Call It A Comeback
Clearly Barack Obama is a flip-flopper.
Sometimes, when you are doing the press releases for major candidates, you need to stop and think, just how much inside baseball is too much.
Howard Wolfson needs a vacation. And a life.
Rich on the black vote and Obama
Next, you “experts” assume that just because viable, credible black candidates end up winning overwhelming majorities of black votes that polls currently showing Hillary Clinton leading Obama among African Americans are somehow important.
Wrong again.
In Illinois, at least, large numbers of black voters tend to take their time making up their minds. In political parlance, they ”break late.”
Ten months before the March 2004 U.S. Senate primary (about where we are now before the Iowa caucuses), Obama’s own polls showed him winning just 34 percent of the black vote. About a month before the primary, African-American voters began ”breaking” in large numbers to his candidacy. As they began focusing on the campaign, black voters saw he was viable, liked his message and a significant percentage finally realized he was African American. He ended up winning just about all their votes.
This same pattern has been repeated time and time again during the past 25 years here. Harold Washington didn’t start off his campaign with the majority of black support against a white female with a huge war chest and the powers of patronage and incumbency, but he certainly ended that way.
Like Byrne, Hillary Clinton is almost universally known and has a strong record of backing issues important to many Democratic African-American voters. Obama is far less known. It’s perfectly natural that, right now, many black voters are siding with Clinton. But, if Obama’s candidacy remains viable through early next year, I’d bet that the vast majority of African-American voters will end up with him.
To recap, because I know you’re all very busy: Black leadership endorsements of white candidates over black opponents are not necessarily important because they don’t automatically translate into black votes; and black voters take their time deciding whether to vote for a fellow African American, but if that candidate looks like a potential winner, they usually end up voting for him or her.
I hope this helps.
Iowa and New Hampshire have no significant black population (outside of Waterloo). South Carolina is the first state with significant black population that holds a primary and it isn’t until January 26th meaning it’ll be towards the end of December that you start to get a sense of what the black population will be doing–and that might carry over until the first week of January given the holidays.
And he speaks English so it’s understandable even.
Well, guess who is now set to appear on Meet the Press this coming weekend? Hillary supporter James Carville, of course.
The network has just confirmed to me that Carville is one of the guests set to appear this Sunday. The other guests, as of now, are Bob Shrum, Mary Matalin and Mike Murphy — which is to say, no backer of any of the other Dem candidates.
Oh, wait. Axelrod isn’t one of the villagers.
Hillary Clinton offers up this same gem
Voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face. I think we need a president with more experience than that…. I don’t think this is the time for on-the-job training on our economy or on foreign policy…”
The condescension is dripping as if John Kerry said it himself.
The day that George Bush offers up this:
Obama offers “odd foreign policy,” suggests he and other rivals lack experience.
Obama spokesman Burton responds to Bush: “I can’t tell if he’s endorsing her, hoping she’s the nominee or thanking her for her votes on Iraq and Iran.“
I look forward to liberal kvetching about the Clinton Campaign use of right wing talking points….nevermind.
Via TPM
Michelle Obama: “Imagine our family on that inaugural platform. America will look at itself differently. The world will look at America differently. There is no other candidate who is going to do that for our country. You know that.”
I know Social Security isn’t a crisis and I’m not particularly thrilled with the language Obama is using, but Clinton is proposing on turning the entire process over to a secretive panel of villagers.
Sound familiar? Yes, Health Care in 1994. At least he’s got the right solution if not the right rhetoric.
I just consider this an ode to a talent that too often goes unnoticed:
“When it takes two weeks and six different positions to answer one question on immigration, it’s easier to understand why the Clinton campaign would rather plant their questions than answer them.”
You also get the Senator from Punjab garbage, but ultimately, he’s good at this politics thing.
And seriously, it’s not a hard issue to take a position on. Obama even voted on it before. But she has all sorts of ‘experience.’ Experience avoiding answering questions, but experience nonetheless.
Countdown to the press release whining:
It’s unfortunate that Barack Obama is abandoning the politics of hope….
Nuclear Weapons Policy. Let me explain:
One such document is known as OPLAN 8044 Revision 03. That document is an update of the basic nuclear-weapons plan, formerly known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan. It was created by the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom), which has responsibility for nuclear-weapons planning, doctrine and maintenance. Using the Freedom of Information Act, the Federation of American Scientists obtained a briefing on how Stratcom’s OPLAN 8044 Revision 03 changed the nuclear-policy paradigm. For the first time in U.S. nuclear history, plans for nuclear attack on regional targets around the world were included in the basic nuclear war planning document.
It’s not entirely easy to tell from the planning document what WMD-desiring countries are listed as targets for a possible U.S. nuclear attack. (See page 11 for all the redactions on this crucial point.) But the FAS hazards an educated guess based on photography included in the briefing document: Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Syria.
The briefing document also references a “target base” for prospective elimination with nuclear weapons. However, the actual document redacts what that target base might be. FAS contends it probably refers to either the stockpiles of WMD themselves or the command center for any state seeking to deploy WMD. And that’s a further sign of specific planning for a full-blown nuclear conflict, the FAS writes: “The creation of a ‘target base’ indicates that the planning went further than simple retaliatory punishment with one or a few weapons, but envisioned actual nuclear warfighting intended to annihilate a wide range of facilities in order to deprive the states the ability to launch and fight with WMD.”
It’s difficult to tell whether OPLAN 8044 Revision 03 is still in place. A further revision of the plan, known as Revision 05, was still in effect as recently as July. “Presumably,” writes FAS, Revision 05 carries with it planning for nuclear strikes on Iran, North Korea and Syria.
The new glimpse of OPLAN 8044 Revision 03 comes at an awkward time for the Bush administration. Just last week, a State Department official at an international arms conference met with rebuke for suggesting that U.S. nuclear forces weren’t on “hair-trigger alert,” even though the U.S. nuclear arsenal is known to experts to be capable of launching within minutes of an order. Certainly Iran, North Korea, and Syria are wondering at whom those weapons are currently aimed.
The guts of the new planning are described in detail here.
What I can add is that it’s somewhat like the moment in Dr. Strangelove when the Russian Ambassador reveals the existence of the doomsday bomb and Strangelove asks him what good is a such a device if you don’t tell anyone about it.
Here is a plan that significantly changes the United States’ nuclear stance while telling everyone the stance isn’t really changed much? If deterrence is your goal, such conflicting messages are largely useless so the only reason to make such plans is if you think you just might use them.
We aren’t just full up on crazy around here, we are overflowing with crazy from this administration.
Obama, as any sane candidate on either side of the aisle has a perfect chance to put Clinton into a box of which she won’t let herself out. All he has to do is point out that the current administration is fucking insane and on a path to create a regional nuclear war that would probably escalate into a worldwide nuclear war and that he supports the US Policy before Bush. Nothing crazy, keeps deterrence in tact, and gets the press in a tizzy as they try and say he is naive and Clinton refuses to answer hypotheticals.
Obama then produces documents used during the Clinton administration on the US nuclear stance then making her look like a crazed warmonger and hopefully pounding into the pundits heads that there was a sane world at one time.
He can even get a new slogan out of it: Obama: The Sane One.
He even linked nicely to me lately even though I make fun of him, Andrew Sullivan hits the nail on the head for Obama:
A lot of people are asking if he will and whether he should directly attack Clinton. Of course he should attack Clinton, and, if he’s smart, he’ll focus on her endorsement of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment and her shilly-shallying over torture. But what he should really be doing is attacking Giuliani. The major worry many Democrats have is that Obama cannot stand up to Rudy-style “all-my-opponents-are-terrorists” politics. Give Rudy hell, tonight, Obama. That’s what you really have to prove.
Oh, and bloggers are even having a harder time getting the campaign to respond. Let me put this point on it–you know all those stories about the homophobic preacher even though the other campaigns have homophobic preachers all around—it would have helped to talk some folks through it.
Because if Donnie McClurkin, is the standard, a whole lot of Black Ministers aren’t going to be acceptable as supporters.
Let’s start with where the issue probably started:
Hillary Clinton
Or perhaps Darrell Jackson, who has admirably supported hate crimes legislation, but preaches that homosexuality is wrong. Oh, and he got a big fat contract too
The real point here is that Democrats have two constituencies that often disagree with one another. One, African-Americans, compose a socially conservative demographic who are more anti-gay than the average member of the population. The GLBT community is a strong supporter of Democrats as well, but they find that many African-American religious leaders who back Democrats have offensive ideas about gay people. That’s true.
Joe Solomonese of Human Rights Campaign said this today:
“I spoke with Sen. Barack Obama today and expressed to him our community’s disappointment for his decision to continue to remain associated with Rev. McClurkin, an anti-gay preacher who states the need to ‘break the curse of homosexuality,’” Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solomonese said in a statement sent out moments ago.
Lots of black preachers say such things. Does that mean none of them can be associated with a Democratic Campaign?
Obama is right on most GLBT issues other than marriage by the standards of the HRC–he was a Sponsor on the ENDA at the state level in Illinois. And he, like every other Democratic politician who courts African-Americans has lots of socially conservative black preachers backing him. Why then is he singled out for this one?
And is the solution to insist on excluding such people, or is it better for candidates to build a coalition that can then dialogue on such issues?
And why aren’t other candidates hit hard on the same issue?
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