Lamont Williams, "voice talent"

Daily Kos has a new story about the robo-call operation in North Carolina I discussed yesterday. I don't buy the answers Daily Kos got from Women's Voices Women Vote and if I could I would ask the following:

1. Where did Women's Voices Women Vote get the list of men they called using the recorded voice of Lamont Williams, an African American "professional voice talent?" They claim they are targeting "unregistered voters and voters that have previously been registered but have moved and need to reregister." Then why did they get so many registered voters? In the case of the men they called, they presumably were targeting "African Americans, Hispanics and young people," which are the groups Women's Voices Women Vote reportedly reach out to, alongside the organization's main target, women. If it turns out they were calling people identified as Obama supporters, and they were using a list they procured from the Clinton campaign, this is an ugly story.
2. Why didn't Women's Voices Women Vote identify they were the source of the call? In February, after a similar series of robo-calls in Virginia created confusion and concern, Women's Voices Women Vote pledged that they never again would make anonymous calls and would, from that point forward, clearly identify that the calls were coming from Women's Voices Women Vote. Yet here we are, almost three months later, and they not only aren't following through and doing what they promised, they are making the strange choice of using a woman's voice to call women and an African American actor to call men. If they aren't up to some deceptive game designed to fool call recipients into thinking a person of color, ostensibly tied to the Obama campaign, is calling, why use different messages for men and women?
3. The calls placed to men, at least, appear to have been made after the deadline for registering to vote in North Carolina passed. What about the calls to women, who, given the trends of this race, were more likely to vote for Hillary? Were those calls made after the registration deadline?

(Update 5/2: This story has made an appearance in the mainstream media, popping up on the ABC News website under the banner "Brian Ross and the Investigative Team." It has not, as far as I can tell, appeared on ABC's evening broadcast. The ABC story, and a follow-up from Facing South, who broke the story, now identify that the calls featuring Lamont Williams were made ONLY to African American households, and that identical calls were made to African American households in Ohio and Louisiana as well as Virgina. I missed Page Gardner's "apology" on the Huffington Post on Wednesday. Gardner is Founder and President of Women's Voices Women Vote and was deputy politcal director for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign and presidential transition team. Is it too paranoid to imagine Women's Voices Women Vote was launched in anticipation of a role it might play in a Hillary Clinton campaign for president? Facing South, the blog that played a key role in bringing this story forward, has a vital update on its site today. North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper has called the calls illegal and is opening an investigation.)

Oprah's fans: mad at her for getting uppity

Confirming something I was speculating on a couple days ago, there is an eye-opening piece about the price Oprah is paying for backing Obama on the Root, a great blog hosting writing by some of the country's leading African American scholars and commentators. After she stepped out to campaign for Obama, Oprah's favorability rating dropped to 55%, a steep plunge from her usual favorability score of around 80%. The piece, written by Marjorie Valbrun, doesn't ask the question I want to ask: is any of this the product of a viral campaign by Clinton, begun, perhaps, with some astroturf postings on Oprah's message boards?

Hillary gives in to her dark side

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."

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.

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.

Donna live in New Orleans

This week I attended a conference in New Orleans and the keynote speaker was Donna Brazile, the Democratic consultant and CNN commentator. She gave an entertaining talk. She was born and raised in New Orleans, and she welcomed us and expressed her appreciation that we had picked her hometown, still struggling to recover from the ruin of Katrina. Her talk only now and then touched on civic engagement, the topic publicized in the conference program. At the end of her talk, instead of the usual Q and A, where one might expect questions about the talk, or requests for clarifying comments, several people stepped up to the microphones in the audience to ask questions about the endless Democratic primary schedule. As one might expect, several women stepped forward to offer, in place of actual questions, long, rambling defenses of Hillary. One woman, evidently realizing that protocol expects that Qs will be asked during Q and A, wrapped up her weepy monologue about Hillary by asking: Don't you think the media has been horrible to Hillary? Brazile's answer was long, angry, and illuminating. She began by saying that Hillary's problems are her own making, they aren't the product of a media conspiracy or boys beating up on the only girl with the nerve to crash their party. She said Hillary is better than her campaign. But her campiagn has been awful. Brazile couldn't believe that Hillary would assemble a campaign that assumed she'd lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday, and have NO IDEA WHAT TO DO ON FEBRUARY 6. She marveled at a campaign that would spend millions on political consultants, but not spend money for on-the-ground operations. The result, she implied, is a campaign that had NO CHOICE BUT TO ATTEMPT TO TAKE DOWN OBAMA, REGARDLESS OF THE DAMAGE IT WOULD DO TO THE PARTY. Brazile said she defended Hillary's decision to continue after the long slide that followed Super Tuesday, but she implied she might have thought differently if she knew Hillary's campaign was going to go after Obama with both barrels.

Brazile, who is a super-delegate, said, though, that she isn't going to watch while Hillary fights all the way to the convention. She said she is going to get on the phone on June 4, the day after Montana and South Dakota vote, and she is going to call Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, and she is going to say: This has to end now. That still leaves 2 months for the Clinton campaign to thoroughly contaminate the party and the process with their deplorable tactics and personal attacks. On June 4, the surviving candidate--which will be, as predicted by almost every objective observer, Barack Obama--will find himself trying to rally a demoralized, divided party, fatigued by months of brutal hand-to-hand combat, less willing (or less able) to give money for the general election race against McCain. Maureen Dowd wrote a column this week that laid out a scenario where Hillary, convinced she can't win this year, has decided to damage Obama so badly he can't win against McCain. Then Hillary will return in 2012 and take the presidency from McCain, or his VP if the 71 year-old McCain decides not to seek reelection. The scenerio made me think of Primary Colors, the Mike Nichols film, from the novel by Joe Klein. The novel was widely known to have been based on the Clintons, and the movie makes this as clear as can be, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson playing fictionalized versions of Bill and Hillary. In the movie, Susan and Jack Stanton (that is, Hillary and Bill) have the chance to win the Democratic party's nomination by using radioactive dirt against their primary opponent (they learn he used cocaine in the past and had some homosexual encounters). Watching the movie again recently I thought: Klein and Nichols had it right. Here, without that toxic-grade personal dirt to use, they have decided: if we can't bring Obama down, let's make sure he can't win, then we can win 4 years from now.

While traveling I had the chance to read the Wall Street Journal, something I never do unless someone gives me the paper (thanks Sheraton!). I never agree with their editorials, which are always campaigning for bigger tax breaks for the richest of the rich, and propose market-based solutions for everything. But on Friday I found myself saying: "Fuck yeah! That's right!"I can't link to the editorial, because the Journal makes you pay to look at their online edition. But here's the part that caught my eye. Hillary dragged Joe and Valerie Wilson to Philadelphia to campaign for her. The goal was to shine-up her foreign policy credentials and further distance herself from her vote authorizing the Iraq war. The editorial quotes Wilson saying: "Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path." Wait. That's. A. Lie. Anyone who has read Hillary's floor speech, as I pointed out about a month ago, knows that she sided with Bush, employing all of the same tactics he did to inspire fear among the American people and undermine the United Nations. The Journal points this out: "This is the same Senator Clinton who spoke extensively of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his WMD, who endorsed the invasion as a way to remove that threat, whose husband endorsed the invasion, and who supported the war for years afterward."

Obama live in Philly

One of my favorite albums of all time is David Bowie's live album recorded in Philadelphia. It does a lot of things, but its most visible achievement is the way it transitions Bowie from the fascinating cult figure he was on Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, to the accomplished entertainer he had become and would more visibly be on Young Americans and Station to Station.

Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia today does a lot of things, but at least 5 worth mentioning:

1. The point, about halfway through, where he turns from talking about anger in the black community to talk about white anger toward affirmative action and African American crime, is brilliant. It takes the field away from Hillary, at least for the moment. It is Obama saying: I feel your pain. It says: If you are looking for a candidate who gets it, and wants to find sustainable solutions that won’t be taken away in the next election cycle, then vote for me. As a side thought: One thing that undermines Hillary’s claims, for me, or anyone who cares about sustainable solutions, is that almost everything that Bill Clinton achieved was swept aside by the Bush administration. That’s why change is better than small victories achieved through hand-to-hand legislative combat. Change persists (paradoxically) while legislation is overturned.

2. He makes a case that change is essential to the American experience, and far from dismissing it, we need to appreciate its transformative role in our history. More essentially, he overturns the idea that Hillary has been trying to communicate—that we shouldn’t be seduced by talk about change. Change, in her rhetoric, is substance-less. She positions “solutions” as the opposite of change—in the language of her campaign, you can work for solutions or hope for change. But here, Obama makes the case that change IS hard, that it takes effort and focus. Here he communicates, in a way more concrete than ever before, that change requires sustained work, it requires us to build coalitions and set aside biases and preassumptions, and it requires work in our communities and new public policy, to rebuild schools, and provide health care, and assure jobs that pay a decent wage. Hillary thinks elected officials fight out our battles over public policies, in contests between (and within) Congress and the White House. But, upon closer scrutiny, her “solutions” are handed to us. For Obama, change requires this, but also much, much more—we need to come together and rethink what we want and what we believe. His vision is actually much more effortful than hers. Change isn’t a lazy hope for those unwilling to do the work, it is the product of cumulative labor, of sustained and coordinated effort.

3. Obama, in a similar way, asserts that talking about issues is important. Toward the end of the speech he succeeds in characterizing this campaign as a chance to talk “about the crumbling schools” and the corrosive effects of profit-driven decisions to close down factories and ship jobs overseas. Far from being insignificant, which is what Hillary has claimed, talking about things matters. That’s how things get on our agenda, that’s how we organize our common effort, and see where our points of common concern are. Hillary doesn’t need talk. She knows what we need. For her, talking gets in the way of getting things done.

4.Obama talks about his religion and should, now, at least, be able to set aside the insidious campaign to position him as a Manchurian candidate, a secret muslim, serving as an agent of Islamic extremism.

5.Although my friend Scott, who has been working and fund-raising for Obama (thanks Scott!) isn't buying it, I see more evidence here to support my argument that Obama is proposing a paradigm-shifting (not incrementalist) approach to policy and governance. This speech clearly makes the case for a meaningful reengineering of some central paradigms that guide our thinking about federalism, corporate responsibility, and our shared obligations to vulnerable populations. Who is responsible for failing schools? Not local communities, but all of us (locating, I think, the solution firmly at the federal level). Why do companies ship jobs overseas? For, as Obama describes it, “nothing more than a profit.” This suggests that there are things that matter more than profit and, presumably, there will be some effort, again at the federal level, to make corporations consider the externalities of their decisions. And what do we do about vulnerable populations, those families that are “standing permanently up to (their) neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown” them? It isn’t just about repairing the social safety net, or pushing people into work, as the Clinton welfare reforms did. We need to get at root causes. “A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family....And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement.” This all helps “create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.” This echoes the 1965 Moynihan Report, which said: “So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.” And, like Moynihan, the unmistakable conclusion is that we need “A national effort...that will give a unity of purpose to the many activities of the Federal government in this area.” This is how we eradicate poverty, and all the social externalities that come with it.

When we ask our two-year-old son Jonah who our next president will be, he says: “Barack O-BAMA.” Today I feel more confident that he’s right.