact that the Army had acted independently of the Maliki government in creating the Anbar Awakening. "That is one lesson we've learned from Iraq."
Almost exactly two years ago, I had my first formal interview with Barack Obama — and he appeared on this magazine's cover for the first time. It wasn't an easy interview. His book The Audacity of Hope had just been published, but his policy proposals didn't seem very audacious. He actually grew a bit testy when I pushed him on the need for universal health insurance and a more aggressive global-warming policy — neither of which he supported. He has stayed with his less-than-universal health-care plan, and I still find it less than convincing. And his cap-and-trade program to control carbon emissions has taken a backseat to the economic crisis — although Obama insisted that he still favored such a plan, so long as consumers are cushioned with rebates when energy prices rise.
But Obama seems a more certain policymaker now, if not exactly a wonk in the Clintonian sense. He has a clearer handle on the big picture, on how various policy components fit together, and a strong sense of what his top priority would be. He wants to launch an "Apollo project" to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: "The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit." But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, "because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt." A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and "there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy ... That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office."
That sort of clarity is new. At the beginning of the year, Donna Brazile said of Obama, "We know he can walk on water — now where are the loaves and fishes?" The inability to describe his priorities, the inability to speak directly to voters in ways they could easily comprehend, plagued Obama through much of the primary season. His tendency to use big rhetoric in front of big crowds led to McCain's one good spell, after Obama presumptuously spoke to a huge throng in Berlin after his successful Middle East trip. Only a President should make a major address like that overseas. Obama seemed to learn quickly from that mistake; his language during the general-election campaign has been simple, direct and pragmatic. His best moments in the debates came when he explained what he wanted to do as President. His very best moment came in the town-hall debate when he explained how the government bailout would affect average people who were hurting: if companies couldn't get credit from the banks, they couldn't make their payrolls and would have to start laying people off. McCain, by contrast, demonstrated why it's so hard for Senators to succeed as presidential candidates: he talked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the sins of Obama, and never brought the argument home.
But even with his new populist skills, Obama hasn't been as plain as he could be. If an Apollo project to create a new alternative-energy economy is his highest priority, as he told me, why hasn't he given a major speech about it during the fall campaign? Why hasn't he begun to mobilize the nation for this next big mission? In part, I suppose, because campaigns are about firefighting — and this campaign in particular has been about "the fierce urgency of now," to use one of Obama's favorite phrases by Martin Luther King Jr., because of the fears raised by the financial crisis and because of the desperate, ferocious attacks launched by his opponent.
If he wins, however, there will be a different challenge. He will have to return, full force, to the inspiration business. The public will have to be mobilized to face the fearsome new economic realities. He will also have to deliver bad news, to transform crises into "teachable moments." He will have to effect a major change in our political life: to get the public and the media to think about long-term solutions rather than short-term balms. Obama has given some strong indications that he will be able to do this, having remained levelheaded through a season of political insanity. His has been a remarkable campaign, as smoothly run as any I've seen in nine presidential cycles. Even more remarkable, Obama has made race — that perennial, gaping American wound — an afterthought. He has done this by introducing a quality to American politics that we haven't seen in quite some time: maturity. He is undoubtedly as ego-driven as everyone else seeking the highest office — perhaps more so, given his race, his name and his lack of experience. But he has not been childishly egomaniacal, in contrast to our recent baby-boomer Presidents — or petulant, in contrast to his opponent. He does not seem needy. He seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1853025,00.html
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Why Barack Obama Is Winning
By Joe Klein
General David Petraeus deployed overwhelming force when he briefed Barack Obama and two other Senators in Baghdad last July. He knew Obama favored a 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq, and he wanted to make the strongest possible case against it. And so, after he had presented an array of maps and charts and PowerPoint slides describing the current situation on the ground in great detail, Petraeus closed with a vigorous plea for "maximum flexibility" going forward.
Obama had a choice at that moment. He could thank Petraeus for the briefing and promise to take his views "under advisement." Or he could tell Petraeus what he really thought, a potentially contentious course of action — especially with a general not used to being confronted. Obama chose to speak his mind. "You know, if I were in your shoes, I would be making the exact same argument," he began. "Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favorable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential Commander in Chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security." Obama talked about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, the financial costs of the occupation of Iraq, the stress it was putting on the military.
A "spirited" conversation ensued, one person who was in the room told me. "It wasn't a perfunctory recitation of talking points. They were arguing their respective positions, in a respectful way." The other two Senators — Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed — told Petraeus they agreed with Obama. According to both Obama and Petraeus, the meeting — which lasted twice as long as the usual congressional briefing — ended agreeably. Petraeus said he understood that Obama's perspective was, necessarily, going to be more strategic. Obama said that the timetable obviously would have to be flexible. But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.
Barack Obama has prospered in this presidential campaign because of the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making. They are his best-known qualities. The most important decision he has made — the selection of a running mate — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. Two months later, as John McCain's peremptory selection of Governor Sarah Palin has come to seem a liability, it could be argued that Obama's quiet selection of Joe Biden defined the public's choice in the general-election campaign. But not every decision can be made so carefully.
There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a presidential candidate has to make in the course of a campaign — like whether to speak his mind to a General Petraeus — and this has been a more difficult journey for Obama, since he's far more comfortable when he's able to think things through. "He has learned to trust his gut," an Obama adviser told me. "He wasn't so confident in his instincts last year. It's been the biggest change I've seen in him."
I asked Obama about gut decisions, in an interview on his plane 17 days before the election. It was late on a Saturday night, and he looked pretty tired, riddled with gray hair and not nearly as young as when I'd first met him four years earlier. He had drawn 175,000 people to two events in Missouri that day, larger crowds than I'd ever seen at a campaign event, and he would be endorsed by Colin Powell the next morning. He seemed as relaxed as ever, though, unfazed by the hoopla or the imminence of the election. Our conversation was informal but intense. He seemed to be thinking in my presence, rather than just reciting talking points, and it took him some time to think through my question about gut decisions. He said the first really big one was how to react when incendiary videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist sermons surfaced last spring. "The decision to make it big as opposed to make it small," Obama said of the landmark speech on race relations he delivered in Philadelphia. "My gut was telling me that this was a teachable moment and that if I tried to do the usual political damage control instead of talking to the American people like ... they were adults and could understand the complexities of race, I would be not only doing damage to the campaign but missing an important opportunity for leadership."
The speech was followed by a more traditional form of damage control when Wright showed up in Washington still spewing racial nonsense: Obama cut him loose. And while Obama has followed a fairly traditional political path in this campaign, his strongest — and most telling — moments have been those when he followed his natural no-drama instincts. This has been confusing to many of my colleagues and to me, at times, as well: his utter caution in the debates, his decision not to zing McCain or even to challenge him very much, led me to assume — all three times — that he hadn't done nearly as well as the public ultimately decided he had. McCain was correct when he argued that Obama's aversion to drama led him to snuggle a bit too close to the Democratic Party's orthodoxy. But one of the more remarkable spectacles of the 2008 election — unprecedented in my time as a journalist — was the unanimity among Democrats on matters of policy once the personality clash between Obama and Hillary Clinton was set aside. There was no squabbling between old and new Dems, progressives and moderates, over race or war or peace. This was a year for no-drama Democrats, which made Obama as comfortable a fit for them as McCain was awkward for the Republican base.
And at the crucial moment of the campaign — the astonishing onset of the financial crisis — it was Obama's gut steadiness that won the public's trust, and quite possibly the election. On the afternoon when McCain suspended his campaign, threatened to scuttle the Sept. 26 debate and hopped a plane back to Washington to try to resolve the crisis, Obama was in Florida doing debate prep with his top advisers. When he was told about McCain's maneuvers, Obama's first reaction — according to an aide — was, "You gotta be kidding. I'm going to debate. A President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time." But there was a storm brewing among Obama's supporters in Congress and the Beltway establishment. "My BlackBerry was exploding," said an Obama aide. "They were saying we had to suspend. McCain was going to look more like a statesman, above the fray."
"I didn't believe it," Obama told me. "I have to tell you, one of the benefits of running this 22-month gauntlet is that ... you start realizing that what seems important or clever or in need of some dramatic moment a lot of times just needs reflection and care. And I think that was an example of where my style at least worked." Obama realized that he and McCain could be little more than creative bystanders — and one prominent Republican told me that McCain was "the least creative person in the room at the President's White House meeting. He simply had no ideas. He didn't even have any good questions." Obama had questions for the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chairman, but he was under no illusions: he didn't have the power to influence the final outcome, so it was best to stay calm and not oversell his role. It was an easy call, his natural bias. But, Obama acknowledged, "There are going to be some times where ... I won't have the luxury of thinking through all the angles."
Which is why the Petraeus moment is so interesting. Obama's gut reaction was to go against his normal palliative impulse and to challenge the general instead. "I felt it was necessary to make that point ... precisely because I respect Petraeus and [Ambassador Ryan] Crocker," Obama said, after he reluctantly acknowledged that my reporting of the meeting was correct. "Precisely because they've been doing a good job ... And I want them to understand that I'm taking their arguments seriously." Obama endorses Petraeus' new post, as the commanding general at Central Command, with responsibility for overseeing both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. "He's somebody who cares about facts and cares about the reality on the ground. I don't think he comes at this with an ideological predisposition. That's one of the reasons why I think he's been successful in moving the ball forward in Iraq. And I hope that he's applying that same perspective to what's happening in Afghanistan."
Actually, Obama and Petraeus seem to be thinking along similar lines with regard to Afghanistan. I mentioned that Petraeus had recently given a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in which he raised the possibility of negotiating with the Taliban. "You know, I think this is one useful lesson that is applicable from Iraq," Obama said without hesitation. "The Sunni awakening changed the dynamic in Iraq fundamentally," he said, referring to the Petraeus-led effort to turn the Sunni tribes away from the more radical elements of the insurgency. "Whether there are those same opportunities in Afghanistan I think should be explored," he said. In fact, senior U.S. military officials have told me that there is a possibility of splitting Pashtun tribes away from the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan. "But we have to do it through the Karzai government," a senior officer told me, referring to the fact that the Army had acted independently of the Maliki government in creating the Anbar Awakening. "That is one lesson we've learned from Iraq."
Almost exactly two years ago, I had my first formal interview with Barack Obama — and he appeared on this magazine's cover for the first time. It wasn't an easy interview. His book The Audacity of Hope had just been published, but his policy proposals didn't seem very audacious. He actually grew a bit testy when I pushed him on the need for universal health insurance and a more aggressive global-warming policy — neither of which he supported. He has stayed with his less-than-universal health-care plan, and I still find it less than convincing. And his cap-and-trade program to control carbon emissions has taken a backseat to the economic crisis — although Obama insisted that he still favored such a plan, so long as consumers are cushioned with rebates when energy prices rise.
But Obama seems a more certain policymaker now, if not exactly a wonk in the Clintonian sense. He has a clearer handle on the big picture, on how various policy components fit together, and a strong sense of what his top priority would be. He wants to launch an "Apollo project" to build a new alternative-energy economy. His rationale for doing so includes some hard truths about the current economic mess: "The engine of economic growth for the past 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20. That was consumer spending. Basically, we turbocharged this economy based on cheap credit." But the days of easy credit are over, Obama said, "because there is too much deleveraging taking place, too much debt." A new economic turbocharger is going to have to be found, and "there is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy ... That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office."
That sort of clarity is new. At the beginning of the year, Donna Brazile said of Obama, "We know he can walk on water — now where are the loaves and fishes?" The inability to describe his priorities, the inability to speak directly to voters in ways they could easily comprehend, plagued Obama through much of the primary season. His tendency to use big rhetoric in front of big crowds led to McCain's one good spell, after Obama presumptuously spoke to a huge throng in Berlin after his successful Middle East trip. Only a President should make a major address like that overseas. Obama seemed to learn quickly from that mistake; his language during the general-election campaign has been simple, direct and pragmatic. His best moments in the debates came when he explained what he wanted to do as President. His very best moment came in the town-hall debate when he explained how the government bailout would affect average people who were hurting: if companies couldn't get credit from the banks, they couldn't make their payrolls and would have to start laying people off. McCain, by contrast, demonstrated why it's so hard for Senators to succeed as presidential candidates: he talked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the sins of Obama, and never brought the argument home.
But even with his new populist skills, Obama hasn't been as plain as he could be. If an Apollo project to create a new alternative-energy economy is his highest priority, as he told me, why hasn't he given a major speech about it during the fall campaign? Why hasn't he begun to mobilize the nation for this next big mission? In part, I suppose, because campaigns are about firefighting — and this campaign in particular has been about "the fierce urgency of now," to use one of Obama's favorite phrases by Martin Luther King Jr., because of the fears raised by the financial crisis and because of the desperate, ferocious attacks launched by his opponent.
If he wins, however, there will be a different challenge. He will have to return, full force, to the inspiration business. The public will have to be mobilized to face the fearsome new economic realities. He will also have to deliver bad news, to transform crises into "teachable moments." He will have to effect a major change in our political life: to get the public and the media to think about long-term solutions rather than short-term balms. Obama has given some strong indications that he will be able to do this, having remained levelheaded through a season of political insanity. His has been a remarkable campaign, as smoothly run as any I've seen in nine presidential cycles. Even more remarkable, Obama has made race — that perennial, gaping American wound — an afterthought. He has done this by introducing a quality to American politics that we haven't seen in quite some time: maturity. He is undoubtedly as ego-driven as everyone else seeking the highest office — perhaps more so, given his race, his name and his lack of experience. But he has not been childishly egomaniacal, in contrast to our recent baby-boomer Presidents — or petulant, in contrast to his opponent. He does not seem needy. He seems a grown-up, in a nation that badly needs some adult supervision.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1853025,00.html
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Waging the Racist Campaign
Lee Atwater on his deathbed tried to get right with his God by confessing and apologizing for his racism in using Willie Horton and other racist attacks on Democrats. The tradition did not stop with his death. Since then Karl Rove and the Republicans have continued to use racism to divide and misinform the American people. The McCain campaign has continued that tradition, so much so that someone that he cited as a reference for what constitutes moral leadership, Congressman John Lewis, has pointed out that the McCain-Palin rallies are feeding this unsightly course. Linking Barack Obama to terrorism and being unpatriotic is no less racist. McCain would not dare do that to a white Democratic nominee. Bob Herbert makes the point that this patriotism is the real scandal, not the phony issue of registration fraud being waged being waged against ACORN. The attack on ACORN is both a campaign against blacks and the poor. Herbert exposes what he calls “The Real Scandal.” RGN
October 21, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The Real Scandal
By BOB HERBERT
It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.
So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are “pro-America or anti-America.”
Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.
Ms. Bachmann’s demented desire (“I would love to see an exposé like that”) is of a piece with the G.O.P.’s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans — and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.
But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents’ supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they’ve been cast.
Which brings me to the phony Acorn scandal.
John McCain, who placed his principles in a blind trust once the presidential race heated up, warned the country during the presidential debate last week that Acorn, which has been registering people to vote by the hundreds of thousands, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.”
It turns out that a tiny percentage of these new registrations are bogus, with some of them carrying ludicrous names like Mickey Mouse. Republicans have tried to turn this into a mighty oak of a scandal, with Mr. McCain thundering at the debate that it “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.”
Please. The Times put the matter in perspective when it said in an editorial that Acorn needs to be more careful with some aspects of its voter-registration process. It needs to do a better job selecting canvassers, among other things.
“But,” the editorial added, “for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.”
Two important points need to be made here. First, the reckless attempt by Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and others to fan this into a major scandal has made Acorn the target of vandals and a wave of hate calls and e-mail. Acorn staff members have been threatened and sickening, murderous comments have been made about supporters of Barack Obama. (Senator Obama had nothing to do with Acorn’s voter-registration drives.)
Second, when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the G.O.P. and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot. We saw this in 2000. We saw it in 2004. And we’re seeing it again now.
In Montana, the Republican Party challenged the registrations of thousands of legitimate voters based on change-of-address information available from the Post Office. These specious challenges were made — surprise, surprise — in Democratic districts. Answering the challenges would have been a wholly unnecessary hardship for the voters, many of whom were students or members of the armed forces.
In the face of widespread public criticism (even the Republican lieutenant governor weighed in), the party backed off.
That sort of thing is widespread. In one politically crucial state after another — in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it — the G.O.P. has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible — or, better yet, impossible — for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats.
For Senator McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a “threat to the fabric of democracy” is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.
Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state who is now president of Demos, a public policy group, remarked on the irony of elected Republican officials deliberately attempting to thwart voting. Some years ago, he said, he “and all the other secretaries of state” would bemoan the lack of interest in voting, especially among the young and the poor.
Now, he said, with the explosion of voter registration and the heightened interest in the presidential campaign, you’d think officials “would welcome that, and encourage it, and even celebrate it.” Instead, he said, in so many cases, G.O.P. officials are “trying to pare down the lists.”
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Powell Endorsement
MONDAY 20 OCTOBER 2008
Powell Endorses Obama
Sunday 19 October 2008
by: Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times
Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president on Sunday morning as a candidate who was reaching out in a "more diverse and inclusive way across our society" and offering a "calm, patient, intellectual, steady approach" to the nation’s problems.
The endorsement, on the NBC public affairs program "Meet the Press," was a major blow to Senator John McCain, who has been a good friend of Mr. Powell for decades. Mr. Powell, a Republican, has advised Mr. McCain in the past on foreign policy.
Mr. Powell told reporters after the taping of "Meet the Press" that he had been disturbed in recent weeks by the negative tone of Mr. McCain’s campaign, particularly its focus on Mr. Obama’s passing relationship with William Ayers, a 1960s radical and founder of the Weather Underground. The McCain campaign has sought to promote the idea that Mr. Obama is "palling around with terrorists," in the words of Mr. McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, because of Mr. Obama’s weak links to Mr. Ayers.
"I thought that was over the top," Mr. Powell told reporters. "It was beyond just good political fighting back and forth."
Mr. Powell did offer Mr. McCain a small dose of solace by calling him a different kind of Republican, although one who would support the party’s standard positions.
"As gifted as he is, he is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda, with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it," Mr. Powell said. "But I think we need a generational change."
In offering his endorsement, Mr. Powell becomes the highest profile Republican to add his support to the Democratic ticket. Aides said it was not yet known whether the two men would campaign together – or what Mr. Powell would do alone – in the final two weeks of the presidential campaign.
Those talks, aides said, were underway on Sunday.
Mr. Powell’s endorsement exposed a fundamental policy rift in the fractious Republican party foreign policy establishment between the so-called pragmatists, a number of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake, and a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush's first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.
Mr. Powell, who is of the pragmatist camp and has been critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, was said by friends in recent months to be disturbed by some of the neoconservatives who have surrounded Mr. McCain as foreign policy advisers in his presidential campaign. The McCain campaign’s top foreign policy aide is Randy Scheunemann, who was a foreign policy adviser to former Senators Trent Lott and Bob Dole and who has longtime ties to neoconservatives. In 2002, Mr. Scheunemann was a founder of the hawkish Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraqi exile and Pentagon favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, who was viewed with suspicion and distaste at the State Department when Mr. Powell was secretary of state.
Mr. Powell met with both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama in June in preparation to make a possible endorsement. He has said repeatedly in recent months that he wanted to wait until after the political conventions and the presidential debates before making a decision.
Mr. Powell’s support of Mr. Obama was not a surprise to people who know him well and within Washington’s foreign policy establishment, but the Obama campaign welcomed it as a powerful reassurance to voters about Mr. Obama’s national security credentials. Other voters, however, could discount it as an action of a disgruntled member of the Bush administration or as simply the support of one African American for another.
Mr. Powell also told reporters on Sunday that he was troubled that a number of Americans believe that Mr. Obama is a Muslim, although he did not directly link that supposition to the McCain campaign. At a recent town-hall style meeting, Mr. McCain told an audience member who said she thought that Mr. Obama was an "Arab," "no, ma'am, he’s a decent family man."
"These are the kinds of images going out on Al Jazeera that are killing us around the world," Mr. Powell said. "And we have got to say to the world it doesn’t make any difference who you are and what you are. If you’re an American you’re an American."
Mr. McCain was asked about Mr. Powell's endorsement during an interview on Fox News Sunday.
"I have always admired and respected General Powell," Mr. McCain said. "We have a respectful disagreement."
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Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.
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