MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Meat to the . . .

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He’s always had the substance but got tarred with not providing details. The good news, according to The New York Times, is that he’s going into more details on the stump. The oratory may be less soaring, but . . .

“Don’t be fooled by this talk about speeches versus solutions,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of Wisconsin voters. “It’s true, I give a good speech. What do I do? Nothing wrong with that.”
To that confident strain of self-assessment, the audience roared with approval.
A shrug of the shoulders and a few deadpanned retorts, some of which stop just shy of mocking his rival, is the latest approach Mr. Obama has taken to respond to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism that his words offer more poetry than substance.
Yet as he traveled across Wisconsin last week, Mr. Obama seemed to have let loose a little more of his inner-wonk, which his strategists had once urged him to keep on the shelf.
Even as he was dismissing Mrs. Clinton’s criticism, he appeared to be taking it at least mildly to heart — a suggestion that as a line of attack, she might be on to something.
Suddenly, he was injecting a few more specifics into his campaign speeches. Giant rallies that had sustained his candidacy through a coast-to-coast series of contests on Feb. 5, notable for their rhetorical flourishes and big applause lines, were supplemented with policy speeches and town-hall-style meetings, complete with the question-and-answer sessions he abandoned as he roared out of Iowa and into New Hampshire. (In hindsight, he conceded as he reviewed a defeat to Mrs. Clinton, that was a mistake.)
By every indication, this was not a random change in the Obama style. The senator decided to clue in his audience to the shift on a recent morning in Janesville, Wis., where he presented an economic proposal to create seven million jobs over the next decade.
“Today, I want to take it down a notch,” said Mr. Obama, of Illinois, standing on the floor of a General Motors plant. “This is going to be a speech that is a little more detailed. It’s going to be a little bit longer, with not too many applause lines.”

And so, on to the next complaint. Maybe, now, the complaint will be that he’s too tall, too good-looking, or smiles too much.

February 17, 2008
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This Election Season . . .

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We must not let Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), pretend that a vote for him in November is not a vote for a third term for George W. Bush. We must not let him pretend that he is not Bush’s heir. He begged for this, groveled, and bargained away his integrity to have it. Everyone must keep in mind that he sold his soul to get this nomination, that he has betrayed every last principle on which his reputation for moderation stood.

Sen. McCain will try to pull the wool over the voters’ eyes with the full complicity of the corporate-owned mainstream media.

The truth is that a vote for Mr. McCain this fall is a vote for a continuation of Bush’s disastrous policies that has put the United States of America on the precipice of ruin in more ways than we dare to count.

It is important that Sen. McCain owns every part of this administration’s legacy, including the abomination of torture that became its hallmark. McCain let Abu Ghraib happened. Guantanamo Bay happened with Bush in his embrace. We waterboarded alleged enemy combatants with his full blessing.

No matter who the Democrats nominate as their standard bearer, the nation has to keep that in mind. Do we want more wars, more torture, a blighted environment, a government run in secrecy, more distrust of us by our allies around the world, and an intemperate and angry man as the next person in the oval office?

We would be voting for all that when we vote for McCain.

February 16, 2008
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If Only . . .

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This story is scary. On election night, Sen. Hillary Clinton, (D-NY), was reported to have swept through New York. To put it mildly, the Empire state was said to be immune from the juggernaut Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL), was becoming in the rest of the country.

Then comes this little story in the metro section of The New York Times today:

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

City election officials this week said that their formal review of the results, which will not be completed for weeks, had confirmed some major discrepancies between the vote totals reported publicly — and unofficially — on primary night and the actual tally on hundreds of voting machines across the city.

In the Harlem district, for instance, where the primary night returns suggested a 141 to 0 sweep by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the vote now stands at 261 to 136. In an even more heavily black district in Brooklyn — where the vote on primary night was recorded as 118 to 0 for Mrs. Clinton — she now barely leads, 118 to 116.

The history of New York elections has been punctuated by episodes of confusion, incompetence and even occasional corruption. And election officials and lawyers for both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton agree that it is not uncommon for mistakes to be made by weary inspectors rushing on election night to transcribe columns of numbers that are delivered first to the police and then to the news media.

Timesman Sam Roberts assures us that there’s little chance this was fraud. Local election officials have very little incentives to engage in this kind of chicanery, someone told him. They would steal votes in elections that concern them not in this kind of race.

He should try telling that to people who voted for Mr. Obama.

At the sprawling Riverside Park Community apartments at Broadway and 135th Street, Alician D. Barksdale said she had voted for Mr. Obama and her daughter had, too, by absentee ballot.

“Everyone around here voted for him,” she said.

And:

At the Archive, a cafe and video store on the border of Bushwick and East Williamsburg, the manager, Brad Lee, agreed. “There were Obama posters in everyone’s windows,” he said. “There was even Obama graffiti.”

Let me ask this. . How would you feel if, let’s say you caught Obama-mania and rushed out and voted for him only to find out the next day that not a single person where you lived voted for him? And they wonder why people don’t vote anymore.

February 16, 2008
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Old Newt

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Thank God for Newt Gingrich.

Where would we be without him wisely guiding us to the path of reason and understanding?

The august Mr. Gingrich is dispensing advice on the conundrum the Democratic Party may soon confront if one of their presidential candidates does not win the nomination outright.

The race for the nomination is tighter than (what would Dan Rather say here?) tick on a dog’s ear (is how Katie Couric, Mr. Rather’s successor, now says it). There’s talk now that 796 super-delegates, elected officials and other party functionaries, may now decide who gets the nomination, Mrs. Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama.

The question is what to do about the results of the Florida and Michigan primaries, which have at stake 366 delegates. Both states, in violation of Democratic Party rules, moved their primaries up in the calendar to increase their states’ influence in the presidential nomination contests. As consequence, the party punished them by taking away their delegates. All the candidates running at the time also agreed not to campaign in the states (although Sen. Hillary Clinton found ways to squeeze in appearances in Florida and even showed up to claim her almost Pyrrhic victory there). Mrs. Clinton wants the delegates from both states seated, which is understandable. She ‘won’ both states.

Mr. Gingrich, who cares deeply about our democratic process as well as the Democratic Party, is saying this would be bad: “Democrats are headed for a trainwreck in campaign ’08 that threatens to produce a tainted Democratic presidential nominee and, worse, a divisive and delegitimized presidential contest,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.” He added:

Superdelegates are really “politician delegates.” Superdelegates are technically uncommitted party insiders who can vote for whomever they choose. They were created by the party that prides itself on supposedly representing the common man to be the palace guards of the Democratic establishment. Bill Clinton is a superdele-gate, as is Al Gore. They are Democratic Party insiders whose purpose is to put down insurgent campaigns and protect the interests of Democratic politics as usual.

Nothing Gingrich said in the article is wrong and the solution he is advocating, a re-vote in both states, is probably the best possible outcome. I just wish I’m not hearing it from him. Taking advice, any sort of advice, especially a good one, still creates the dilemma of the source you’re getting the advice from.

Newt Gingrich is a disgraced political figure who conducted himself abominably as a public official. He was cynical and hypocritical in both his public and private affairs. He demeaned political discourse in this country the entire time he was a public official. He does not now belong in any discourse concerning what happens with out political system.

February 15, 2008
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Once Upon a Time . . .

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Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart embodied the ‘change’ and transcendence he talks about in this article. Oh, God, what might have been, if not for ‘Monkey business‘ on the turbulent waters to the island of Bimini?

I don’t want to revisit the past but Mr. Hart’s article moved me. He was a change agent brimming with ideas to galvanize a nation long before Mr. Obama had any notion of transcending anything.

Isn’t it always the case though that leaders with the best ideas often possess fatal flaws? Gary Hart, Gary Hart, Gary Hart. I remember the time now like it was yesterday. ‘Where’s the beef?’ Walter Mondale, parroting doggerel from a television jingle, kept bellowing. So when Mr. Hart was caught with a woman not his wife, it became easy to throw the man overboard and forget his ideas.

The intervening years, I believe, proved him prophetic on some of those ideas. For instance, Mr. Hart saw the dangers we faced as a nation from terrorism, yelled enough about them, but went unheeded, until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. We then proceeded to ignore him some more. But, I guess, there’s no solace in thinking about being right. Not now. Not for Mr. Hart. Not for Mrs. Lee Hart, his wife, who had to live with the pain of his wanderings. Not for the former Donna Rice. And certainly not for us.

I don’t know anything so I am not suggesting Sen. Barack Obama has some skeleton in his closet. Whatever it is, if there is a ‘it,’ I just don’t want to know. I want this moment to last. I believe Mr. Obama is as good as we seem to think he is. And he has to lead now. Our nation needs him to.

February 14, 2008
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No reason . . .

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for this post except . . . I found a happy photo of this profane, angry, and joyless man . . .

who’s also a hypocrite and a con man. To have his record and policy positions and have a reputation as a forthright and clean politician who is a ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal’ and to be beloved by liberals, moderates, and independents alike leads one to the only conclusion possible: the man’s got skillz!

Okay, so maybe he has a reason to be happy.

February 14, 2008
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Gipper

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joeyboy says:

Huckabee is the scariest presidential candidate I’ve seen since Ronald Reagan.

Like Huckabee would say, he’s not mad about being scary. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is scary because he masks his unreasonableness with a honeyed tongue. He’s managed to get the so-called liberal media to fall in love with him. Out of boredom, more than anything else, the news mongers are keeping him afloat.

How ’bout this: what if McCain picks Huckabee as his running mate, wins office and promptly drops dead! Then, our nightmare comes true: President Huckabee.

He’s even more ignorant than George W. Bush and unabashed about it. Asked about his lack of expertise in foreign affairs, Huckabee jovially agreed with his questioner, then added: “but I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express last night.” Much hilarity. His glib, happy-go-lucky persona is winning over pundits and ink-stained wretches alike.

The Republicans running to succeed W. are uniformly worse than he was as president, if you can believe such a thing is possible. McCain is worse because there’s no principle that he won’t trim, if it’ll help him become president.

February 13, 2008
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'Learnin' the Blues'

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Photograph by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald recorded a version of this song that is at once beautiful, sad, funny, and heartbreaking all at the same time. Today’s New York Times story about Sen. Barack Obama’s struggle with the issue of race in his campaign to become the Democratic Party nominee for president makes me feel all of those things.

Mr. Obama has largely succeeded in muting the issue of race in this campaign. He has succeeded in making the campaign not about his race, even as he has benefited from race (the whole ‘a credit to his race’ thing). The Clintons, Bill especially, recognized what was happening and quickly ended their subtle attempts to remind people that Mr. Obama is black. They, instead, took up a megaphone and blared it to anyone who would listen.

Photographs by Ozier Mohammed/The New York Times.

They earlier made the false claim to the New Yorker Magazine that Latinos don’t vote for blacks. When Sen. Obama won in Iowa, they became more daring and explicit in New Hampshire before going overboard in South Carolina.

Former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, (D-N.J.), was fond of saying (and I forget who he’s quoting here) that race is America’s original sin.

Nowhere is it more explicit than in this race. Mr. Obama’s campaign, as great as it has been, has had some significant failures. The deficits in his support now are testaments to those failures.

His seeming inability to craft a message that could appeal to lunch bucket, blue collar white voters is telling. It is my belief that Mr. Obama’s message benefits this constituency far more than the people who have been flocking to his campaign so far. He needs to find the language to talk to them.

As for Latinos, it is right that Sen. Obama has to work to earn their votes, just as he had to work (with no small amount of help from Bill and Hillary Clinton) to win over African-Americans. Latinos are diverse and not one single message will reach them. Again, reaching them is not an insurmountable challenge.

This just means Mr. Obama and his staff have to work harder to earn their votes. That is part of the promise of Mr. Obama’s movement. The solutions to our nation’s problems have to be deep and lasting. The blood, sweat and tears in this effort will only make sure both the achievements and the progressive coalition more enduring.

This is not to exclude Sen. Hillary Clinton. First, let me say that any other year I would be banging the drum hard supporting her. It is just a fluke that she is running at a time when her opponent is this remarkable man. She has taken some unfortunate steps in this campaign which she’ll ultimately have to atone for.

What must not happen is troglodyte John McCain winning the presidency.

That said, I will support Sen. Clinton if she wins the nomination. She will have the task of crafting the same progressive coalition, which I hope she is working on now, to carry her to the presidency.

February 12, 2008
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