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Obama, for the win. (pg. 63)
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| Ang ' ela_ie |
| Im almost offended by that. |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Judge Him by His Laws
By Charles Peters
Friday, January 4, 2008; Page A21
People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.
Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters' fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.)
I am a rarity among Washington journalists in that I have served in a state legislature. I know from my time in the West Virginia legislature that the challenges faced by reform-minded state representatives are no less, if indeed not more, formidable than those encountered in Congress. For me, at least, trying to deal with those challenges involved as much drama as any election. And the "heart and soul" bill, the one for which a legislator gives everything he or she has to get passed, has long told me more than anything else about a person's character and ability.
Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.
Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.
This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.
Obama had his work cut out for him.
He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics."
The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.
By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.
Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.
Obama didn't stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state's first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois "one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure"). Obama's commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle" contributions for them.
Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a "unique" ability "to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people." In other words, Obama's campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.
I do not think that a candidate's legislative record is the only measure of presidential potential, simply that Obama's is revealing enough to merit far more attention than it has received. Indeed, the media have been equally delinquent in reporting the legislative achievements of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, both of whom spent years in the U.S. Senate. The media should compare their legislative records to Obama's, devoting special attention to their heart-and-soul bills and how effective each was in actually making law.
Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, is president of Understanding Government, a foundation devoted to better government through better reporting.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...l?referrer=digg
Pretty persuasive editorial, IMO. |
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| Clovis |
And on top of that one, our favorite...
| quote: | Over Not Out
by Hendrik Hertzberg May 19, 2008
When the polls closed in Indiana and North Carolina last Tuesday evening, a lot of Barack Obama supporters braced themselves for bad news. Their candidate had just gone through a harrowing month, divided neatly in two by his thumping in the Pennsylvania primary. He had been repeatedly gored by a pair of old bulls, his ex-President and his ex-pastor, both of them maddened by his success and aggrieved by his presumption. He had been singed in a media bonfire sparked by trivia and fanned into flame by culture-war-mongering. His remark about the bitterness of displaced workers supposedly made him an élitist; his glancing acquaintance with a sixty-something ex-Weatherman supposedly made him a friend of terrorists. On the stump, he seemed subdued, wearied by the bumpy last stage of the long, astonishing ascent he began fifteen months ago, when he set out to do battle with one of the most famous women in the world, whose arsenal included a huge war chest, backed by a fund-raising apparatus unparalleled in Democratic politics; the support of the great majority of Democratic officeholders ready to declare a preference; and, as her chief surrogate, the most successful Democratic politician of the past forty years. Although North Carolina had long been seen as a lock for Obama, on account of its large African-American population, there were late polls that put him and Hillary Clinton within the margin of error; Indiana seemed out of reach, according to the polls, which in any case had a record of overestimating his strength.
Losing both states probably wouldn’t have cost Obama the nomination, but it would have meant, at a minimum, a brutal, ugly, down-to-the-wire endgame guaranteed to leave the ultimate winner seriously, perhaps fatally, weakened. So when the returns started coming in, showing an Obama landslide in North Carolina and a shrinking Clinton lead in Indiana, Obama supporters looked at one another in happy wonderment. As Clinton’s margin in Indiana slipped below twenty thousand, Tim Russert, of NBC, went on the air to say, bluntly, “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it.” Just after dawn, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos decreed, “This nomination fight is over.” On CBS, Bob Schieffer brought the networks to unanimity. “Basically,” he said, “this race is over.” And the New York Post hit the streets with cruel tabloid succinctness: a picture of the home-state senator over a single word—“TOAST!”—in block letters three inches high.
When and where, it is not too soon to ask, did she go wrong? Well, here’s one answer: eight years ago, in New York. If she had chosen, instead, to move to Illinois, where her accent is familiar and her connections deep (Chicago’s her home town, after all), she could have settled in and sought her Senate seat there, in 2004. She didn’t do that, presumably for reasons both marital (Bill’s not really a Second City kind of guy) and political (she would have had to run for President as a first-term senator rather than as a reëlected one). But Barack Obama would still be a local or regional up-and-comer and, most likely, a Hillary supporter. Here’s another: five and a half years ago, in Washington. If she had opposed authorizing the Iraq war, the activists—grassroots and netroots—might have mobilized for her rather than against her. She might have cruised to the nomination, and the Democratic Party might now be basking in the warm glow of being about to make history by electing the first woman President.
It is surely beyond galling for Hillary Clinton to find herself losing to a freshman senator who is young (forty-six, Bill Clinton’s age when he got elected), whose “firstness” matches hers, who has no executive experience at any level of government and not much foreign-policy experience of the conventional kind, and whom few Americans had heard of until, at John Kerry’s invitation, he stood up to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Convention. You have to feel a little sorry for the Clintons, having their restoration upended by such an unlooked-for political phenomenon. But some months ago, when it dawned on the Clintons that “winning clean” might not be a viable option, they began to explore less elevated paths. The summertime gas-tax holiday that became her hobbyhorse in Indiana and North Carolina was one of the milder examples. Its original proposer was John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, yet it had no support in the White House, and virtually none in the Democratic Congress. A hundred economists, including liberal stalwarts like James Galbraith, Alice Rivlin, and the Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz, denounced it, and the Clinton campaign could find none to endorse it. Obama rejected it, rightly, as a gimmick, and said that at best it might save the average motorist a total of thirty dollars. Even that was too generous; according to the economists, it would probably just transfer revenue from the government to the oil companies. It was a pseudo-populist hoax—an act of condescension far more profound than Obama’s remark about bitterness. And, to judge by the results last Tuesday, it was a failure as a political ploy.
The TV pundits were both right and wrong. They were right that we now know who the nominee will be, but they were wrong about the race being over. Much will depend on how it gets to be over and, especially, on how Senator Clinton behaves. Her speech in Indiana was incoherent, part valedictory (“This has been an extraordinary experience”), part battle cry (“Full speed on to the White House!”), but more the latter than the former. She demanded that her Florida and Michigan delegates, elected in defiance of Party rules that she had agreed to follow, be fully accredited. “It would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by forty-eight states,” she said, and her husband, in an e-mail to supporters, added, “People want Hillary to stay in this race until every last voter has a say.” (Never mind that in January the Clintons’ chamberlain, Terry McAuliffe, had called the race “a twenty-seven-state contest” that would be “over on February 5th.”) Still, her speech was notably free of attacks on Obama or insinuations about his color.
The next day, however, in an instantly notorious interview with USA Today, Clinton was back to arguing her superior electability. “There was just an A.P. article posted that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how the whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me,” she said. “ There’s a pattern emerging here.”
Indeed there is, and it should be painted over as soon as possible. Hillary Clinton, as her record from high school onward proves, is the very opposite of a racist. This time, she seems to have well and truly misspoken. But if she plans to drag the contest out for another month or two she will be wise to avoid this sort of demographic analysis—and, more important, to abandon the dishonorable political strategy that underlies it. If she doesn’t, it won’t just be Chicago that she didn’t go back to. It’ll be a place called hope. ♦
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BOOM |
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| msz |
| do u smell wut barack is cookin |
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| Ang ' ela_ie |
Yay John Edwards!!!
Edwards for VP! |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ang ' ela_ie
Yay John Edwards!!!
Edwards for VP! |
Hell yeah. |
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| RJT |
Obama/Edwards is pretty much my dream ticket right now.  |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| I'd love it too... but Edwards doesn't win Obama any new votes. I'm still holding out for Biden. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
Just a rumor at the moment:
"I now have it from two sources close to senior Republicans that they have video dynamite–Michelle Obama railing against “whitey” at Jeremiah Wright’s church. Republicans may have a lousy record when it comes to the economy and the management of the war in Iraq, but they are hell on wheels when it comes to opposition research. Someone took the chance and started reviewing the recordings from services at Jeremiah Wright’s United Church of Christ. Holy smoke!! I am told there is a clip that is being held for the fall to drop at the appropriate time."
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/0...from-the-train/
I'm skeptical about this for now, of course. But I thought posting it might spur some comment... |
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| Clovis |
| Those ing suckers. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| If true, it would almost certainly mean the end of Obama's campaign and probably the end of his career in politics as well. He can't exactly "distance" himself from his wife, especially when she has been campaigning at his side... |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
If true, it would almost certainly mean the end of Obama's campaign and probably the end of his career in politics as well. He can't exactly "distance" himself from his wife, especially when she has been campaigning at his side... |
It would be the saddest day in American history since september 11th 2001. Yes I said that. |
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