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.

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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.”

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."

---------

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

r

Record Rally in St. Louis: 100,000!!!!!

MONDAY 20 OCTOBER 2008

Obama Says Meet Me in St. Louis - and a Record 100,000 Turn Up
Saturday 18 October 2008
by: Julian Gavaghan, The Daily Mail UK

Senator Barack Obama spoke to aa enthusiastic crowd of over 100,000 people in St. Louis Missouri on Saturday. (PHOTO: Jae C. Hong / AP)

Barack Obama made history again today after drawing the highest American crowd of this year's presidential campaign.

The senator who became the first black man to become a candidate was cheered on by more than 100,000 people in St. Louis, Missouri.

"All I can say is wow," he said as he took the stage in his latest bid to woo voters in the key battleground state.

Every four years, Missouri commands attention because of its bellwether status. It has voted for every presidential winner since 1900, with the exception of 1956.

The Illinois Democrat has drawn big crowds all through his contest with John McCain, who Mr Obama now leads by up to 14 points in nationwide polls.

In May the 47-year-old attracted about 75,000 to an event in Portland, Oregon before that state's primary election.

And in the German capital, Berlin, he drew more than 200,000 during a foreign tour in July.

But today's massive crowd in his neighbouring state set a record at home for the charismatic candidate.

Mr Obama used the speech to defend his tax cut proposals, which Mr McCain, an Arizona senator, had criticised earlier in the day during a stop in North Carolina.

"John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing, he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare.'" he told the crowd assembled in a city square.

"George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas, they are out of touch, and if you stand with me in 17 days they'll be out of time."

But despite Mr Obama's runaway national lead, the U.S. election depends on candidates winning big states.

And a CNN/Time/Opinion Research poll released earlier this week showed the two candidates in a virtual tie in Missouri, the 18th most populous state.

Today's visit was his seventh trip to there since he secured the nomination.

Mr McCain, meanwhile, is schedule to stop in the state on Monday.

The ability of Mr Obama to give attention to Missouri little more than two weeks before Election Day stands in stark contrast to John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee who had virtually conceded Missouri at this point in his campaign.

As it has in other states, economic stress in Missouri has boosted Mr Obama's campaign here, as voters express strong frustration with the nation's current direction.

If he is to win the state, Mr Obama will need to boost turnout in the urban centers of St. Louis and Kansas City to counter the state's strong base of conservative evangelicals.

His campaign, however, has been aggressively registering new voters, especially in the major urban centres of St. Louis and Kansas City, where it hopes to dramatically increase voter turnout.

Even before Obama secured his party's nomination, he started making trips into the state, including one in May where he met with workers in Cape Girardeau, the boyhood home of ultra conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

"We're going to spend a lot of time in Missouri making sure we win this state," Obama said during that stop.

----

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama-as prepared for delivery
St. Louis, Missouri
Saturday 18 October 2008

We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic crisis we face is the worst since the Great Depression. As the stock market has plummeted, millions of Americans have opened up their 401(k) statements to see that so much of their hard-earned savings have disappeared.

The credit crisis has left businesses large and small unable to get loans, which means they can't buy new equipment, or hire new workers, or even make payroll for the workers they have. In households across the country, it's getting harder and harder to get a loan for that new car or that startup-business or that college you've dreamed of attending. Wages are lower than they've been in nearly a decade. You're paying more for everything from gas to groceries, but your paychecks have flat-lined.

I know these are difficult times. I know folks are worried. But I believe that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis because I believe in this country. Because this is the United States of America. This is a nation that has faced down war and depression; great challenges and great threats. The American story has never been about things coming easy - it's been about rising to the moment when the moment is hard.

America can meet this moment. We have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on Earth. We're home to innovation and technology, colleges and universities that are the envy of the world. Some of the biggest ideas in history have come from our small businesses and research facilities. It won't be easy, but there's no reason we can't make this century another American century.

But Missouri, I also know this. It will take a new direction. It will take new leadership in Washington. It will take a real change in the policies and politics of the last eight years. And that's why I'm running for President of the United States of America.

Even as we face the most serious economic crisis of our time; even as you are worried about keeping your jobs or paying your bills or staying in your homes, my opponent's campaign announced earlier this month that they want to 'turn the page' on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead. Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

Well, Missouri, here's what my opponent doesn't seem to understand. With the economy in turmoil and the American Dream at risk, the American people don't want to hear politicians attack each other - you want to hear about how we're going to attack the challenges facing middle class families each and every day. You want to hear about the issues that matter in your lives. You want to hear about how we're going to bring about the change that we desperately need for our country. That's what the American people want to hear.

So let's talk about the issues that matter. In the debate this week, my opponent felt the need to inform me that he's not President Bush. And in fairness, I don't blame Senator McCain for all of President Bush's mistakes. After all, he's only voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time.

But it is fair to say that over the course of three debates and twenty months, Senator McCain still hasn't offered a single thing that he would do differently from George W. Bush when it comes to the most important economic issues we face today. Not one.

Just look at taxes. My opponent's been talking a lot about taxes in his campaign. But here's the truth Missouri - we are both offering tax cuts. The difference is who we're cutting taxes for.

It comes down to values - in America, do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it? For eight years, we've seen what happens when we put the extremely wealthy and well-connected ahead of working people. Now, John McCain thinks that the way to rebuild this economy is to double down on George Bush's policy of giving more and more tax breaks to those at the very top in the false hope that it will all trickle down. I think it's time to rebuild the middle class in this country, and that is the choice in this election.

Senator McCain wants to give the average Fortune 500 CEO a $700,000 tax cut but absolutely nothing at all to over 100 million Americans. I want to cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all workers. And under my plan, if you make less than $250,000 a year - which includes 98 percent of small business owners - you won't see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes - nothing. It's time to give the middle class a break, and that's what I'll do as President of the United States.

Lately, Senator McCain has been attacking my middle class tax cut. He actually said it goes to, "those who don't pay taxes," even though it only goes to working people who are already getting taxed on their paycheck. That's right, Missouri - John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people "welfare."

The only "welfare" in this campaign is John McCain's plan to give another $200 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations in America - including $4 billion in tax breaks to big oil companies that ran up record profits under George Bush.

That's who John McCain is fighting for. But we can't afford four more years like the last eight. George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas, they are out of touch, and if you stand with me in 17 days they will be out of time.

We need new priorities in Washington. I think it's time to give a tax cut to the teachers and janitors who work in our schools; to the cops and firefighters who keep us safe; to the waitresses working double shifts, the nurses in the ER, and the plumbers fighting for their American Dream. These workers are the backbone of our country. They are the ones that Washington has forgotten. They're the ones I'll fight for. And while Senator McCain ignores the payroll taxes you pay to score a few political points, I'll put a tax cut into the pockets of working people so you can pay the bills, put away some savings, and pass on a brighter future to your children.

So Senator McCain can keep trying to attack me and distract you - but it's not going to work. Not this time - not now. Because while my opponent thinks this campaign is all about me - the truth is, this campaign is about you. Your jobs. Your health care. Your retirement. Your children's future. That's what this election is about. That's what I'm fighting for. Because I can take 2 more weeks of these attacks from John McCain, but the American people can't take four more years of the same failed policies and the same divisive politics. That's why I'm running for President of the United States.

It is time to turn the page on eight years of economic policies that put Wall Street before Main Street but ended up hurting both. We need policies that grow our economy from the bottom-up, so that every American, everywhere, has the chance to get ahead. Not just the person who owns the factory, but the men and women who work on its floor. Because if we've learned anything from this economic crisis, it's that we're all connected; we're all in this together; and we will rise or fall as one nation - as one people.

The rescue plan that passed the Congress was a necessary first step to easing this credit crisis, but now we need a rescue plan for the middle class. If we're going to rebuild this economy from the bottom up, it has to start on Main Street - not just the big banks on Wall Street. That's why I've outlined several steps that we have to take right now to help folks who are struggling.

First, we've got to act now to create good paying jobs. We've already lost three-quarters of a million jobs this year. That's why I've proposed a new American jobs tax credit for each new employee that companies hire here in the United States over the next two years. And that's why I'll stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas and invest in companies that create good jobs right here in Missouri.

Second, we need to help small businesses get back on their feet. To fuel the real engine of job creation in this country, I'll eliminate all capital gains taxes on investments in small businesses and start-up companies, and provide an additional tax incentive through next year to encourage new small business investment. And we'll also make sure that small businesses can access the immediate loans they need to pay their workers and finance their inventory.

Third, we need to provide relief for homeowners. The Treasury must use the authority it's been granted and move aggressively to help people avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes. We don't need a new law or a new $300 billion giveaway to banks like Senator McCain has proposed. We just need to act quickly and decisively. For those responsible homeowners in danger of losing their homes, I've proposed a three-month moratorium on foreclosures so that we give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet.

Finally, we've got to help states and local governments that have been squeezed. Today, twenty-one states are facing budget short-falls, and they might be forced to cut services or raise taxes. That's why I'm going to create a $25 billion fund to help states and local governments pay for health care and education, police and firefighters, without having to raise your taxes. And we'll save one million jobs by creating a Jobs and Growth Fund that will help states move forward with projects to rebuild and repair our roads, our bridges, and our schools.

These are the steps that we must take - right now - to start getting our economy back on track. But we also need a new set of priorities to grow our economy and create jobs over the long-term.

If I am President, I will invest $15 billion a year in renewable sources of energy to create five million new, green jobs over the next decade - jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced; jobs building solar panels and wind turbines and fuel-efficient cars; jobs that will help us end our dependence on oil from Middle East dictators.

I'll also put two million more Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges - because it is time to build an American infrastructure for the 21st century. And if people ask how we're going to pay for this, you tell them that if we can spend $10 billion a month in Iraq, we can spend some money to rebuild America.

If I am President, I will finally fix our broken health care system. This issue is personal for me. My mother died of ovarian cancer at the age of 53, and I'll never forget how she spent the final months of her life lying in a hospital bed, fighting with her insurance company because they claimed that her cancer was a pre-existing condition and didn't want to pay for treatment. If I am President, I will make sure those insurance companies can never do that again.

My health care plan will make sure insurance companies can't discriminate against those who are sick and need care most. If you have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums. If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance that Members of Congress get for themselves. And we'll invest in preventative care and new technology to finally lower the cost of health care for families, businesses, and the entire economy. That's the change we need.

Senator McCain has been eager to share some details of his health care plan - but not all. First, we found out that he wants to pay for his plan by taxing your health care benefits for the first time in history, just like George Bush. That was bad enough. But it turns out, Senator McCain would pay for part of his plan by making drastic cuts in Medicare ñ$882 billion worth. Under his plan, if you count on Medicare, you would have fewer places to get care, and less freedom to choose your doctors. You'll pay more for your drugs, receive fewer services, and get lower quality care.

I think every single American has a right to affordable accessible health care. We can strengthen Medicare by eliminating wasteful subsidies to big HMOs in Medicare, and making sure seniors can access home-based care, and letting Medicare negotiate with drug companies for better prices. That's the kind of change we need.

And if I'm President, we'll give every child, everywhere the skills and the knowledge they need to compete with any worker, anywhere in the world. I will not allow countries to out-teach us today so they can out-compete us tomorrow. It is time to provide every American with a world-class education. That means investing in early childhood education. That means recruiting an army of new teachers, and paying them better, and giving them more support in exchange for higher standards and more accountability.

And it means making a deal with every American who has the drive and the will but not the money to go to college. My opponent's top economic advisor actually said that they have no plan to invest in college affordability because we can't have a giveaway to every special interest. Well I don't think the young people of America are a special interest - they are the future of this country. That's why I'll make this deal with you: if you commit to serving your community or your country, we will make sure you can afford your tuition. No ifs, ands or buts. You invest in America, America will invest in you, and together, we will move this country forward.

Finally, I will take on the corruption in Washington and on Wall Street to make sure a crisis like this can never, ever happen again. I'll put in place the common-sense regulations and rules of the road I've been calling for since March - rules that will keep our market free, fair, and honest; rules that will restore accountability and responsibility in our corporate boardrooms.

And just as we demand accountability on Wall Street, I will also demand it in Washington. That's why I'm not going to stand here and simply tell you what I'm going to spend, I'm going to tell you how we're going to save when I am President.

I'll do what you do in your own family budgets and make sure we're spending money wisely. I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line, and eliminate programs that don't work and aren't needed. We'll start by ending a war in Iraq that's cost us nearly a trillion dollars. And we'll save billions more by cutting waste, improving management, and strengthening oversight.

These are the changes and reforms we need. A new era of responsibility and accountability on Wall Street and in Washington. Common-sense regulations to prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again. Investments in the technology and innovation that will restore prosperity and lead to new jobs and a new economy for the 21st century. Bottom-up growth that gives every American a fair shot at the American dream. And above all confidence ñ confidence in America, confidence in our economy, and confidence in ourselves.

I won't pretend this will be easy or come without cost. We will all need to sacrifice and we will all need to pull our weight because now more than ever, we are all in this together. This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we haven't seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its way and its purpose? When we allowed our own petty differences and broken politics to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?

Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognizing that common stake that we have in each other's success?

This is one of those moments. I realize you're cynical and fed up with politics. I understand that you're disappointed and even angry with your leaders. You have every right to be. But despite all of this, I ask of you what's been asked of the American people in times of trial and turmoil throughout our history. I ask you to believe - to believe in yourselves, in each other, and in the future we can build together.

Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes. Not when there are families who can't afford to see a doctor, or send their child to college, or pay their bills at the end of the month. Not when there is a generation that is counting on us to give them the same opportunities and the same chances that we had for ourselves.

We are 17 days away from changing this country. 17 days. But for those who are getting a little cocky, I've got two words for you: New Hampshire. That's where I learned - with the help of my great friend and supporter Hillary Clinton - that you can't let up or pay too much attention to the polls. We've got to keep making our case for change; we've got to keep fighting for every vote; we've got to keep running through that finish line. This election is too important to take anything for granted. The future that you and I seek for our children is too important to let up now. The time for change has come.

We can do this. Americans have done this before. Some of us had grandparents or parents who said maybe I can't go to college but my child can; maybe I can't have my own business but my child can. I may have to rent, but maybe my children will have a home they can call their own. I may not have a lot of money but maybe my child will run for Senate. I might live in a small village but maybe someday my son can be president of the United States of America.

Now it falls to us. Together, we cannot fail. And I need you to make it happen. If you want the next four years looking like the last eight, then I am not your candidate. But if you want real change - if you want an economy that rewards work, and that works for Main Street and Wall Street; if you want tax relief for the middle class and millions of new jobs; if you want health care you can afford and education that helps your kids compete; then I ask you to knock on some doors, make some calls, talk to your neighbors, and give me your vote on November 4th. And if you do, I promise you - we will win Missouri, we will win this election, and then you and I - together - will change this country and change this world. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless America.

Record Fundraising: You Did It!!!!

Obama raises record $150 million in September
• Story Highlights
• September amount is biggest monthly fundraising total for a presidential
campaign
• The Obama campaign added 632,000 new donors in September
• McCain accepted $85 million in federal funds for last two months of campaign

DUNN, North Carolina (CNN) -- Barack Obama's campaign announced Sunday the Democratic presidential candidate raised $150 million in donations in September, setting a new high-water mark in campaign fundraising.

Barack Obama calls a prospective voter from a headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday.

In a campaign video, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said a record 632,000 new donors gave to the campaign, with the average contribution under $100. More than 3 million donors have given so far.

The Obama campaign raised $65 million in August.

Regardless of the stunning haul, Plouffe told supporters the campaign still needed more money because of "the slime that we're getting from the McCain campaign."

Plouffe cited recent attack ads and automated phone calls in battleground states and said the campaign needed to have every resource to "fight back."

"Their campaign is going to descend even more into the gutter," he said.
Plouffe also said the campaign was expanding its reach to compete "aggressively" in West Virginia.

Tightening polls in Georgia and North Dakota meant more money and resources could be sent to those two states in the remaining days, he said.

"We can't afford to make any cuts. We have to execute everything we think is required to win," Plouffe said of their battleground strategy. "None of us can look back on the night of November 4 or the morning of November 5 and wished we had done something extra."

The McCain campaign accepted $85 million in federal matching funds for the last two months of the campaign.

The Obama campaign opted out of the matching funds program and is free to raise and spend as much money as it can.

Murtha's "Racist" Pennsylvania: What the People are Saying

Is it possible that racism does not matter when it comes to Obama? Check out the response to the canvasser just below the Jack Kerouac report from "On the Road." It will put the "racism thing" in perspective. We have got the keep working to make the landslide a reality. The 50-state strategy is working and remains a possibility. It was encouraging when we saw "Republicans for Obama." Then there was "Bikers for Obama." That was even more encouraging. At the Democratic National Convention, there was reason to be ecstatic when we saw "Rednecks for Obama." Now we are talking about "Racists for Obama!" Has Obama won all of America??? RGN

On the Road: Western Pennsylvania
“I walked five miles to get out of Pittsburgh, and two rides, an apple truck and a big trailer truck, took me to Harrisburg in the soft Indian-summer rainy night. I cut right along. I wanted to get home…. That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof?”

– Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can't win those voters? John Murtha's "racist" western Pennsylvania district, where this story takes place, is some of the roughest turf in the nation. But Barack Obama is on the ground and making inroads due to unusually strong organizing leadership.

In Washington County, a bellwether in this traditional swing state that John Kerry carried by a mere 552 votes out of over 96,000 cast, the Obama campaign's mood is optimistic but very cautious. The campaign has registered over 4,000 new voters in this county, and enough statewide since the primary season to push the Democratic registration edge to over 1.2 million.

Still, Barack Obama wasn't competitive in the primary, and getting volunteers, knocks and phone calls was tough over the summer. "After the primary many of the Obama supporters were tired and were enjoying their summer," according to longtime resident and Obama Neighborhood Team Leader Greg Roth, whose house was used as a staging location during the primary. "Also, it took some time for some of the Hillary supporters come around."

As the campaign shifts into GOTV (get out the vote) mode, its universe of targeted voters begins to change. "We know who our voters are," said Roth. "Now we just have to go get them to vote." Asked if the racism resistance to Obama would inhibit volunteer effort here, "We had probably 200 people last night show up to our GOTV training in Washington, and it's a complete 180 from the tough summer months."


Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain's campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then "Obama" asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, "Obama" then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using "n***er" and other shock language.

From what we've seen, this IS the McCain ground campaign. Robocalls count as "touches" on voters, as do direct mail pieces such as this one. As David Plouffe said in today's fundraising letter to supporters, "These tactics are all that the McCain campaign and their allies have left."

In Pittsburgh, we attended Michelle Obama speech at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial on Pitt's campus. The crowd received her with adoration, and she didn't disappoint, delivering a 45-minute speech to an assembled group of roughly 2,000 on the personal nature of the economic crisis, education, costs of the Iraq War, and health care. She urged the audience not to get complacent, even as polls in Pennsylvania showed a widening race. Work "as if we're 20 points behind," she said.

"Barack Obama, as far as I'm concerned, was always the underdog. He is still the underdog, will be the underdog until the day he's sitting in the Oval Office. We take nothing for granted."

Strongly directed from the candidate himself, Obama's campaign organizers are taking nothing for granted, and the relentless organizing beat goes on. To accommodate the more spread out nature of the turf in west-central PA, over in the more rural upper half of Cambria County, Obama's aggressive campaign has organized its volunteers to improvise with phonebank and canvass staging locations out of apartments and offices after-hours.

"Our first night about a month ago," said volunteer Jim Sabella, "about four of us huddled around a one-bulb lamp to make calls." The apartment the volunteers used for the phonebank hadn't even had the electricity turned back on yet, and so they had to improvise. "We patched it through from the neighbors with an extension cord and just decided, we will do whatever it takes. Enough is enough, and we can't take another four years like the last eight." Now well-lit, the phone bank hosts several volunteers nearly every night of the week.

Eighteen days. Philly burbs, here we come.

For the full report and graphics see: 538.com

Politico: Racists for Obama

Racists for Obama?
By: Ben Smith
October 18, 2008 10:56 AM EST

New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African-Americans.

Race has become the elephant in the room of the 2008 presidential campaign, with Obama’s prospect of becoming the first black president drawing some Americans closer to him while pushing others away. At times, the contest has slipped into a familiar dynamic of allegations of racism and outraged denial — but it's also challenged some easy assumptions about race, racism and prejudice.

“What you see is it’s perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African-Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Racial feelings are not as cut and dried — not as black and white — as people often say.”

Franklin explored those contradictions in a large, national survey taken in mid-September, when the Illinois Democratic senator's rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led in many polls and the nation’s economic woes had not yet produced a deep crisis. The poll asked voters whether they agreed with the statement that “African-Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing." About a fifth of white voters said they “strongly agreed.” Yet among those who agreed, 23 percent said they’d be supporting Obama.

“This result is reasonable if you believe that race is not as monolithic an effect as we might easily assume,” Franklin said, noting that 22 percent of those who "strongly disagreed" said they'd be supporting McCain.

Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there’s a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man.

“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.

One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”

The notion that there might be “racists for Obama,” as one Democrat called them, comes against the backdrop of a country whose white voters largely accept the notion of a black president.

“The economy is trumping racism,” said Kurt Schmoke, the dean of Howard University Law School and a former Baltimore mayor. “A lot of people who we might think wouldn’t vote their pocketbook because of race — now they are.”

“If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, ‘How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,’ they would say, ‘That doesn’t sound good to me,’” said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. “But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it’s a different situation.”

“The house is on fire, and one guy seems like he’s calm and confident and in charge, and that’s the only option,” he said.

That is, in less dramatic terms, more or less the campaign’s official talking point, a version of the longtime Democratic hope that class will — or at least should — matter more than race.

“Voters are less interested in the hot button and are more interested in the cooling economy,” said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), an Obama ally who is as on-message as his father is off.

But other, more nuanced, questions of race are also in play.

One senior congressional Democrat mused about prejudice among his own supporters. “They’ve all got one black friend,” he said, “and they won’t stop talking about their black friend.”

“That’s Obama,” he said.

And some argue that elements of Obama’s story and persona make him specifically acceptable to voters who hold broadly negative views of African-Americans.

“Not all whites associate the generic African-American with Obama,” said Ron Walters, a longtime student of race and politics and aide to the senior Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. “They give him credit for having half a Caucasian ancestry, and give him credit for his education, and give him credit for his obvious ability to take complex subjects and parse them.”

The geography of racial conflict and tolerance has been a strong overlay of the electoral map. Obama has run better than past Democrats in prosperous states with little history of tension, such as Colorado and Iowa, and worse in working-class states in the Appalachian belt. His campaign has been structured around this dynamic and may actually have overestimated the number of white Democrats in the region unwilling to vote for him because of his race. Obama had ignored West Virginia, for instance, until a spate of positive polls prompted him to start advertising there this week.

Obama has also ignored Southern states with a history of deep racial division, from Arkansas to Mississippi, in favor of those that have seen an influx of new voters from the north — Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.

Until this fall, both campaigns viewed Michigan — a heavily Democratic state, but one with a history of tension between Detroit and its white suburbs — as Obama’s Achilles’ heel. In 2006, the state was deeply divided by a referendum to ban affirmative action. The measure was opposed by most African-American voters as an assault on hard-won gains, but it won broad support among whites and passed by a double-digit margin.

But earlier this month, McCain gave up the state for lost as economic concerns appear to have trumped racial ones.

“Obama’s personality — his speech, his look — he provides [white voters] with a non-threatening way to move forward on this issue, and that’s a very positive development,” said David Waymire, who led the unsuccessful opposition to the anti-affirmative action initiative. “He is not Kwame Kilpatrick,” he said, referring to the Detroit mayor who resigned last month after pleading guilty in a sex and misconduct scandal.

For black observers of American politics in particular, Obama’s ability to win over voters who harbor negative views of African-Americans at large is a complex, but hopeful, sign.

“I didn’t think the election itself is necessarily going to transport a lot of people, but I’ve been changing my view on that a bit lately,” said Walters. “I’ve been in personal circumstances where I said to myself, ‘I wonder if this person sees me differently because a black person is about to be the president of the United States?’”
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

See/Hear George Lakoff

Be sure to see the George Lakoff talk on the Political Mind.

William Kristal to McCain: Give it Up!!!!????

Even the Neocons are saying to McCain, throw in the towel. At least that seems to be the message of William Krystal when he tells McCain to fire his campaign staff. That’s not exactly what they are saying but they might as well. With Sarah Palin as its lifeblood, the McCain campaign is unraveling. The negativity and white nationalist character of their campaign, McCain and Palin stoked the flames of extremism in desperation. As many conservatives and Republicans realize, the McCain campaign is a bust. The wheels are coming off.

That being the case, unless something drastic happens between now and November, Barack will win big. It will be a landslide. While I am hedging my bets on a 50-state victory, that is still a possibility. Barack is leading McCain among all demographics except the white male vote and the over 70s white vote. What this means that power has shifted from the “segregationist era” whites many of whom continue to cling to their male chauvinist white nationalist upbringing to a post-Brown, post Civil Rights era America.

McCain’s campaign has been backward and inept from the start. Given the dismal record of the Bush administration, conservatives and Republicans have lost all credibility with thinking people, left, right and center. The only people supporting McCain are low-information voters, unrepentant Republicans and white nationalists. Now with the nation in a financial crisis, there is no reason to believe that the American people will waste their vote on the failed candidacy of John McCain. Many of his “supporters” will stay home.

With such lame opposition, this election should be a landslide not only for Obama but the Democratic Party and its principles. Barack’s coattails will change Washington. RGN


October 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Fire the Campaign
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.
He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.
He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.
But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.
The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.
What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.
And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.
Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.
The hope for McCain and Palin is that they still have pretty good favorable ratings from the voters. The American people have by no means turned decisively against them.
The bad news, of course, is that right now Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is better than McCain’s. Indeed, Obama’s is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama.
So drop them.
Not because they’re illegitimate. I think many of them are reasonable. Obama’s relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is, I believe, a legitimate issue. But McCain ruled it out of bounds, and he’s sticking to that. And for whatever reason — the public mood, campaign ineptness, McCain’s alternation between hesitancy and harshness, which reflects the fact that he’s uncomfortable in the attack role — the other attacks on Obama just aren’t working. There’s no reason to think they’re suddenly going to.
There are still enough doubts about Obama to allow McCain to win. But McCain needs to make his case, and do so as a serious but cheerful candidate for times that need a serious but upbeat leader.
McCain should stop unveiling gimmicky proposals every couple of days that pretend to deal with the financial crisis. He should tell the truth — we’re in uncharted waters, no one is certain what to do, and no one knows what the situation will be on Jan. 20, 2009. But what we do know is that we could use someone as president who’s shown in his career the kind of sound judgment and strong leadership we’ll need to make it through the crisis.
McCain can make the substantive case for his broadly centrist conservatism. He can explain that our enemies won’t take a vacation because the markets are down, and that it’s not unimportant that he’s ready to be commander in chief. He can remind voters that even in a recession, the president appoints federal judges — and that his judges won’t legislate from the bench.
And he can point out that there’s going to be a Democratic Congress. He can suggest that surely we’d prefer a president who would check that Congress where necessary and work with it where possible, instead of having an inexperienced Democratic president joined at the hip with an all-too-experienced Democratic Congress, leading us, unfettered and unchecked, back to 1970s-style liberalism.
At Wednesday night’s debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.
He’d enjoy it. And he might even win it.

From the Nation: Conservatives as Crack Pots

The Conservative Crack-Up (And Crackpots)

posted by Ari Berman on 10/13/2008 @ 12:21pm

With the Republican Party experiencing a full-blown implosion, conservatives are grasping at straws in a desperate effort to bring down Barack Obama.

The latest fashionable right-wing conspiracy theory: Obama didn't write his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Bill Ayers did!

You can't make this stuff up--or, if you're a writer for the fringe website the American Thinker (a major promulgator of numerous Obama smears) I suppose you can. One of its contributors, Jack Cashill, compared Obama's memoir with Ayers' Fugitive Days and concluded that only the former Weatherman could've authored Obama's book (even though, for starters, Obama got the contract for his book in 1990 and didn't meet Ayers until 1995, the year his memoir came out).

Normally I'd just ignore such bogus drivel, except that Cashill's smear was picked up by Andy McCarthy of National Review, which still enjoys (perhaps unfairly) a modicum of respectability.

"Did Obama Write Dreams from My Father ... Or Did Ayers?" asked McCarthy on Saturday. "I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia," McCarthy writes, and then goes on to do just that. (In case you've forgotten, some conservatives accused Bill Clinton of murdering his longtime friend, Vince Foster, in 1993.)

McCarthy's rant was too much for fellow National Review contributor Jonathan Adler, the director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western University, to handle. Wrote Adler:

C'mon Andy. Giving credence to Jack Cashill's maybe-Ayers-wrote-Obama's-book theory is a bit much. This is even more outlandish than his stuff alleging a possible connection between Enron and Ron Brown's death. Even if Obama's book was ghost-written---and I've seen no evidence that it was--fingering Ayers as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff.

Thus gave rise to a civil war at National Review's group blog, the Corner, over whether or not Obama wrote his own memoir. Responded McCarthy:
I resisted reading Cashill's analysis for a long time---and he's not the first to advance the idea that Obama did not write his book---because I didn't want to be accused of wading into what could be taken as nutter stuff. I was then persuaded that I should at least look at it with an open mind. I'm convinced it raises major questions. I tried to treat them in a serious way. I expected to get gruff, but I did hope it wouldn't come from my own (diminishing) ranks. But such is the way it is these days.

Yes, these days conservatives can call out other conservatives as lunatics. Get used to it, Andy. Responded Adler in round II:

It's still a giant leap to Cashill's suggestion that Ayers was the actual writer of Obama's book, his "analysis" notwithstanding. There are more serious issues at stake, and we can do better than that.

But can they? While the economy tanks and America plunges into recession, there's nothing but Ayers, Ayers, Ayers over at the Corner. Not so long ago, conservatives liked to brag about how they belonged to the "party of ideas." When those ideas run dry--or are actually implemented to disastrous effect (see Bush, George W.), conspiracy-mongering is all they have left.

Stanley Fish on the Classroom and Buttons and Bows

October 12, 2008, 9:30 pm
Buttons and Bows
By Stanley Fish

Campaign buttons are a staple of any political season, but this year they are also central to yet another dispute about the rights of classroom teachers. The dispute has both a K-12 and a college version. In New York City, Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein announced that his administration would enforce a longstanding policy prohibiting teachers from wearing campaign buttons when they are at work. In Illinois, the state university ethics office stated in its newsletter that faculty are barred not only from wearing campaign buttons in the classroom, but also from placing political bumper stickers on their cars and attending political rallies on campus.

Reaction was swift and predictable. In a letter to Chancellor Klein, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten noted that teachers have always “been allowed to express their opinions as citizens, political and otherwise, on their lapels.” American Association of University Professors President Cary Nelson (an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana) issued a statement deploring the “chilling effect on speech” of such rules, which, he says, amount to “interference with the educational process.” He asks why “students can exercise their constitutional rights and attend rallies and wear buttons advocating candidates, but faculty cannot?”

There’s a lot to sort out here, and we might begin by separating the real issues from the silly ones.

It is silly (and unconstitutional) to dictate what faculty members can put on their cars, especially at a state university like Illinois where the parking lots are the size of Rhode Island and the odds of a student knowing which car belongs to which professor are next to nothing. At a more intimate liberal arts college, students might be aware of what cars their teachers drive, but it is unreasonable to require that students be shielded from any knowledge of professors’ political views, unless you want to say that faculty members can’t write letters to the editor because students might read them, and no one wants to say that.

The ban against attending political rallies is a closer call. On a campus with a small number of students and faculty, all of whom interact daily in a limited number of courses, there might be a worry that going directly from a rally into a classroom would run the risk of blurring the line between pedagogy and politics.

But again the risk seems too attenuated to justify a policy designed to minimize it. Joseph White, president of the University of Illinois, seems to agree, for on Oct. 6 he clarified (or, rather, backed down from) the ethics office’s memo and announced that university employees may “attend political rallies, provided that the employees are not on duty” and may also “display partisan bumper stickers on their vehicles.” (I would ban bumper stickers on aesthetic grounds, but that’s besides today’s point.)

That leaves the campaign buttons. On that matter, which is the real deal, White says that university employers may wear them so long they are not “on duty nor in the workplace.”

While there might be an argument about what is or is not “in the workplace,” classrooms surely are. So presumably the ban on professors wearing political buttons in class stands. Some of those protesting the restriction want to assimilate it to the attempt to regulate bumper stickers. Sherman Dorn acknowledges (on his blog) that “you can’t use public property to support candidates,” but “I assume,” he says, that “faculty buy their own clothes, so they’re festooning personal property” in the same way they festoon their personally owned vehicles.

But the issue is not whether the clothes or, for that matter, the buttons, belong to the teachers; the issue is what they’re using them for; and if they’re using them as political billboards — announcing their partisan identifications from their chests — the question of the intrusion of politics in the classroom cannot be avoided.

One way of answering it is to claim, as Leo Casey does, that teachers who wear campaign buttons are performing a valuable educational purpose. Rather than harm, he says, there is “some worthwhile good in students knowing that their teachers were engaged in the primary right and responsibility of citizenship-participation in the political process.”

But you don’t have to be overtly partisan in order to proclaim the virtue of participating in the political process. You can get that message across with a button that reads “I will vote on November 4th” or “Voting sustains Democracy.” A button that says Obama or McCain says only one thing: I’m for this guy and you should be, too. It doesn’t advance democracy; it advances a party.

Randi Weingarten’s failure to see this distinction is almost comical. She begins a sentence by saying that “teachers understand they cannot proselytize their personal beliefs” and ends it by saying that “they also understand the importance of showing students the value of civic participation.” But in what way is wearing a campaign button different from proselytizing your personal beliefs? You don’t have to be taking up a collection for a candidate in order to make a pitch for him. A campaign button will do just fine, and the student who sees it day after day will wonder if it might be prudent to slant an essay in a certain direction.

And as for Cary Nelson’s point (which others also make) that if students can wear campaign buttons, why can’t teachers too, the answer is obvious: if I look out and see Heather and Kevin turning themselves into advertisements for a candidate, my behavior doesn’t alter at all; but if they look up and see me announcing where I stand, they might well alter their behavior in ways of which they are not even aware. Faculty advocacy, even if it is technically silent, distorts and pollutes the educational process.

But what about a faculty member’s rights? This is the most often voiced objection to the button ban. It curtails the constitutionally protected speech of teachers. In a letter to President White, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education (an organization with whose positions I usually agree) cites Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and its famous statement that “It can hardly be argued that either teachers or students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the school house gate.” But as it turns out, this ringing declaration is merely flag-waving, for after delivering it the court announces a test (there’s always a test) that determines whether or not an abridgment of speech rights is O.K.: Does the speech at issue “materially disrupt the work and discipline of the school?”
In this case the school district did not allege any such disruption and so the majority ruled for the students who had been disciplined for wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. But the test opens the way for schools (and colleges) to argue that a particular form of speech does constitute a disruption, and subsequent cases have veered in the direction of Justice Black’s dissenting view that students and teachers do not have the right to “use the schools at their whim as a platform for the exercise of free speech,” if only because teachers are “hired to teach” and it is no business of the schools “to broadcast political or any other views to educate and inform the public.”

Justice Harlan, also writing in dissent, added that unless the regulation was designed “to prohibit the expression of an unpopular view,” schools officials “should be accorded the widest authority in maintaining discipline and good order in their institutions.” Harlan points in the direction of a conclusion I would endorse.

Restricting the behavior of teachers and students is in most cases a matter not of constitutional rights but of workplace requirements. FIRE castigates Illinois for denying its faculty “the right to engage in simple political speech like wearing campaign buttons.”

But the university does no such thing. When faculty members are not in class, they remain free to sport their buttons (White remarks that “many parts of campus are not workplaces”), and when they leave the campus, the university has no say at all about what they do or do not wear. The university’s judgment is that political speech does not belong in the classroom, which no more denies a teacher’s constitutional rights than a hospital would deny a nurse’s rights if it disciplined her for advocating for better working conditions in the middle of an operation.

My point is made for me by William Van Alstyne, past President of the AAUP and one of the world’s leading authorities on the first amendment. In a letter to current president Nelson, Van Alstyne corrects his view that faculty “have a first amendment right” to wear campaign buttons. “I have no doubt at all,” he declares, “that a university rule disallowing faculty members from exhibiting politically-partisan buttons in the classroom is not only not forbidden by the first amendment; rather, it is a perfectly well-justified policy that would easily be sustained against a faculty member who disregards the policy.”

Right! It’s no big deal. It’s a policy matter, not a moral or philosophical matter, and as long as the policy is reasonably related to the institution’s purposes, it raises no constitutional issues at all. On Oct. 10, the United Federation of Teachers filed suit to reverse the button ban, claiming that the free speech rights of teachers had been violated. If that’s their case, they’ll lose.

Ron Walters on the Bradley Effect: Not to Worry.

My Take on the Bradley Effect

By Ron Walters

As the election has drawn nearer, there has been an inevitable debate about the way in which race will play out, even spoil the result, and in that respect the so-called “Bradley Effect” – whites saying they will vote for a black candidate to pollsters, but not doing so when they go to vote – may play a role. I have been in the camp which says that the Bradley Effect may determine the election, to the point that I doubted Michele Obama who told Larry King on his TV show recently that if there was a Bradley Effect, Barack Obama would not have won the primary election. Trying to reconcile various stains of this complex issue, the primary elections do stand as something of a refutation that is a Bradley Effect at play, but looking deeper, there are other things as well.

I think there is a unique emotional content in this election that is driving it beyond the normal cues we use to determine the outcome of elections. In fact, I have used the term “landslide” several time out of respect for what I have seen on almost every indicator to determine the result of this one. The emotional content I am suggesting consists of several factors. There is the historic possibility that Barack Obama will become the first black President of the United States, a fact that will drive his numbers up from the 87% given John Kerry into the 95% range this time. Then there is the “fed-up” vote, those who are just tired of Republicans screwing up the country and are ready for to vote for a change of course. Finally, there are the latecomers to Obama, made fearful of how the Republicans have mis-managed the economy to the point that their lives are in financial jeopardy.

So, I now feel that most certainly there will be a Bradley Effect, but that it will be overwhelmed by several factors. First, the emotional content of the campaign showed up in the primary election polling. In those states that were over 25% black such as Maryland, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, the polling underestimated the actual turnout of black voters. This makes me conclude that in those states under 25%, pollsters did not accurately sample the smaller black populations.

Second, the Democratic registration advantage that I have alluded to previously is large and growing, and the only question is whether this advantage will be reflected in the turnout. I suggest that the unique emotional quality of this election will propel people to the polls such that this advantage will be reflected in the turnout.

Third, the huge Democratic registration advantage is comprised of a large proportion of young voters who could set records for the manner in which they turnout in this election. They are not being picked up in the polling accurately because of the complexity of contacting them through home phones, since they are mostly cell phone users. Credible surveys (Institute of Politics, Kennedy School, Harvard, others) suggests they will turnout in big numbers, so big they could determine the result.

Fourth, black Republicans voted for George Bush by 11% in the 2004 election, but polls have indicated that they now fluctuate between only 3-5% in their support for John McCain. If 5% of that number shifts into the Democratic column, it could also help to offset any Bradley effect.

A Pew Center survey several months ago suggested that there is no more Bradley effect because the 2006 elections featured black candidates whose election results were little different from the polling results. But we have never been here before with a Black man poised to take over the White House, to be not only the “President of the Nation” but leader of a tribe that is mostly white. This almost anthropological factor gives to this election an unprecedented character and will put us into some uncharted waters when it comes to analyzing the results.

Race is present in this election to the point that every survey this year has told us that whites and blacks still see things very differently in society and that where this election is concerned, there is a strong segment of voters who will use race to vote negatively. So, I am not deluded, the Bradley Effect will be at play, but this is a very special election that is moving many people to consider things more important to them than race. This means that in an election that was more “normal” the Bradley Effect could be determinative, but my take is -- not this time.



Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is: Freedom is Not Enough, Black Voters, Black Candidates and American Presidential Politics (Rowman and Littlefield.)

Viola Liuzzo's Daughter Speaks Out on Racism in the Campaign

This piece is by the daughter of Viola Liuzzo. Viola Liuzzo was a Detroit area housewife and mother of five whose best friend was her African American housekeeper. In defense of the dignity of her friend, she went to Selma to participate in the Selma voter registration campaign. She moved to Selma and lived in the public housing across the street from Brown Chapel. Brown Chapel was the staging area for the struggle.

As an aside, the picture that is often shown of of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. shaking hands was taken when they met in Brown Chapel during this campaign.

By the time of the Selma campaign, the SNCC workers had become very disillusioned with non-violence in the face of whites not practicing non-violence. The Klan, in complicity with Southern law enforcement, were carrying out murders with impugnity.

Also winter of 1965, there was a growing view in SNCC that Malcolm's message of black self-determination was an important one. As a consequence, it was SNCC that invited Malcolm to the Selma struggle. Within weeks of this connection Malcolm was assassinated.

While these were the dynamics within the Selma campaign, few knew of the commitment of Viola Liuzzo commitment of this mother of five to the struggle. She became a martyr of the movement when she, being a white American, was killed driving marchers back to Selma from Montgomery. The deaths of blacks, versus that of whites, were generally dismissed. For whites on the other hand, white deaths got more coverage. The Liuzzo death was big. These events provide such power to the words of Sally Liuzzo, her daughter should not be dismissed a politics. RGN

Original Content at Sally Liuzzo
October 12, 2008

Race in the 2008 Election

By Sally Liuzzo-Prado

The racial hatred being promoted by Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign deserves comment. I have experienced this type of hatred on a very personal level. I am the youngest daughter of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who was murdered by the KKK AND a paid FBI informant on March 25th, 1965 while participating in the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march.

I find it appalling that someone who wants to lead our country would lower themselves to incite racial violence in an attempt to win a political campaign. Racism has been an ugly and shameful part of our country's history. We need to work together to heal the wounds racism has caused--not bring us backwards in our fight.

I also find it appalling that people in the McCain campaign are spreading rumors insinuating Barack Obama is of Arab decent, as if that in itself is a crime. Being from Detroit Michigan, I grew up in an area with a huge Arabic population. The Arab Americans that I have had contact with are decent people who love this country. They were devastated by the events of 09-11-2001 as proud Arab Americans. It is not right to condemn an entire group of people due to the actions of a few.

I saw Barack for the first time two or three years ago while he was promoting his book. This was long before his campaign for the presidency was announced. I remember thinking, "Who is this man? He is amazing!" There are not enough words to express how I feel about both Barack and Michelle Obama. If anyone can help heal race relations in this country, they can.

This campaign has been an emotional roller coaster for me. It has validated for me everything that my mother taught me. Although it has been 43 years since her death, the pain is still there. I still struggle with trying to keep my emotions under control. My mother's murder has never gotten much easier for me to talk about. As much as I miss her, I would not change a thing. I am so proud of her and the sacrifice she made for her fellow man. She taught me more in the six short years we were together, than many parents teach their children in a lifetime. She taught me to choose my friends by their character, not by their appearance or status. I have three children, my 19 year old twin daughters were born the same day my mother was killed, March 25th, twenty-four years later. She left a legacy that my family is passing on to our children. Hopefully in some small way, we can make this planet a better place for all of us.

Let us promote positive race relations instead of hate speech, especially in a presidential campaign.




Authors Bio: My name is Sally Liuzzo-Prado. I am the youngest daughter of Viola Gregg Liuzzo who was a civil rights worker murdered by the KKK and a paid FBI informant in 1965. My mother was participating in the historic Selma to Montgomery voting rights march and was ambushed by the Klan and shot in the head. I am single and live on the west coast. I am the mother of three wonderful adult children.

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Politico: McCain Exposed!!!

Civil rights icon says McCain stirs hate
By: Mike Allen and Jonathan Martin
October 11, 2008 10:42 PM EST

Civil rights icon John Lewis compared Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to George Wallace in a posting to Politico's forum "The Arena," accusing McCain of fostering “an atmosphere of hate” and “hostility” like the one that led to white supremacists’ 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.

Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia who has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), pointed to “the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign,” and said the senator and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, “are sowing the seeds of hatred and division.”

McCain called the accusation “shocking and beyond the pale” and called on Obama to “repudiate it." A spokesperson said Obama does not believe McCain "is in any way comparable" to Wallace.

Late Saturday night, the Georgia congressman issued another statement easing back on his earlier remarks. Under the heading, "Rep. John Lewis Clarifies Misinterpretations of his Earlier Comments," Lewis said: "A careful review of my earlier statement would reveal that I did not compare Sen. John McCain or Gov. Sarah Palin to George Wallace. It was not my intention or desire to do so.

"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior. I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies. I believe we need to return to civil discourse in this election about the pressing economic issues that are affecting our nation."

Lewis didn't accuse McCain of imitating Wallace, but suggested there were similarities. His sharp words may be dismissed as those of a partisan Democrat in a campaign season. But the former head of SNCC and hero of Selma is somebody who McCain has lavished praise upon over the years.

McCain, in a book he wrote with aide Mark Salter called “Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life,” had lauded the leadership of Lewis in the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Appearing with Obama at a forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in August, McCain included Lewis as one of "three wise men" he would consult as president. "He can teach us all a lot about the meaning of courage and commitment to causes greater than our self-interest," McCain said of Lewis.

Today, Lewis castigated McCain in the harshest of terms. "George Wallace never threw a bomb," Lewis noted. "He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."

McCain quickly fired back hard, calling the comments “a character attack against Gov. Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale.”

“The notion that legitimate criticism of Sen. Obama's record and positions could be compared to Gov. George Wallace, his segregationist policies and the violence he provoked is unacceptable and has no place in this campaign,” McCain said in the statement. “I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track.

McCain also put the onus on Obama to distance himself from the remarks: "I call on Sen. Obama to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments that are so clearly designed to shut down debate 24 days before the election. Our country must return to the important debate about the path forward for America.”

Obama's campaign distanced themselves from Lewis's Wallace language but took a shot at Palin for some of her tough charges of late.

“Senator Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "But John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night, as well as the baseless and profoundly irresponsible charges from his own running mate that the Democratic nominee for President of the United States ‘pals around with terrorists.’

"As Barack Obama has said himself, the last thing we need from either party is the kind of angry, divisive rhetoric that tears us apart at a time of crisis when we desperately need to come together. That is the kind of campaign Senator Obama will continue to run in the weeks ahead.”

The full text of Lewis' original statement, sent to Politico's Fred Barbash, referee of "The Arena," with the heading “Rep. John Lewis On Hostility of McCain-Palin Campaign": “As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

“During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.”



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