The past few days with candidate Obama

This post references the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama. It begins with a general overview of what went on recently with the senator. The Democrats are saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign.” The Obama campaign is vows to be more aggressive with push-back againstJohn McCain. Two of the three biggest Democrats got together for lunch Thursday. Politico’s John Harris speculates (9/12/08) about the advice Bill Clinton may have given Barack Obama. To summarize this excellent read:

1. Don’t make this about you. . . 2. Define yourself through policies-yours and theirs. . . 3. Have more fun. . . 4. Make the election about something big. . . 5. Spend more time speaking to your opponents. . . 6. Don’t take Hillary voters for granted. . . 7. Stop smoking whatever it is you are smoking. . . 8. And while you are it, give me an apology.

If Barack Obama uses President Clinton’s advice, we can look for more defining McCain through policies, rather than getting distracted by the Palin phenomenon. That is what many Democrats would also say to Obama. This from Politico.com, on 9/5/08, opines that is, “Obama’s Palin strategy: Sit and Wait.” It is by Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown. To quote:

The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin. Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.

Thursday, Obama and his senior aides cast Palin as little more than a surrogate for McCain and her party, leaving the more direct engagement to a newly prominent group of female surrogates. Chief campaign strategist David Axelrod called Palin a “skilled politician” who “had an assignment, and she went out and she discharged it.”

If Barack Obama uses President Clinton’s advice to make this campaign about something big, we can look for more on national Security and the military, and I would add, civil liberties. “Intel Dump” is a blog by Phillip Carter at the Washington Post. Carter has gone on leave of absence to work with the Barack Obama Campaign as the National Veterans Director. Guest blogger experts will fill in for him in the interim. Back in April he wrote a very interesting post titled, “Whither the 4th Amendment.”To quote:

A great deal was written this past week [early April] about the latest torture memo to surface. . . Buried within the memo, however, is an extremely interesting and potentially important footnote alluding to far-reaching uses of executive power within the United States.

[footnoted in original] What exactly does this mean?

It could refer to the National Security Agency’s now-well-publicized surveillance program - a program grounded in many of the same constitutional theories of presidential power that underlie the torture memoranda. It could also refer to deployment of federal military forces within the United States and action they could take against U.S. citizens, such as hypothetically searching someone’s bag for suspected explosives at an airport. (It should be noted that most soldiers deployed for homeland security are state National Guard soldiers, who for complex reasons are subject to different legal rules than federal soldiers.) Or the footnote could refer to clandestine domestic military operations conducted by the Defense Department and its intelligence components – things we can only guess at.

If Barack Obama uses President Clinton’s advice, he stands a better chance of getting elected, in my opinion. The nation needs a genuine change in direction. Senator John McCain does not represent change. He and his Vice-President would be more of the same abuses of power, war as opposed to diplomacy, and erosion of civil liberties that went on in the Bush administration. The nation just cannot afford to stay on the Bush path any longer.

Handy Dandy References -

• From Democrats.com Are You Registered to Vote? Are You Sure ?  Republicans are working quietly to steal another election by disenfranchising Democratic voters, just as they did in 2000 and 2004. So please make sure you are registered to vote! Login to Democrats.com and click: http://www.democrats.com/voter_registration
• JIM VANDEHEI & HARRY SIEGEL (9/7/08), from Politico.com, noted: “Doh!: Top eight gaffes of the campaign.”
• From regular contributor, Jon (9/1/08): from AlterNet – All over the world, alternative approaches to capitalist greed are bubbling up from the grassroots. This post by Mark Engler, posted September 1, 2008, posits that There is an Alternative to Corporate Rule. Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Mark Engler’s new book How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008).

(Cross-posted at The Reaction.)

My “creativity and dreaming” post today is at Making Good Mondays.

Technorati tags: news news and politics politics obama democrats president clinton national security palin

Sphere: Related Content

Who Speaks For Hillary?

The Clinton’s should probably swap memos more often. Bill supports one thing, Hillary supports another. Bill says one thing, Hillary says another. Of course, we could also talk about the rest of her entourage that supposedly speak for her, but generally seem to say the opposite of what she’s declaring.

This past weekend, we had the gaffe by her Chief Campaign Strategist, Mark Penn, who went to Columbia, wearing his lobbyist hat to broker a deal with the Colombians, that, apparently, Hillary is against. Well, it turns out that Bill was all for it.

Now, it appears that Bill and Hillary are at odds about whether or not folks should boycott the Olympics in China. Hillary just came out declaring that President Bush should not go, while last summer, Bill talked Steven Spielberg out of boycotting the Olympics as their “Overseas Artistic Director”.

It seems that Hillary, the presidential candidate, should have the last word on what comes out of her campaign, but, with people who claim to speak for her, coming out and contradicting what she says, one has to wonder if her presidency will be just as incoherent.

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Now That’s Just Nasty

Is there anybody this Ho won’t schlep with? I don’t know about you, but when somebody has it in for my family, does everything in their considerable power to destroy everything we’ve worked to achieve, does it publically and does it dirty, I would NOT be pals. I would not forget, and I damn sure wouldn’t pander.

Of course, I’m not Hillary Clinton. The picture is priceless.

That’s Richard Mellon Scaife! Yesterday! Jeebus, I need a shower after looking at that. For those with short memories, Scaife was THE MAN orchestrating the Clinton attacks. From Salon, 4/7/1998:

The man whom Time magazine, in its latest issue, calls “the ultimate patron” of the Clinton haters has been identified by Salon and the New York Observer as a key funder of the $2.4 million Arkansas Project, a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones’ sexual harassment case against Clinton. – Salon

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

A vote for Hillary was a vote for McCain

Rachel, step-mom to PraetorOne, is giving us her pov on Hillary this morning. Please welcome her to Sirens Chronicles. She also contributes to the Coalition for a Democratic America~Dusty

I wish that the Hilary supporters in this country would realize that their candidate comes with a 48 to 52 negative approval rating. Sadly, however, the obsessive old white women who so obsessively continue to support her are so eager to run a woman–ANY WOMAN–for President that they haven’t bothered to ask the all important question: Is she the right woman at the right time? Certainly the time is right, but this is clearly the wrong candidate. For all intents and purposes, Hilary leaves the impression that the only thing that matters at any given time is Hilary; that she is obsessed with power and that the only thing she holds precious is herself. Now I admit, that could only be the way she comes off. Those who know her well say that she is one of the warmest and most caring people you could ever hope to find. I only wish that side of her nature would come through on the campaign trail. From what I’ve seen, however she presents a facade which suggests that she is cold, manipulative, and addicted to power.

That said there are very real reasons to distrust Hilary Clinton. Harry S. Truman once suggested that if you run a real liberal against a conservative the real liberal will almost invariably win. Likewise, if you run a moderate or a moderate conservative as a liberal the real conservative will almost invariably win, and we are now dealing with the latter example. We need to remember that Bill and Hillary are products of the Democratic Leadership Convention, the DLC which is little more than a debating society for Conservative, corporatist “Democrats.” In other words they aren’t Democrats at all; they are Lite Republicans and they have done more to split and weaken the Democratic Party than any sex or financial scandal.

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Toni Morrison backs Obama, not Clinton

Ironically, it was Ms. Morrison that dubbed Bill Clinton the “First Black President”:

In an October 1998 essay in The New Yorker, Morrison wrote: “Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

Ms Morrison is a Nobel Prize winning author. I love my irony served up hot and fresh in the morning..don’t you?

Sphere: Related Content

The Clinton era..was it really that good for America?

Tuesday night, prior to counting the first NH vote, the pundits pretty much had Hillary Clinton on life support. She won..not by a landslide, but she clearly beat Obama and wiped the street with John Edwards.

Whatever you think of Hillary and her politics, one thing is abundantly clear; she is riding on the coattails of her husbands eight years as President. A good yardstick of what will happen under a Clinton44 reign can be read in those ancient tea leaves of Clinton42’s era. My point-of-view is that, as progressives, with Bill Clinton we were in the frying pan and the heat was on high. We then jumped into the fire with the election of George Bush..but I digress.David Morris dissects the first Clinton’s time in office very well this week in an Alternet article. I also tear into the Clinton’s, the DCCC and the Clinton’s personal democratic PAC known as the DLC here.

Bill Clinton, with the flourish of his pen, changed the course of all telecommunications. He signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This act allowed a free-for-all to take place with the blessings of the federal government, and I might add..without one iota of oversight or public hearings on the massive changes that would take place. Within three years, we went from having 13 Teleco’s down to 5 huge conglomerates that control everything. The FCC lost control of the public airwaves as well thanks to the Teleco Act of ‘96. Two corporations, Infinity and Clear Channel sucked up a majority of the radio stations and consequently killed roughly 1100 of them in the process that didn’t ‘perform well’ if you believe the two corporations. Clear Channel is all about the Benjamin’s and its crystal clear if you read the series of articles at Salon by Eric Boehlert. Check out this quote from a Buzzflash writeup about the giant conglomeration that owns anything and everything regarding advertising and music:

Read more

Sphere: Related Content

Is; Your Nuts! A political term?

Bill Clinton used it several times today in New Hampshire when he was swarmed by Ron Paul wingnuts. From MSNBC’s First Read:

KEENE, NH — Several Ron Paul supporters shadowed a much larger Clinton entourage as Bill Clinton greeted supporters downtown. The former president later called them “nuts.”

During his third stop of the day, the former president posed for pictures and shook hands as he strolled down Main Street on this unseasonably warm Primary Eve day. Across the street, a few Paul supporters shouted his name.

Eventually, Clinton stopped outside a bakery, offered some remarks, and took questions. As he was answering one on Iraq, one of the Paul backers interrupted and shouted that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job, and that the U.S. didn’t need to be in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he dropped an F-bomb, the crowd booed. Clinton, who had tried to talk over the man, gave up.

“You wanna know what I think?” Clinton said. “You guys who think 9/11 was an inside job are crazy as hell. My wife was the senator from New York when that happened. I was down at Ground Zero. I saw the victims’ families. You’re nuts.”

That’s telling em Billy!

Sphere: Related Content