Exclusive: Thursday, May 1


Author: Presidential Watch 2008

Date Published: 2008-04-30


Presidential Watch – Daily – Thursday, May 1

 

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: The Front-Runner; Like Voters, Superdelegates Have Doubts About Clinton  [Published April 10, 1992]

R.W. Apple, Jr.

 

Even though Bill Clinton won four primaries on Tuesday, even though Paul E. Tsongas announced today that he would not re-enter the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, even though many of them concede there is probably no stopping Mr. Clinton now, dozens of Democratic senators and representatives remain reluctant to endorse him.

 

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia scheduled a news conference for Friday to announce his backing. Senator Tom Daschle told news organizations in his home state, South Dakota, that the moment had come to rally around Mr. Clinton. But beyond that there was little movement.

 

Of 264 superdelegates in the House and Senate, 93, or 35 percent, have endorsed Mr. Clinton so far, according to a continuing survey by The New York Times. Most are Southern, and most made their statements some time ago. A much larger number remain officially uncommitted.

 

Representative Dennis E. Eckart of Ohio, more willing perhaps to speak on the record than many of his colleagues because he has announced his retirement from the House, said that he and some of his colleagues had constituted an informal "Missouri caucus -- a show-me caucus" -- and would do nothing for now.

 

"The voters haven't embraced Clinton, so I don't see any reason why I should endorse him," Mr. Eckart said. "Look at the exit polls. People have terrible doubts about this guy, and we're talking about Democrats." Read article.

 

A trashy decade threatens Obama

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

"The race card" was for decades the most reliable card in the Democratic deck, and even today, as we've seen this spring, Democrats play the card with residual skill.

 

The card must be played carefully, and with exquisite subtlety. No place for George Wallace or Orval Faubus here. But now race is all that Democrats are talking about as they stagger and stumble toward agreement on a presidential candidate, maybe next week in Indiana and North Carolina, or if not then maybe the week after that in West Virginia, and if not then surely the week after that in Kentucky and Oregon. They'll always have Denver. At least for now they've got the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the gift who keeps on giving (to John McCain).

 

Barack Obama's early campaign was based on a subtle playing of race. By loudly proclaiming that his campaign was traveling the high road "above race," race became the alligator in the bathtub. This so infuriated Bill Clinton in South Carolina that he couldn't resist comparing Sen. Barack Obama to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Bubba, once idolized as "our first black president," insists that race was the farthest thing from his mind when he made the comparison. (Would Bubba tell a lie?) Read article.

 

An Old Newness

Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

 

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things -- using the mantra of "change" endlessly -- the cold fact is that virtually everything has says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.

 

Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not -- all this is a re-run of the 1960s.

 

We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.

 

Internationally, the approach that Senator Obama proposes -- including the media magic of meetings between heads of state -- was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

 

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it. Read article.

 

Obama and the Weird

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Human Events.com

 

I dissent from my journalistic colleagues' belief that Obama is different. He has been a political hustler all his life, much as the Clintons have and many other Democratic miracle workers, too. When he graduated from Columbia University, he came to Chicago and at 23 became a community organizer in a poor Chicago neighborhood, whose residents viewed him as a slick outsider, which he was. Here, again, we see him as not unlike the left-wing Clintons of the late 1960s or Jean-Francois Kerry or Al Gore. Soon Obama returned east for a Harvard Law School degree, after which he immediately entered Chicago politics. He has been in politics all his adult life. How does that make him different from other top Democrats?

 

He says he is, and they believe it. He is for "change," for "community," for all Americans to "come together." That does not sound very different from anyone else who has sought the Democratic presidential nomination, but the mainstream journalists forget things. They also ignore indelicacies, for instance, the Obama supporters now under indictment, at least one of whom has some disturbing Middle Eastern financial sources. The journalists also have paid little attention to the fact that in 2005, the newly elected senator from Illinois bought a $1.65 million dollar house for $300,000 less than the asking price. Read article.

 

Jeremiah Wright Goes to War

Amy Sullivan, Time.com

 

Maybe Barack Obama skimped on his contribution when the offering plate came past at Trinity United Church of Christ. Or perhaps he nodded off during one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons. It's hard to think of another reason why the Illinois Senator's former pastor would put on the kind of performance this morning at the National Press Club that can only be described as a political disaster.

 

Until the question-and-answer portion of his appearance, Wright had been using the multi-city tour to redeem his reputation as a teachable moment.

 

But while Wright is a theologian, a teacher and a pastor, he is ultimately a performer. In front of a cheering crowd of supporters that included a whistling Cornel West, he gave into temptation and lustily went after his critics. As soon as the questions began, Wright transformed into a defiant, derisive figure, snapping one-liners at the unfortunate moderator tasked with reading the questions.

 

The combative pose that Wright chose to strike is perhaps most damaging not to Obama's candidacy — although the candidate will surely endure yet another round of scrutiny regarding his relationship to the minister and his positions on Wright's views — but to Wright's own message. Because he is right when he says that most Americans don't understand the black church and that their resulting confusion and fear contributes to a racial divide. Read article.

 

The Real Reverand Wright's Views are Uglier Than We Knew

Rich Lowry, NY Post.com

 

Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack Obama's criti cally acclaimed race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it into bits and tossed it in the air to serve as confetti for his parade through the media.

 

In that speech, Obama said Wright had been taken out of context, a defense the pastor has made himself. If only we knew the true Wright, Obama complained, instead of just "the snippets of those sermons that have run on an endless loop on the television and YouTube." In his interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright said the playing of his sound bites was "unfair," "unjust" and "untrue."

 

Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his "chickens come home to roost" claim on 9/11 in exactly the same terms as in his original sermon: "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." He stood by his damnation of America and his contention that the US government had created AIDS: "I believe our government is capable of doing anything."

 

For good measure, he dishonestly denied Louis Farrakhan's infamous denunciation of Judaism as a "gutter religion" and called him "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century." The more Wright talked, the more he sounded like a Christian Farrakhan. Read article.

 

Here comes 2012, ready or not

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

Innocents eager to flee the endless campaign of '08 can take heart. Some people are already gearing up for the campaign of 2012. And why not? We've rarely had a field of such likely one-termers as John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

 

President McCain would be pushing 76 in the summer of '12, and the prospect of a second term would be giving the envelope a mighty shove. Four years of a hip-hop White House or the shrill echoes of a nagging nanny would surely be enough to sate the appetite of the hardiest masochist. How much Jeremiah Wright or Bubba Redux could one country take?

 

Frightened Democrats long ago concluded that their two survivors have worn their welcome thin, giving John McCain a free ride that could well last to November. Harry Reid, the bagman from Las Vegas, is worried that what happens in April and May is not likely to stay in April and May. The Iowa caucuses are already only dimly remembered, distant and fuzzy events from a previous century.

 

It's not clear who, exactly, elected him to tell the superdelegates where and when to get off, but he threatens to enlist Howard Dean, the chairman of the party, and Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, to join him in writing a strong letter of instruction. "The three of us, we may write a joint letter [to superdelegates]," he said. "We might do individual letters. We are in contact with each other." Once he gets his letter off, we can move on to something useful in 2012. Read article.

 

VIEW VIDEO.

 

After Pennsylvania, On With the Demolition Derby

Paul Greenberg, Townhall.com

 

Now it's on Indiana. And North Carolina. And Oregon. And... all the way to Denver late in August? The votes are in from the Keystone State: Hillary Clinton, the once - and future? - Inevitable Nominee now has scored a solid but scarcely decisive victory over another formerly Inevitable Nominee. So the race to mutual exhaustion goes on.

 

All along, Hillary! has been claiming that Barack Obama was an unknown quality. She said he hadn't been vetted, as the political consultants put it in their awful lingo, the way she has been forever and ever - and don't we know it! Miss Hillary has been vetted so long, to lapse into the colloquial, she's been mighty nigh ruint. Or as the pollsters would say in their grating way, she's got the highest negatives of the three still-standing presidential candidates.

 

Sen./Tigress Clinton has set out to do the vetting of her Democratic opponent herself - vet him to shreds if she can. And primary after primary, with more than a little help from her rival's miscues, she's succeeding - not necessarily in winning her party's presidential nomination but in seeing to it that, by the time her opponent does, he'll be damaged goods. Read article.

 

Lady Macbeth vs. Billy Budd

Joseph Epstein, Online WSJ.com

 

Whether the outcome of last Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary is good or bad for the Democratic Party isn't of great interest to me. My stake in the continuing contest is entirely personal, and has to do with my mental hygiene, which it is ruining.

 

I'm thoroughly hooked by the campaign, turned into a one-subject news junkie. I have only to see the names "Obama" or "Clinton" atop an editorial or news article, or hear the phrase "Campaign 2008" on television, and I am gone, as lost as an adolescent boy reading his first pornographic novel. I cannot seem to get enough print, television, chat or highly repetitive schmooze on this subject. What's the attraction?

 

The contest pits Hillary Clinton's empty though fierce ambition against Barack Obama's naïve yet carefully orchestrated idealism. It's like Yale's Lady Macbeth versus Harvard's Billy Budd. As long as I'm tossing around literary allusions, perhaps John McCain might be compared to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: When it comes to expanding government, he really "would prefer not to."

 

I have always considered the Clintons as little more than a branch of William Faulkner's Snopes family, in their cases Snopeses who have given high SAT scores a bad name. I don't find it easy to imagine how anyone outside her immediate family could find Mrs. Clinton, in her bouncy campaign persona – Hubert Humphrey in drag – appealing. Read article.

 

Another Obama Marxist

Lance Fairchok, American Thinker.com

 

Barack Obama has a thing for Marxists. He befriends them, listens to their counsel, and he even hires them to work in his campaign.  And they seem to feel the warmth.  President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who led a revolution there in 1979,  says Barack Obama's presidential bid is a "revolutionary" phenomenon, and Americans are "laying the foundations for a revolutionary change."

 

A captured computer revealed that an unknown person chatted with Marxist FARC guerillas on Obama's behalf (they believed), stating he would be the next President and US policy towards Columbia would change. Frank Marshall Davis, a dear Obama friend and mentor was as a member of the Communist Party USA. Barack Obama just seems to attract Marxists.

 

If the people he surrounds himself with are any indication of his core beliefs, a higher capital gains tax to punish the rich, even if it diminishes actual tax revenue, may be only the beginning. Obama's Official campaign blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, a former writer for the leftist Nation magazine and a contributor to the Socialist Viewpoint, is certainly a believer in class warfare.

 

The capitalist ruling class of the United States exercises a virtual dictatorship not only over American society, but also over the entire world. This capitalist class rule is the basic cause of the poverty, wars and the degradation of the natural environment.

 

Obama is a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky mold, and knows where to get people like Sam who have energy and drive. His staff is nothing if not energetic. He even cut his activist teeth in Chicago, the stomping grounds of Alinsky and so many others in the "progressive" community.

Read article.

 

Memo to Obama: Seven things he should do to fix his image problem.

Howard Fineman, Newsweek.com

 

Senator Obama, you stand accused of being an out-of-touch, arugula-eating Ivy League elitist who couldn't convert a one-pin spare if the presidency depended on it.

 

I don't have a dog in this fight (despite what Hillary Clinton supporters sometimes think of me) but here are my suggestions for how to reach, and be seen reaching, the "the real America" as you continue to grind toward the Democratic nomination. Obviously, you've got to talk in more meat-and-potatoes terms about how your economic proposals will help working people. But that's only part of what you need to do: 

 

TELL US IN CONCRETE TERMS WHERE YOU ARE FROM.

 

It's not Indonesia, and it's probably not Hawaii (hard to translate in any case). It's not the Ivy League. You are from where you chose to be from, which is the South Side of Chicago. Read article.

 

A gut level reaction to Obama

Thomas Lifson

 

Mary Grabar, a Slovenian-American college English teacher and poet, reacts to Barack Obama's condescending comments in his San Francisco fundraiser, articulating thoughts that many other ethnic groups may share.

 

“We know who you're talking about, Barack Obama, when you talk about Pennsylvania and the Midwest, about small towns where the jobs have left.  [....]

 

“You're talking about white people who have neither the family connections nor the racial credentials to gain entrance to the world that you inhabit. Many of the people you're talking about are those whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who came to these places to work in steel mills, coal mines, and factories. We know the code words.

 

“You're talking about people whose culture is little known. We have been pretty quiet. We never tried to impose our culture on everyone. We never insisted on putting pictures of ourselves in our native dress into schoolbooks or mandating that our stories and songs be part of the curriculums.

 

“We tried to maintain our culture without government aid, by forming our own churches and groups, and building Polish, Ukrainian, and Slovenian halls.

 

“We never wore buttons declaring "Slav Power" or grouped together for purposes of intimidation or violence………” Read article.

 

Time for a change

Michael Tomasky, Guradian.co.uk

 

How much of the damage that has come Barack Obama's way has been self-inflicted, and what he can do about it by May 6, when North Carolina and Indiana vote.

 

The answer to the first question is that while I can't put a percentage on it, clearly Obama's done himself considerable harm. There are the obvious things, like his association with the Reverend Wright, his "bitter" comment and the way he handled those questions at the ABC debate.

 

The Wright association is the most damaging. A more political animal - a Clinton, say! - would have left that church once he decided he had larger political ambitions than Chicago could contain; joined a nice, multiracial Episcopalian church whose only point of controversy was that it supported the investiture of Gene Robinson (a huge plus, at least during Democratic primary season). So in a perverse way it speaks well of Obama that he bucked politics and stayed loyal to his church. But he's learned the hard way that bucking politics has a price.

 

The Obama campaign is slow on the draw on things like this. The Clinton campaign is spinning circles around them on questions like the popular vote. The Obama camp has been in a trance since all these controversies hit. They'd better snap out of it. Read article.

 

McCain's Plan: While Democrats Implode, he crafts an inventive 'win it all' strategy

Jonathan Martin, NY Post.com

 

For reasons of financial necessity, personal preference and plain politics, John McCain is gearing up to run one of the least traditional presidential campaigns in recent history.

 

But even prominent strategists within McCain's own party wonder if his unorthodox strategy will work.

 

Facing the prospect of competing against a Democrat who is on track to shatter every fundraising record, McCain and his key advisers have largely been forced into devising a three-pronged strategy that they hope can turn their general election weaknesses into strengths.

 

McCain will lean heavily on the well-funded Republican National Committee. He will merge key functions of his campaign hierarchy with the RNC while also relying on an unconventional structure of 11 regional campaign mangers.

 

And finally - and perhaps most importantly - McCain will rely on free media to an unprecedented degree to get out his message in a fashion that aims to not only minimize his financial disadvantage but also drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush. Read article.

 

 

 

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