The Clinton campaign has been running a black ops program to convince likely Obama supporters in North Carolina that they aren't registered. Robo-calls, from someone named Lamont Williams, offer to help call recipients register but--oops! oh-oh!--North Carolina's deadline to register has already passed. In fact, most of these voters are already registered, and the calls are aimed to confused them and, the hope is, convince them they can't vote in the primary. Lamont Williams doesn't exist--or rather, there certainly is someone named Lamont Williams somewhere out there, but the calls are really coming from Women's Voices Women Vote, a non-profit run by a slew of former Clinton administration officials and long-time supporters. Undoubtedly, the name Lamont Williams was picked because it sounded a little, I'll say it, black.
Another hallmark of the Rove era in dirty politics--the push poll--has also made an appearance in North Carolina, in the form of some telephone surveys conducted by Garin-Hart-Yang, the firm of Clinton pollster Geoff Garin. The calls "test some messages," i.e. strategies for negative campaigning, and by design leave callers with some "very major doubts" about Obama. This is the goal of push polling. Under the guise of an objective poll, designed merely to collect information, the campaign pumps out lots of negative, innuendo-loaded, and phony messages about its opponent. Karl Rove's most infamous push polling happened in Bush's primary run against John McCain in South Carolina, in 2000, when Rove operatives called voters to ask: "would you be more or less likely to vote for McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black."
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Is Obama following in the path of the Cleveland Browns and the Indians?
I grew up in Cleveland. The last time a Cleveland sports team won a championship was 1964. I was 3. All my life I had to experience the excruciating pain of watching the Browns (under Bernie Kosar; damn that John Elway!) and the Indians (I still have nightmares about Tony Fernandez's 11th inning error in the 7th Game of the 1997 World Series) lose games inches away from championships. This has made me a total baby when watching Cleveland teams flirting with greatness. Last year I couldn't watch the Cavs in the NBA finals at all because I knew it would all end horribly and I'd be in a funk for days afterwards.
I'm starting to have the same feeling about Obama and the Democratic nomination. That, more than anything else, explains my long absence from the blog. I have been watching, slack jawed and gaping, as Hillary and the media has convinced America that Jeremiah Wright's views matter (and tell us something about Obama) and that Obama is elite and out of touch. And the Obama campaign has stumbled, making the same mistake that Gore did in 2000 and Kerry did in 2004, being pulled away from their message, scrambling to relocate their equilibrium. It doesn't really matter to me whether this ends with Hillary pulling off the political equivilant of The Drive or Obama following in Earnest Byner's footsteps and fumbling it all away, I can't watch.
So I have been thinking through what Obama needs to do. It's simple: he needs to win Indiana and North Carolina. Period. This race has become something entirely conducted in the headlines. The truth of things doesn't matter. Obama's impressive performance over a candidate that should have cakewalked to the nomination doesn't matter. The media (or as we bloggers say, MSM) wants this race to continue. And they are ignoring any realities or subtleties that get in the way. If America wakes up on May 7th and sees that Obama has won Indiana and North Carolina, and the media is dancing around calling it a "comeback" or "extraordinary" or claiming that it shows Obama's "resilience," it is over.
So, the question becomes, how does Obama do this? I have three contributions to make. Okay, four, the first is entirely personal and whiny:
1. Someone from the Obama campaign should call me! I signed up to volunteer in Indiana. To knock on doors and talk to voters. I live 25 minutes away, and my Dad grew up in La Porte. I have cute kids. I'm a balding, 40-something white man. I can show up on someone's porch and be mistaken for a member of the homeowner's church. But NO ONE HAS CALLED ME TO TELL ME WHERE TO GO OR WHAT TO DO! The Obama website has a handy, user-friendly volunteer sign-up feature, I gave them my name and my phone number. A messsage in response said I'd get a call from a local organizer. Nope. Never came. (Update 4/30: I just got an email from the Obama volunteer center getting me squared away with info for my volunteering effort this weekend in Indiana. So no worries.)
2. Obama needs to talk about poverty. Especially in North Carolina. He has to bring together his concerns about a number of interrelated issues and package it as a poverty plan. And he needs to tie his plan in a very public way to John Edwards' commitment to the issue. I've been beating this drum for a while, but I still think I am right. In an economy this bad, the middle class is concerned about falling into poverty, and the poor are concerned about sinking deeper. And the topic, and Obama's real commitment to it, is a great way to overturn Hillary's laughable claims that Obama is out of touch and elitist. My friend Tom Frank recently published a column in the Wall Street Journal, which is something I never thought I would write. He up-ends the issue about Obama's elitism with a light touch. What the media is getting worked-up about (and getting voters worked-up about) is a "crime of attitude." We don't like Obama's attitude. How dare he think he is better than us! But not voting for a candidate because you don't like his attitude, when everything else about him is right, is torturously idiotic. Yet, nevertheless, that's where we are, and Obama needs to demonstrate not only his concern for America's working class, but offer solutions. He should pledge to make sure that every child in America has a good school and a first-class education. He needs to promise every worker a living wage. It is time to revoice his commitment to repair the disintegrating social fabric of our poorest and most desperate neighborhoods. This was the work of his years as a neighborhood organizer. These goals can be achieved, or at least targeted, with federal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration. Obama needs to make that the pledge. And then pledge to eliminate poverty in 30 years.
3. He needs to talk about his plans to make college affordable for everyone. His plan is only a tiny bit better than Hillary's, but he can still get out there (especially in Indiana) and make a truthful claim that it is better. I grew up in a family where my mom and dad worried about paying for three kids' college bills. This is a worry that is universal across the American landscape. Unless you are in the upper ten-percent, college costs are a worry. And nothing makes you feel more like a failure than being unable to delivery on your promise to make your child's life better than your own. Finding a way to give your son or daughter a college education is one important thing you can do to help deliver on that promise. Obama has to stand up and say: I understand this, and I will help you guarantee that you can give your child the education that will open doors and transform his or her life. Indiana is a great place to have this conversation (and so is North Carolina). Indiana is a "hand-up" kind of state. Hoosiers don't like or trust big government, but they believe in giving everyone a hand, and then giving folks the chance to take it from there. Translated: if we give everyone a chance at a quality education, we have done a lot to level the playing field. I don't believe that and, in fact, without the work to improve the conditions and circumstances and life chances of children living in the poorest corners of America, the promise of a college education means very little, since they won't have the tools to take advantage of it. We need big government, because only big government can do this. But, if the goal is to find consensus--and isn't that part of the Obama vision--finding common ground with Hoosiers over paying for college is a commendable place to start.
4. Get everyone on the campaign trail. Obama needs to be out there ALL THE TIME! And Michelle needs to get out to Gary and Hammond, Indiana, just a short drive from her south Chicago home. And get the Kennedys and Robert Reich and Bruce Springsteen and the Arcade Fire and everyone else out to North Carolina, campaigning in the state's university towns. And, am I the only one wondering, where is Oprah? She can get a limo ride to Indiana in the time it has taken me to write this. And if she can convince 1000 women leaning toward Hillary to vote Obama, that's a big thing in a campaign this close. I've been mystified by Oprah's complete absence on the campaign trail, but the American media hasn't pursued the question. The Times of London did, and they concluded that Oprah felt like her empire was threatened by the anger of the thousands of women who supported Hillary and felt betrayed by Oprah. After announcing her support of Obama, message boards on sites associated with Oprah's media conglomerate became flooded with poisonous messages from upset fans. In their anger they saw that Oprah had sinned in two ways: she had failed to back a woman running for the presidency, and she had revealed her inner "racism," i.e., she was viewing the world through a racial prism and by backing a black candidate she had allowed her race to get in the way of sound judgement. The Times wondered--way back in January--if the assault on Oprah's message boards was spontaneous or orchestrated by Clinton. But they never followed up on the question, and neither has, as far as I can tell, any media outlet in the U.S. This might be because there is nothing there--these were authentic messages from distressed fans--or it could be because these message boards, which offer the rest of us a chance to give voice, have been celebrated by the media as part of the democratization of opinion made possible by the web. The media doesn't really want to draw attention to the fact that these message boards are employed by politicians and corporations to shape opinion and spin stories. I spent a few minutes looking at some recent threads on Oprah's message boards, and it turns out that Oprah has a lot of ugly, hate-filled fans. Some of this could be manufactured, but the one-sidedness of it--every poster seems to be a racist Republican witch--makes me think that Oprah was surprised by the reaction, and how awful, mean-spirited and creepy her fans were, and decided she needed to shut up about Obama, or risk losing her fan base. Still, some of the postings--calling attention repeatedly to "what we don't know" about Obama and his "plans" for America--sound a lot like the viral talking points the Clinton campaign has been spreading for weeks.
I'm starting to have the same feeling about Obama and the Democratic nomination. That, more than anything else, explains my long absence from the blog. I have been watching, slack jawed and gaping, as Hillary and the media has convinced America that Jeremiah Wright's views matter (and tell us something about Obama) and that Obama is elite and out of touch. And the Obama campaign has stumbled, making the same mistake that Gore did in 2000 and Kerry did in 2004, being pulled away from their message, scrambling to relocate their equilibrium. It doesn't really matter to me whether this ends with Hillary pulling off the political equivilant of The Drive or Obama following in Earnest Byner's footsteps and fumbling it all away, I can't watch.
So I have been thinking through what Obama needs to do. It's simple: he needs to win Indiana and North Carolina. Period. This race has become something entirely conducted in the headlines. The truth of things doesn't matter. Obama's impressive performance over a candidate that should have cakewalked to the nomination doesn't matter. The media (or as we bloggers say, MSM) wants this race to continue. And they are ignoring any realities or subtleties that get in the way. If America wakes up on May 7th and sees that Obama has won Indiana and North Carolina, and the media is dancing around calling it a "comeback" or "extraordinary" or claiming that it shows Obama's "resilience," it is over.
So, the question becomes, how does Obama do this? I have three contributions to make. Okay, four, the first is entirely personal and whiny:
1. Someone from the Obama campaign should call me! I signed up to volunteer in Indiana. To knock on doors and talk to voters. I live 25 minutes away, and my Dad grew up in La Porte. I have cute kids. I'm a balding, 40-something white man. I can show up on someone's porch and be mistaken for a member of the homeowner's church. But NO ONE HAS CALLED ME TO TELL ME WHERE TO GO OR WHAT TO DO! The Obama website has a handy, user-friendly volunteer sign-up feature, I gave them my name and my phone number. A messsage in response said I'd get a call from a local organizer. Nope. Never came. (Update 4/30: I just got an email from the Obama volunteer center getting me squared away with info for my volunteering effort this weekend in Indiana. So no worries.)
2. Obama needs to talk about poverty. Especially in North Carolina. He has to bring together his concerns about a number of interrelated issues and package it as a poverty plan. And he needs to tie his plan in a very public way to John Edwards' commitment to the issue. I've been beating this drum for a while, but I still think I am right. In an economy this bad, the middle class is concerned about falling into poverty, and the poor are concerned about sinking deeper. And the topic, and Obama's real commitment to it, is a great way to overturn Hillary's laughable claims that Obama is out of touch and elitist. My friend Tom Frank recently published a column in the Wall Street Journal, which is something I never thought I would write. He up-ends the issue about Obama's elitism with a light touch. What the media is getting worked-up about (and getting voters worked-up about) is a "crime of attitude." We don't like Obama's attitude. How dare he think he is better than us! But not voting for a candidate because you don't like his attitude, when everything else about him is right, is torturously idiotic. Yet, nevertheless, that's where we are, and Obama needs to demonstrate not only his concern for America's working class, but offer solutions. He should pledge to make sure that every child in America has a good school and a first-class education. He needs to promise every worker a living wage. It is time to revoice his commitment to repair the disintegrating social fabric of our poorest and most desperate neighborhoods. This was the work of his years as a neighborhood organizer. These goals can be achieved, or at least targeted, with federal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration. Obama needs to make that the pledge. And then pledge to eliminate poverty in 30 years.
3. He needs to talk about his plans to make college affordable for everyone. His plan is only a tiny bit better than Hillary's, but he can still get out there (especially in Indiana) and make a truthful claim that it is better. I grew up in a family where my mom and dad worried about paying for three kids' college bills. This is a worry that is universal across the American landscape. Unless you are in the upper ten-percent, college costs are a worry. And nothing makes you feel more like a failure than being unable to delivery on your promise to make your child's life better than your own. Finding a way to give your son or daughter a college education is one important thing you can do to help deliver on that promise. Obama has to stand up and say: I understand this, and I will help you guarantee that you can give your child the education that will open doors and transform his or her life. Indiana is a great place to have this conversation (and so is North Carolina). Indiana is a "hand-up" kind of state. Hoosiers don't like or trust big government, but they believe in giving everyone a hand, and then giving folks the chance to take it from there. Translated: if we give everyone a chance at a quality education, we have done a lot to level the playing field. I don't believe that and, in fact, without the work to improve the conditions and circumstances and life chances of children living in the poorest corners of America, the promise of a college education means very little, since they won't have the tools to take advantage of it. We need big government, because only big government can do this. But, if the goal is to find consensus--and isn't that part of the Obama vision--finding common ground with Hoosiers over paying for college is a commendable place to start.
4. Get everyone on the campaign trail. Obama needs to be out there ALL THE TIME! And Michelle needs to get out to Gary and Hammond, Indiana, just a short drive from her south Chicago home. And get the Kennedys and Robert Reich and Bruce Springsteen and the Arcade Fire and everyone else out to North Carolina, campaigning in the state's university towns. And, am I the only one wondering, where is Oprah? She can get a limo ride to Indiana in the time it has taken me to write this. And if she can convince 1000 women leaning toward Hillary to vote Obama, that's a big thing in a campaign this close. I've been mystified by Oprah's complete absence on the campaign trail, but the American media hasn't pursued the question. The Times of London did, and they concluded that Oprah felt like her empire was threatened by the anger of the thousands of women who supported Hillary and felt betrayed by Oprah. After announcing her support of Obama, message boards on sites associated with Oprah's media conglomerate became flooded with poisonous messages from upset fans. In their anger they saw that Oprah had sinned in two ways: she had failed to back a woman running for the presidency, and she had revealed her inner "racism," i.e., she was viewing the world through a racial prism and by backing a black candidate she had allowed her race to get in the way of sound judgement. The Times wondered--way back in January--if the assault on Oprah's message boards was spontaneous or orchestrated by Clinton. But they never followed up on the question, and neither has, as far as I can tell, any media outlet in the U.S. This might be because there is nothing there--these were authentic messages from distressed fans--or it could be because these message boards, which offer the rest of us a chance to give voice, have been celebrated by the media as part of the democratization of opinion made possible by the web. The media doesn't really want to draw attention to the fact that these message boards are employed by politicians and corporations to shape opinion and spin stories. I spent a few minutes looking at some recent threads on Oprah's message boards, and it turns out that Oprah has a lot of ugly, hate-filled fans. Some of this could be manufactured, but the one-sidedness of it--every poster seems to be a racist Republican witch--makes me think that Oprah was surprised by the reaction, and how awful, mean-spirited and creepy her fans were, and decided she needed to shut up about Obama, or risk losing her fan base. Still, some of the postings--calling attention repeatedly to "what we don't know" about Obama and his "plans" for America--sound a lot like the viral talking points the Clinton campaign has been spreading for weeks.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Bosnia burned while Bill fiddled
Christopher Hitchens is a shrill blow hard. But sometimes he is right. He has a column in Slate right now that nails Hillary's lies about Bosnian sniper fire with such precision that it should be required reading for anyone trying to sort out whether Hillary's lies about her excellent adventures with Sinbad matter. I used to laugh at and applaud the bumper stickers that say When Bill lied no one died. Hitchens' point: When Hillary lied, in fact, people had died, and her husband hadn't done enough to stop it. It doesn't require mental gymnastics to accept his central point. One of the things that Hillary's lie conceals is that the Clinton administration didn't do enough to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. And, by Hitchens' account, that was because Hillary feared her health-care reforms would be compromised by our involvement in the Balkans quagmire. Her lens was LBJ's war on poverty, which was lost, according to conventional wisdom, because of his decision to widen the war in Vietnam. As we spent resources there, and as LBJ lost support and leverage because of the unpopular war, we lost our chance to end poverty.
Historically, we can assess the measures the Clinton administration went to to avoid making a firm commitment to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. After claiming that he would help arm Bosnia's muslims to make it "a fair fight," Bill Clinton backed away from even this modest commitment, while working to undermine efforts by France to engineer a NATO plan to intervene. I think it is an exaggeration to claim that the only thing keeping Bill Clinton from stepping in to do more in Bosnia was Hillary's concerns about her health-care initiative. There were legitimate questions about how messy an intervention would be, and real concerns about how a long-term involvement in Bosnia would shape or undermine our long-range strategic goals. Clinton wanted to redirect NATO toward new priorities in a new international landscape, expanding its role in non-European security affairs and using it to absorb new Eastern European democracies, incorporating them into the alliance as a way of shaping the post-Cold War world.
Looming over the decision was U.S. failure in Somalia. Bill Clinton didn't have strong national security credentials when he entered the White House. When a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter went down in October 1993, and 18 U.S. servicemen were killed, Bill Clinton needed to restore confidence among U.S. military forces, who felt like they had been led into a no-win mission, without adequate forces to do the job, by a President who had avoided military service. He didn't want to repeat the experience in Bosnia. Even when HANDED THE OPPORTUNITY TO GO INTO BOSNIA WITH NATO BACKING, exactly the type of concerted international action the Bush administration only pretended to assemble in Iraq, Bill declined. Even when the proposed action on the table was NATO bombing to protect safe areas, Bill delayed. U.S. involvement only moved forward in 1995 when Bosnian Serbs escalated the conflict by taking UN peacekeepers hostage, making U.S. intervention more politically acceptable; polls showed 78 percent of Americans approved using U.S. forces to rescue captive UN forces and enforce safe-zone guarantees.
Two truths: Hillary's post-conflict trip to Tuzla says nothing about Hillary's foreign affairs readiness. The Clinton administration's timid, self-interested, and poll-driven choice to delay (and finally take part in) a Bosnian intervention says a lot about Bill's failings as a commander in chief. Hillary should not be condemned for her husband's lack of courage, compassion, or leadership, but she should be condemned, as Hitchens does, for attempting to suggest that her presence on that tarmac in Tuzla says anything about her willingness to face fire, or respond to international crises, or take on bullies. And her willingness to lie about being shot at, to gain a moment's notice on the evening news, is an insult to everyone who actually did face fire to bring peace to Bosnia and end ethnic cleansing there.
Update: The Clinton campaign's flawed efforts to talk their way out of Hillary's lie about landing under sniper fire in Tuzla continue in the Opinion pages of the New York Times today. Again, they hang their defense on: If her military escort took steps to keep the First Lady safe, she must have been at risk. And because she bravely faced those risks, she can deservedly be described as crisis-ready. That's like saying: because the TSA screens passengers at airports I fly from, and I bravely line up to fly anyway, I clearly have the right stuff. In actuality, I do answer the call when it comes at 3 a.m. All the time. In fact, I did last night, when my two year old couldn't sleep and called out to me. I grabbed him from his bed and we watched TV and ate rice cakes.
Historically, we can assess the measures the Clinton administration went to to avoid making a firm commitment to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. After claiming that he would help arm Bosnia's muslims to make it "a fair fight," Bill Clinton backed away from even this modest commitment, while working to undermine efforts by France to engineer a NATO plan to intervene. I think it is an exaggeration to claim that the only thing keeping Bill Clinton from stepping in to do more in Bosnia was Hillary's concerns about her health-care initiative. There were legitimate questions about how messy an intervention would be, and real concerns about how a long-term involvement in Bosnia would shape or undermine our long-range strategic goals. Clinton wanted to redirect NATO toward new priorities in a new international landscape, expanding its role in non-European security affairs and using it to absorb new Eastern European democracies, incorporating them into the alliance as a way of shaping the post-Cold War world.
Looming over the decision was U.S. failure in Somalia. Bill Clinton didn't have strong national security credentials when he entered the White House. When a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter went down in October 1993, and 18 U.S. servicemen were killed, Bill Clinton needed to restore confidence among U.S. military forces, who felt like they had been led into a no-win mission, without adequate forces to do the job, by a President who had avoided military service. He didn't want to repeat the experience in Bosnia. Even when HANDED THE OPPORTUNITY TO GO INTO BOSNIA WITH NATO BACKING, exactly the type of concerted international action the Bush administration only pretended to assemble in Iraq, Bill declined. Even when the proposed action on the table was NATO bombing to protect safe areas, Bill delayed. U.S. involvement only moved forward in 1995 when Bosnian Serbs escalated the conflict by taking UN peacekeepers hostage, making U.S. intervention more politically acceptable; polls showed 78 percent of Americans approved using U.S. forces to rescue captive UN forces and enforce safe-zone guarantees.
Two truths: Hillary's post-conflict trip to Tuzla says nothing about Hillary's foreign affairs readiness. The Clinton administration's timid, self-interested, and poll-driven choice to delay (and finally take part in) a Bosnian intervention says a lot about Bill's failings as a commander in chief. Hillary should not be condemned for her husband's lack of courage, compassion, or leadership, but she should be condemned, as Hitchens does, for attempting to suggest that her presence on that tarmac in Tuzla says anything about her willingness to face fire, or respond to international crises, or take on bullies. And her willingness to lie about being shot at, to gain a moment's notice on the evening news, is an insult to everyone who actually did face fire to bring peace to Bosnia and end ethnic cleansing there.
Update: The Clinton campaign's flawed efforts to talk their way out of Hillary's lie about landing under sniper fire in Tuzla continue in the Opinion pages of the New York Times today. Again, they hang their defense on: If her military escort took steps to keep the First Lady safe, she must have been at risk. And because she bravely faced those risks, she can deservedly be described as crisis-ready. That's like saying: because the TSA screens passengers at airports I fly from, and I bravely line up to fly anyway, I clearly have the right stuff. In actuality, I do answer the call when it comes at 3 a.m. All the time. In fact, I did last night, when my two year old couldn't sleep and called out to me. I grabbed him from his bed and we watched TV and ate rice cakes.
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