New game: find where Hillary talks about poverty

Here's what Hillary says about poverty on her official campaign website:

Hillary Clinton has been working for 35 years to give a voice to the poor and disempowered in America. She shares John Edwards’ compassion and deep concern for the daily lives of the American people, and is proud to meet John’s call to continue making poverty reduction a central issue in this campaign.

Yeah. Her commitment to "meet John's call" to make poverty "a central issue" is so strong, the concern doesn't even appear as a topic on her Issues drop-down menu. Here's a game. Without using the search function, see how long it takes you to find the above quote on Hillary's website.

Udpate (3/17): See the article in The American Lawyer where it discusses Hillary's long career as a member and partner of the Rose Law Firm. That's where she spent 15 of the "35 years" she has spent, in her words, helping "people who have nowhere else to turn." For this part of her career, she helped, for example, block efforts to help the poor save on energy bills. She is clearly trying to bury this part of her narrative. It takes up a single sentence on her campaign website.

More on poverty

Why doesn't Obama talk more about poverty on the campaign trail? And why, specifically, won't he make this the core of his campaign in Pennsylvania? What he has said on poverty is more profound, more heartfelt and more moving than anything Hillary is saying.

In a speech in July, Obama said: "The moral question about poverty in America - How can a country like this allow it? - has an easy answer: we can't. The political question that follows - What do we do about it? - has always been more difficult." Is he stumbling over the fact that he can't answer the question? I would say to the campaign: it doesn't matter. No one can answer that question at the start of the process. Map out a beginning, let's talk about the details of the problem--the role education and joblessness and isolation and hopelessness and federal policies on wages play--and then let's commit ourselves to change. When JFK promised we'd land on the moon before the 60's ended, he knew less about rocketry than Obama knows about poverty. His starting points are right on target: Make sure that every child in America has good schools. Make sure every worker earns a living wage. Make sure the disintegrating social fabric of our poorest and most desperate neighborhoods is repaired. And these goals can be achieved, or at least targeted, with federal legislation in the first 100 days of his administration. Make that the pledge. And then pledge to eliminate poverty in 30 years, as Edwards has.

Oh. And get Edwards' endorsement.

Obama: the affirmative action candidate?

It. Does. Not. Ever. Stop. Geraldine Ferraro, Clinton campaign fundraiser and advisor, went after Obama in a conversation with a meaningless little, but refreshingly titled California newspaper, The Daily Breeze. What she was voicing, and I assume she was instructed to voice, was the complaint that Obama is winning only because he is black. Huh?

Here's what's going on. There are parts of America, in the suburbs mainly, where people are convinced that their sons, promising young white boys, Eagle scouts and gridiron heroes, are being denied opportunities to study at the best schools because seats are being saved for less qualified black applicants. And, later, after college these same boys are being denied the best jobs in top firms because those jobs are being reserved for black candidates. This hatred of affirmative action--even where affirmative action policies aren't in place, or where they have been rolled back--is pronounced and unshakable. The Pennsylvania primary is six weeks away. And Pennsylvania is doted with communities where voters believe affirmative action is unfair and harmful (at least to their interests). This is an effort to speak to them. It is the Clinton campaign saying: Barack Obama is the affirmative action candidate. He is only where he is because he is taking advantage of an affirmative action impulse in our political process. And if you hate affirmative action. And if you hate those blacks who take jobs away from you. Well you should hate Obama too.

Update (3/13): Alright, after watching Ferraro continue to insist that she is a victim, of reverse racism, of the Obama campaign, of sexism, while continuing to hammer home her misguided point that Obama is the luckiest man in America, I accept that Hillary's campaign isn't orchestrating this. I mean, they can't be that stupid. Right? Or are they? I am certain Ferraro would shut up if the Clinton campaign told her to. Her embarrassing appearance on NBC News last night seemed like the kind of spin the Clinton campaign would want. Ann Curry certainly helped, allowing Ferraro to position the story as a product of Obama campaign staffers grabbing hold of a story from a small paper and employing it for their own purposes. Curry never said: "Well apart from these original comments, which you claim were made innocently to a small audience, you then returned to say you were a victim of racism and you were being targeted because you are white; can you comment on that?" Even with Curry holding her tongue, Ferraro still came off bad. Like so many others who view black success stories as a product of privileged opportunities, she diminshes Obama, portraying his success as a mystery that can only be explained with reference to our enormous, misguided generosity as a society, rushing forward, as we do, to open doors for African Americans and to thrust positions upon them. In Ferraro's words: "Is it because he is a Senator from Illinois? I don't think so." Wink wink. Then, like people who are racists, but don't like to think of themselves as racists, she plays the "some of my best friends are black" card (Susan Rice, I know her well) and the "I have always worked for black rights" card. Since the Clinton campaign won't do it, let me say it: Ferraro needs to stop appearing on television. She says she wants this controversy to end, that she has been a victim of the fallout, and yet she KEEPS SHOWING UP TO TALK ABOUT IT SOME MORE. My son is two years old. Yet he understands this: when you do something wrong and are given some time alone in your crib as a result, you don't talk about what you did wrong when mommy and daddy come to retrieve you from the crib. And once free from the crib, you certainly don't walk right back into the living room and throw a sippy cup at your sister again. Ferraro doesn't seem to have the common sense my two year old does.

Hillary's security experience

One last post today. Here are two pieces taking on Hillary's claim that she has experience in international security affairs. Hillary will exaggerate the truth, even manufacture it where necessary. The idea of politics as an honest conversation with voters is entirely alien to her. She isn't alone in this. This is how politics has been practiced for a generation. That's why a change is such an appealing prospect.

Update (3/24): Hillary's efforts to boast about her role in foreign policy is leading to increasingly obvious lies. She is claiming that she flew into Bosnia on a diplomatic mission and had to run across the landing strip to the security of the terminal under sniper fire. With Sinbad the comedian in tow. I assume she stepped forward to offer herself as a human shield to make sure Sinbad came out alive. But it is all a stupid, easily revealed lie. Now her campaign staff is reduced to saying things like: Hillary was told the "ceremony on the tarmac might be canceled because of sniper fire in the hills." It wasn't, and they didn't see any sniper fire, and we're now being asked to believe that routine preparations designed to keep the first lady (and Sinbad!) safe given the range of possible risks potentially encountered in a war zone are evidence that she was in peril.

Hillary's race games

There is an op-ed in today's New Tork Times by Orlando Patterson that is required reading. Not that anyone will read it. I mean, how can anyone get past the lurid Eliot Spitzer story? In passing, let me mention, Spitzer is a Clinton-backing super delegate.

Patterson argues that Hillary's red phone ad is really making the case that your wife and children can't be safe with a black man. This is the age-old concern, dating back to slavery, that black men are a threat to our way of life. Is Patterson right? Was Hillary playing on white fears about black men invading their homes? I don't know. Patterson is willing to admit he can't know what the crafters of the ad intended.

But let's take an opportunity to pause and put several things together in one place. For me, the picture is a Clinton campaign that plays games with race, is insensitive to the ways black voters view the world and respond to messages, and inflames, rather than repairs, racial divisions.

First, Bill Clinton attempted to remind us that Obama, like Jesse Jackson, won South Carolina only because black voters voted for him. This did two things, it marginalized Obama by depicting him as a black candidate, second, intentionally or otherwise, it advanced the argument that black voters can't be trusted to make sensible decisions--they won't vote in ways that are good for them or good for the country, but instead, they are going to vote for the black candidate, whether it is Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Barack Obama. So we should disregard their choices as we try to make sense of trends and outcomes in the electoral process.

Second, Hillary and her campaign staffers have attempted to portray Obama as a Muslim, or at least to equivocate when equivocation is laughably inappropriate. This isn't about suggesting that he will be in league with the terrorists, it's about portraying him as an outsider. He's not like us and it is, by implication, unthinkable to imagine electing him. Strictly speaking, this isn't about race, but viewed through a wider lens it is--we are a white christian nation, and Obama has no business leading us. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hillary and her campaign are spreading this message. Much of this is originating in the Republican party and being spread by bloggers and others at the paranoid fringes of the conservative spectrum. The Clinton campaign is, however, doing something very similar to what Hillary did when she stood up on the Senate floor to weigh in on the decision to invade Iraq. When she should have attacked the misguided and deceitful claims being put forward by the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq war, Hillary instead echoed them. Confronted with lies and innuendos and misstatements about Obama, Hillary is, once again, echoing them rather than attacking them.

Third, Hillary is offering Obama the vice presidency even though he has more votes, more delgates, and has won more states than she has. A portion of the African American electorate and some observers in the blogosphere have called this Hillary's "back of the bus" strategy. Obama shouldn't expect to drive the bus--he's an African American--but he should be content to take a seat in the back and enjoy the ride. I don't think this idea ever occurred to the Clinton campaign. Their calculations were political--they looked at a slice of the democratic party, noticed that they liked Obama but had fears that he was too inexperienced, and thought they could collect their votes by saying: a vote for Hillary/Obama is a vote for Obama, but the more seasoned, ready to lead Obama eight years from now. But this cynical and calculated maneuver, like other things the Clintons have done, is tone-deaf to the response in the African American community.

After Obama wins today in Mississippi, expect the Clinton campaign to dismiss the win as meaningless--a product of black voters voting for a black candidate in a state that the Republicans will carry in November. Here's what I would hope the Clinton campaign would see--the remarkable fact that an African American won a primary in the deep south, in a state that is notoriously linked with segregation and racial violence. This won't be what they see, and for me, this should be a troubling realization for those who still believe that Hillary cares about the right things.

Bringing the poor into the picture

I have often scratched my head over the fact that American politicians never talk about the poor. John Edwards did, and look where it got him. I know, I know: it's all about pandering to voters, so candidates elevate the pain of the middle class (who can't afford gas for their SUV's), and pledge to eradicate their suffering. The poor, the story goes, don't vote, so why should politicians waste their breath talking about them. But that's not true. And in a race this tight, with an economy this bad, shouldn't every vote be sought. And, setting cold, cynical political calculations aside, isn't it time someone talked about the poor in America, especially after the epic, wide-screen depiction of poverty we saw in the aftermath of Katrina? Katrina wasn't just a glimpse into what goes wrong when you turn government over to people who have contempt for government (although it was certainly that), it was also a chance to see the poor we customarily ignore.

The English economic historian R.H. Tawney once sketched the poor as "a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him." After years of tearing down the structures built by a series of Democratic presidents throughout the mid-twentieth century, we now find our poor with fewer protections against this rising tide. Katrina swept away the homes and jobs of tens of thousands of poor people in New Orleans. And home foreclosures and recession threaten to swamp hundreds of thousands more.

Obama should take up Edwards' campaign to end poverty within 30 years. Edwards called poverty, "the great moral issue of our time." And that message, even that formulation, resonates powerfully with people in many faiths. Hillary has recently concluded that McCain will make the general election about national security, and that she has a better chance than Obama to compete head-to-head with McCain on the issue. She is wrong about that in too many ways to count, but I'll offer three reasons she is mistaken. First, McCain can claim to be a Vietnam War hero. Yet, as we saw with John Kerry, that doesn't get you very far. But, he was dead wrong on Iraq and continues to be. Hillary is only a little less wrong than McCain on Iraq; she can essentially argue that she has seen the light and, oops, we should have been more careful in going to war in Iraq. Second, McCain's position on Iraq--that we are winning and we shouldn't surrender--is indefensible from a longer-view strategic perspective. We are exhausting our military resources. Our national guard units cannot respond to domestic emergencies and the army can't resond to other threats elsewhere in the world because they are bogged down in Iraq. If you aren't making that argument--and Hillary hasn't indicated she will--then you aren't taking on McCain head on. Third, I don't care what McCain believes, or what Hillary believes McCain believes, there is no way this election is going to be fought and won over national security. This election is about the economy, stupids. And shifting the conversation now to poverty is an opportunity to move your pieces across the board, while McCain is still learning the rules of the game.

Taking the gloves off

A lot of the talking heads seem to believe that Obama has a dilemma. As the change candidate, dedicated to replacing our politics of dirty tricks and fear and innuendo with something more engaged and responsive, the commentators say Obama can't go negative. So Hillary, the candidate who will do anything to win, even suggesting your kids will die if you vote for Obama, has, they say, an advantage. That's all wrong, and here's why.

I, like so many of Obama's supporters, embrace Obama's commitment to reengineer our political life. I don't view the past through rose colored glasses, I know that dirty tricks and fear and the politics of division have always been part of our political process. Karl Rove didn't invent mudslinging and smears and he wasn't the first to employ rhetoric to inflame our hatreds. Further, the rich and the well-connected have always enjoyed an advantage in politics. And while K Street lobbyists have inserted themselves deeper into the political processes than ever before, government has always been susceptible to the corrupting influence of money. Overturning all of this won't be easy. Yet we need to make a start, and Obama is the first presidential candidate positioned to make a serious effort.

Hillary Clinton is deeply implicated in the type of politics Obama seeks to reject. Obama's goal in the next seven weeks before the Pennsylvania primary should be to make clearer his vision of a renewed, responsive, and transparent political process. And he should throw a bright light on Hillary and illuminate the ways in which she is the very embodiment of what is wrong with American politics. This isn't "going negative," this is straight talk. This is an example of how we should, now and in the future, require politicians to be accountable for the choices they make. And this needs to be done, in a way consistent with the new politics we imagine, with an eye toward expanding the conversation, rather than as a way of marginalizing Hillary. The Clinton campaign consistently has sought to marginalize Obama, dismissing his appeal as cult-like, mocking his appeal to hope, and proposing that he has nothing to offer but words--to the point where Hillary now has been claiming, over and over, that his "entire campaign" is "based on one speech."

So where does Obama start? I would begin, as Obama has, with Hillary's support for the war in Iraq. She hasn't explained to any level of satisfaction why she voted to give George Bush the authority to invade Iraq. Reviewing her speech on the floor of the Senate when she chose to support Bush's rush to war, one sees all of the same justifications that the Bush White House used to justify their efforts to build a sustained push toward war. She uncritically swallowed the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, she believed the U.N. was a weak and ineffective organization (her words: "The United Nations is an organization that is still growing and maturing"), and she implied that failure to act would open us to the possibility of another attack like the one we experienced on September 11th. Further, and most bizarrely, she defended her vote because it expanded presidential power and prerogatives. This was, of course, one of the secret desires of the war's neocon architects, but even they weren't foolish enough to make that a central part of the conversation. Can you see Americans swallowing the deaths of thousands of American soldiers as a means to expand presidential powers?

In short, Obama's claim that Hillary aided and abetted Bush's inexorable march to war seems to have validity. She needs to answer this claim. Obama needs to shift focus: the issue isn't his opposition to the war (although he was right to oppose it), the concern is not Hillary's poor judgment (although she failed to question assumptions about the risk Iraq posed), the question is her role in reciting all of the very same claims the Bush administration was voicing. Her position now is that she wanted more inspections, that she wanted to pressure Saddam Hussein to comply, yet she was turning up the temperature, not appealing for calm. She was playing on our fears--of another attack on our homeland--and undermining the organization that had the best hope of manufacturing an agreement to observe and inspect Iraqi facilities and impose sanctions.

The other topic Obama needs to put on the table is the tri-polar relationship between Bill Clinton, Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra, and Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. The New York Times covered this story in January, but it never developed any wider play. That doesn't mean there is nothing to explore. In brief, Bill Clinton arranged a meeting between Giustra, who was seeking a contract to extract Kazakhstan's uranium, and Nazarbayev, a dictator with an abhorrent human rights record. In the end, everyone got what they wanted. Clinton promoted Nazarbayev's candidacy to head the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, despite the Kazakhstan president's authoritarian record. Giustra got the contract to exploit Kazakhstan's uranium. And Clinton's foundation received a 31 million dollar donation from Giustra. Bill Clinton has said he will continue to fundraise for his foundation if Hillary wins the presidency. It is valid to ask: will this mean brokering more deals between dictators and those seeking favors from them? If it does, what are the implications for U.S. foreign policy? And, perhaps as important, what are the implications for Hillary Clinton's presidency? Will she be incapacitated by calls from Republican opponents for investigations into Bill Clinton's opportunistic friendships?

Hillary's claim is that she is better prepared than Obama to fight the Republican attack machine. Obama has been responding to this claim obliquely. In essence, he has said that he aims to improve politics, to make it about more than fisticuffs and name-calling. But Obama needs more than this. He needs to begin a conversation about Hillary's claim, and question whether she, perhaps through Bill's business dealings, is more susceptible to Republican attacks than he is.