W.V.W.V.

I can't get over the fact that the abbreviation Women's Voices Women Vote uses--W.V.W.V.--looks like an emoticon. And it makes me think of one of those professional wrestling operations. Like the WWF or WCW. Written like this--WVWV--it looks like an EKG. But I'm off topic.

I know I won't drop the topic--I'm holding on to it like Tim Russert holds on to Jeremiah Wright--but this business with WVWV in North Carolina is still bothering me. I don’t get what’s going on here unless it is dirty tricks and vote suppression. The letter Women’s Voices Women Vote sent to the North Carolina State Board of Elections clearly said the campaign involved outreach to “unmarried women” who “W.V.W.V. believes to be unregistered.” See the letter here: http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/WomanVoicesWomenVoteLetter.pdf. So why did they hire an African American voice actor to record a message and then send those calls ONLY to African American households anonymously (after the registration deadline)? This could achieve two things for the Clinton campaign: 1. It might create confusion among African Americans who, after getting the call and the packet, assume that they aren’t registered to vote, and it is too late to do anything about it. 2. It might result in the registration of some previously unregistered African Americans, who would be able to vote in the general election (when it might help Hillary if she is the nominee), but not in the primary (when it would help Obama).

Everything about this story fails the smell test. In answers to questions posed to W.V.W.V. by Adam B from Daily Kos, the group said: “While our focus is on unmarried women, we have worked to target other under-represented groups through our project, the Voter Participation Center.” And: “we have also worked to motivate African Americans, Hispanics and young people.” Oh really? Then why doesn’t their Voter Participation Center website say anything about these aims? It says it targets: “unmarried Americans.” Does that mean gays? It used to mean that. In the past, whenever a prominent gay entertainer or designer died, the New York Times used to describe him in his obit as “a confirmed bachelor” or simply as "unmarried." I don’t think that’s what W.V.W.V. means here. They go on to clarify that the focus really is still on women: “Increasing voter registration and turnout of unmarried people in elections is critical to ensuring that the issues and concerns of unmarried women are heard in our democracy.” I don’t get how this is different from what W.V.W.V. does. But that’s OK. I mean Sony Pictures also owns Columbia and TriStar and a controlling share of MGM and they all make movies. But the group’s explanations, ad hoc and after the fact and silent on one key question--that they promised to stop making confusing anonymous robo-calls three months ago--don’t add up and feel phony. Then they ran out and got counsel, anticipating, I guess, that a shit storm was about to hit them. That storm hasn’t come (because the mainstream media is still obsessed about Jeremiah Wright). And, my lawyer friends are thinking: Of course they got counsel, that’s the smart thing to do. But I look at it and think: They know they have been bad, and they want to start covering their asses. It's like my two year old, who hides behind the couch cushions when he accidently hits his sister with a bouncy ball after he has been told to stop playing with the bouncy ball near her.

And, all in all, while I don't think African American voters will be discouraged from going to the polls in any numbers sufficient to make a difference, I find this whole episode dispiriting. In an earlier post I pointed out that the old Hillary--the champion of liberal causes--would have celebrated Obama's win in Mississisppi as a remarkable overcoming of that state's long and ugly racial history. The new Hillary didn't even mention it, and, now, she acts like the Mississippi race--which landed between Ohio and Texas and her recent win in Pennsylvania--never even happened. Here, too, the old Hillary would have been upset if she found an organization engaged in electoral fraud and suppressing the black vote. The new Hillary may have been complicit in building the organization that recently did exactly that in North Carolina.

(Update 5/8: A smart and attuned observer seems to share my conclusions (or paranoia) about W.V.W.V.'s questionable dealings in North Carolina. Michael Dawson says:

That Clinton supporters would stoop this low, that they would use the very same tactics that Karl Rove and his gang of thugs used in Florida to steal the 2000 presidential election from the American people, is shameful and puts them in the same category as Republicans who, in states such as Georgia, are trying to bring back Jim Crow-era methods of black disenfranchisement, such as a new version of the poll tax.

That's stronger than I would phrase it, but the anger and outrage is on target.)

Page turner

The mystery of where Women's Voices Women Vote got their call lists might be solved. A report by Will Evans, which accompanied NPR's reporting on the issue, shows that Women's Voices Women Vote paid Integral Resources, Inc. $800,000 in 2006. Integral Resources builds and maintains call lists for progressive and charitable organizations, engineers telemarketing campaigns for these groups, and provides associated consulting services. The firm is owned by Ron Rosenblith, the husband of Women's Voices Women Vote President Page Gardner. Rosenblith isn't, like most of the key staffers at Women's Voices Women Vote, a clear-cut Clinton backer. He was once John Kerry's Chief of Staff and played a key role in his 2004 presidential bid. He has reportedly donated to the Clinton campaign this time around. Yet, if you wanted to assemble a list of voters, and wanted to be certain that you targeted African Americans likely to vote for Obama, but didn't want anyone to know you were doing this, you can't beat the convenience of leaning over the breakfast table to say to a spouse: "Hey honey, that list I want for W.V.W.V., can you make sure it's ONLY likely Obama voters?"

It could be there isn't much of a mystery here. In a race as divided by race as the current primary season has been, any list of African Americans will likely be interchangeable with a list of probable Obama backers. Discourage African Americans from voting, and you succeed in suppressing the vote for Obama. Maybe all Rosenblith's firm had to do was deliver a list of African Americans registered to vote in North Carolina. It is an ingenious way to appear to be engaged in noble work--registering African Americans in a southern state--while, in fact, delivering a surprise win for Hillary or, at minimum, keeping enough blacks home that she suffers a narrow defeat, easily besting pre-primary expectations and making her seem to be nipping at Obama's heels even in races that were seen to be in the bag.

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.