MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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May 13
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Obama's values

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I have a couple of reaction to this piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

1). It’s a load of crap

2). The writer is probably right. This is what the general election is going to be about.

Obama and the Values Question Mark By DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN, May 12, 2008

With the Democratic nomination all but decided, it’s time for Barack Obama to start defining himself in the context of the general election — before the Republicans define him. Most importantly, he must answer this question once and for all: What are his values?

Mr. Obama began to do so last Tuesday night, by speaking more generally about who he is and how he defines himself. But this is just a first step.

Exit polls in Indiana and North Carolina show clearly that fewer than 60% of white voters believe Mr. Obama shares their values. In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 45% of the American electorate said they can identify with Mr. Obama’s values, compared to 54% who say they can identify with John McCain’s values.

Make no mistake, the ongoing controversy over his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright leaves Mr. Obama vulnerable. So does the flap over his comments at a San Francisco fund-raiser over working-class voters’ alleged bitterness leading them to cling to religion and guns. He needs to speak directly and forthrightly to the concerns and fears of these voters if he is to succeed in November.

How does he do that?

First, and obviously symbolically, he must start wearing the flag lapel pin. He simply cannot afford to raise doubts about his patriotism.

More substantively, he must also unabashedly support measures that reflect and emphasize his commitment to traditional American values.

For example, he should commit to enhancing and strengthening the earned income tax credit, to provide tax relief to the working poor and to continue transferring people from welfare to work. This will demonstrate his preference for hard work and initiative as opposed to entitlement programs.

Mr. Obama must also demonstrate concretely that he is sympathetic to the victims of crime — in ways that go beyond the abstract rhetoric of his March 18 speech on race relations in Philadelphia. He needs to make clear, in no uncertain terms, that he understands American concerns about law and order, and that he puts public safety at the top of his priorities. To be sure, there is an increasing role for rehabilitation in the criminal justice system. But Mr. Obama must emphasize first and foremost that he is on the side of law-abiding people.

To win southwestern states such as Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, he must demonstrate his intention to secure our borders, and to integrate those immigrants who are here into American society with a clear path to citizenship. Mr. Obama should also reemphasize his support for the rights of gun owners to hunt and use firearms safely and responsibly.

On foreign policy, Mr. Obama must refute the presumption that he is not fully committed to the war on terror, or that he believes every problem can be solved by negotiating with the leaders of rogue nations. He must reassure people that he understands diplomacy has its limits. Part of this reassurance should consist of a speech that Mr. Obama should give on the subject of what Ronald Reagan called “American exceptionalism” — still a core value for most Americans, and particularly swing voters. Our role in the world, and our unique democratic experience, make us a nation that has to be prepared to stand alone if absolutely necessary.

Finally, Mr. Obama must connect with people of faith. He needs to reach out explicitly to the evangelical community, both white and black. Mr. Obama does not have to apologize for his own faith and membership in Trinity United Church of Christ, but he needs to emphasize, as he has tried to do a number of times, that his own values are the opposite of Mr. Wright’s.

Most Americans know that Jeremiah Wright’s views are not those of Barack Obama; they do not need a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Wright’s comments. But moderate-to-conservative voters who once had confidence in Mr. Obama now have doubts, because he has been so close for so long to someone whose values are so inimical to theirs. What Americans need to know, once and for all, is that Mr. Obama stands with them on cultural issues they care about.

Here’s what I mean. In 1996, I was the campaign manager for Clinton-Gore in Tennessee and Kentucky. We ran our campaign almost exclusively on conservative values — on issues such as opposing gang crime, opposing welfare fraud, and fighting street crime. We also had evangelical ministers recording radio ads for rural markets, emphasizing the president’s commitment to traditional values. With all that we won both states only narrowly.

Harold Ford lost the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee in part because Republicans were able to portray him — a more conservative Democrat than Barack Obama — as being on the wrong side of the cultural divide, just because he had once attended a Playboy party for the Super Bowl. Values-related issues are that potent, even in a time of economic downturn.

In Mr. Obama’s March 18 speech on race, he said that he understands black concerns about whites, and white concerns about blacks. But he must go further, and point to the unity of all Americans in support for the values that have made this country what it is today. It is these seemingly universal core values that most Americans were brought up with, and that people now question if Mr. Obama really shares. He must remove all doubt, and quickly.

If Barack Obama is going to win the election, he needs to be able to fight the contest on the core economic issues that clearly work to the Democrats’ advantage — such as job creation, expanding access to health care, and providing relief to homeowners who have trouble paying their mortgages. But unless he is able to present himself as being part of the mainstream on core cultural and values issues, the Republican attack machine will be able to make this election about issues having little to do with the economy and our role in the world.

Mr. Schoen is the author of “Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two Party System” (Random House, 2008).

May 12
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Hillary's agony

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Is She a Trojan Rabbit? By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 11, 2008

If Hillary Clinton were to become Barack Obama’s vice president, would she take the back seat or would she just always be plotting, draining him of his magical powers?

My own two cents, not Ms. Dowd’s? Yes, she will. Hillary, if she accomplishes her electoral goal, would become the Ma Barker of American politics. She is about to rob the nation of Hope. If she could not win it outright, she wants to kill it in its crib.

Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.

After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual, mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been trying to do to him: putting her in her place.

Her last resort is to continue to press the “Psssst — he’s a black man” tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing her?

It is, verily, a sticky wicket.

May 12
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Road to oblivion

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Party Like It’s 2008 By FRANK RICH, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 11, 2008

ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted “game changers” that collapsed in the locker room.

Hillary Clinton’s attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, economist-bashin’ populist went bust: Asked which candidate most “shares your values,” voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton’s small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false expectations for her disastrous showing in North Carolina. Barack Obama’s final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable path to the Democratic nomination.

“It’s still early,” Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it’s way too late for her, she’s half-right. We’re only at the end of the beginning of this extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it’s a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008 will the long march to November start making sense.

This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look (to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers, protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the 50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.

This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts of modest political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent vice president running for the Gipper’s third term. This is not the 1998 midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.

Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those trying to force the round peg of this year’s campaign into the square holes of past political wars. That’s why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr. Obama — surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! — no matter what the voters say to the contrary. It’s why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton machine’s strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It’s why some prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq fiasco to his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.

The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.

And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.

Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.

For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.

Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.

As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry’s against President Bush in 2004.

But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.

Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.

This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.

A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.

Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it that Mr. McCain, a likable “maverick” (who supported Mr. Bush in 95 percent of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics, including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain’s still-unreleased health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama’s history in Chicago. But as long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it’s 2008 while everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be underestimated every step of the way.

May 12
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What we sow

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Seeds of Destruction By BOB HERBERT, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, May 10, 2008

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.

Continue . . .

May 12
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More like the Hindenburg

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Hillary Rodham Clinton biographer Carl Bernstein has a fascinating post at cnn.com about her plan to land the vice-presidential spot on the Obama ticket. Titled Could Clinton land the VP nomination?, her plan to end her campaign and win the vice presidential spot is to blackmail and threaten Obama:

Take me on as your vice president, or I’ll destroy you and the Democratic Party.

Bernstein wrote that HRC’s minions are still, remarkably, trolling for dirt to destroy the Obama campaign with, even as they vigorously seek the second spot on the ticket:

A person close to her, with whom her campaign staff has counseled at various points, said this week, “I think the following will happen: Obama will be in a position where the party declares him the nominee by the first week in June. She’ll still be fighting with everybody — the Rules Committee, the party leaders — and arguing, ‘I’m winning these key states; I’ve got almost half the delegates. I have a whole constituency he hasn’t reached. I’ve got real differences on approach to how we win this election, and I’m going to press the hell out of this guy. … Relief for the middle class, universal health care, etc.; I’m Ms. Blue Collar, and I’m going to press my fight, because he can’t win without my being on the ticket.’ “

Another major Democratic Party figure, who supports her for president, agreed: “It’s not going to be a quiet exit. … Obama has got a terrible situation. He marches to a different drummer. He won’t want to take her on the ticket. But he might have to, even though the idea of Vice President Hillary with Bill in the background at the White House is not something — especially after what [the Clintons] have thrown at him that he relishes. I believe she’ll go for it.”

However, several important Democrats aligned with Obama predicted that he — and Michelle Obama — will vigorously resist any Clinton effort to get on the ticket. Rather, Obama is more likely to try to convince Clinton to either stay in the Senate or accept another position in an Obama administration, should he win the presidency.

Several Clinton associates say there is still a ray of hope among some in her campaign: that a “catastrophic” revelation about Obama might make it possible for her to win the presidential nomination. But barring that, Hillary and Bill Clinton recognize that her candidacy is being abandoned and rejected by superdelegates whom she once expected to win over and that, even if she were to win the popular vote in combined primary states, she will almost certainly be denied the nomination.

This is mind boggling. HRC has lost and her ship is losing water. Yet she is still making threats. There are other people who help Obama, if he even needs this help, with the so-called blue collar, “hard-working” white voters. Jim Webb, as I’ve stated on a number of occasions, for instance.

HRC is a disaster. Bill Clinton has turned out to be a disaster for Democrats. They both need to go away. The sooner the better.

May 12
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Obama comes to Albany, Oregon

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Sen. Obama meets his fans, er, voters

(Jesse Skoubo/Democrat-Herald)

A beaming Katie Egan, 18, reaches out in a sea of hands to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama as he made his entrance to a Town-hall style forum Friday at the Linn County Fair & Expo center in Albany, Oregon.

May 11
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'Ronnie'

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I’m told it’s difficult to do, mistaking a transvestite for a woman, which is what Brazilian soccer star and World Cup hero said he did recently. Now, he may have a hard time facing ridicule from fans and opponents.

Ronald, still only 31, has battled weight problems and injuries in recent years. He’s in Brazil in fact rehabilitating from what he hopes is not a career-ending injury when he ran into his current problem.

(Sebastiao Moreira/European Pressphoto Agency) André Luis Ribeiro Albertino, a transvestite prostitute picked up Monday by the soccer star Ronaldo, holding a paper in São Paulo, Brazil, that says, “Ronaldo loses girlfriend and cries ashamed to Mama.” Ronaldo told the police he tried to send Mr. Albertino and two other prostitutes away when he discovered they were men. Prostitution is legal in Brazil.

What I can tell you is this, they don’t come any more powerful, skillful, and graceful as Ronaldo was in his heydays. A diminished figure now, you still see flashes of the greatness when he steps onto the pitch. Who knows the true circumstance of Ronaldo’s liaison with the tranny. But being gay should never detract from Ronaldo’s accomplishment, or his ability to still dazzle the world as a soccer player.

Here is the coverage in The New York Times:

Soccer Star’s Misadventure Leaves His Fans Smirking By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and JOSHUA SCHNEYER, May 4, 2008
RIO DE JANEIRO — In a city famed for sexual tolerance, the men who shine on the soccer field are held to a different, more macho standard.
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May 10
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'BOYS DON'T CRY'

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Woman Arrested in Norway for Impersonating Teen

A 33-year-old Czech woman has been arrested for attending a Norwegian school, and then claiming abuse, as a 13-year-old boy. But the strange story in Norway is just the beginning of an even stranger story of child abuse in the Czech Republic.

The bizarre case of a Czech woman posing as a 13-year-old boy in Norway could shed light on a separate — and notorious — child-abuse case in the Czech Republic involving a religious cult and a mother who tortured her sons.Barbora Skrlova, a 33-year-old woman on the run from Czech investigators, was arrested this week in Norway for pretending to be “Adam,” a 13-year-old boy. Czech authorities sought her for questioning in another case, not as a suspect — and it still isn’t clear whether she’s an accomplice or a victim.

Last fall she enrolled in an Oslo school as the bald, effeminate son of a Czech theater manager and dramaturg named Martin Fahrner — who had also moved to Norway, though he had a wife and a real son in the Czech Republic named Adam. Skrlova attended classes for several months before fleeing to a Norwegian children’s home, where “Adam” claimed to be the victim of child abuse. Then, on December 16, “Adam” disappeared from the home.

Norwegian officials searched for the boy and arrested Skrlova on January 5. DNA tests determined that “Adam” was in fact Skrlova, who had left the Czech Republic in the spring of 2007 to avoid questioning by investigators there in a nationally publicized case of child abuse. But it isn’t clear whether she left on her own or under the influence of a religious sect linked to her father.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The child-abuse case is even stranger than Skrlova’s flight to Norway. It turns out that “Adam” was not the first teenager Skrlova had pretended to be.

In the town of Kurim, in the Czech Republic, Skrlova was posing as the 12-year-old stepdaughter of a woman called Klara Mauerova, who is now in custody for child abuse. The Prague Daily Monitor reported that after a neighbor found one of Mauerova’s sons, eight-year-old Ondrej, bound and naked in a closet of Mauerova’s house, Mauerova herself was arrested on charges of abusing Ondrej, his brother, and a girl named “Anicka.” Anicka was a supposed stepdaughter who had been in Mauerova’s custody since March — and turned out to be Sklorva.

Czech papers reported that Sklorva could face charges for passing herself off as an underage girl, but the police mainly want her as a witness. After Mauerova was arrested, Sklrova was taken to a children’s home as “Anicka” and disappeared. She went to Denmark, then wound up in Norway.Czech media also report that a splinter sect of the so-called Grail Movement, a cult founded in Germany in the 1940s, could be behind the Mauerova case — and that the splinter sect is headed by Skrlova’s father, Josef Skrla.

Officials still aren’t sure whether Skrlova is a victim or an accomplice, but the suspicion for now is that members of the sect had coerced her into living as “Adam” in Norway — and that she fled the school hoping to be exposed.

“Not even we have been able to figure out what is up and down in this case,” said Norwegian police attorney Sven T. Roer, according to the Associated Press.

Martin Fahrner was first arrested in Norway on child-abuse charges but was subsequently released. Now he and Skrlova both face charges in Norway of providing false testimony.

msm/reuters/ap

May 10
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Jim Webb wrote

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of Class Struggle in the Wall Street Journal opinion editorial page. Some people think Sen. Barack Obama does not understand poor working people. I am not one of them. Obama came into politics because it has been his life’s work helping working people.

I understand Webb has other assets (and liabilities), but if he’s who it’ll takes to help Sen. Obama reconnect with this important demographic group, then I support him as our vice presidential nominee.

Here’s his article:

ELECTION 2006

Class Struggle: American workers have a chance to be heard by JIM WEBB, Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The most important–and unfortunately the least debated–issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic’s range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn’t happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners’ pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate “reorganization.” And workers’ ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

Read More

May 09
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Obama's VP choice

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My own candidate for Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee would be Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, D-KS. She is a wildly popular, twice-elected governor of a reliably Republican state, Kansas. She has a reputation as a consensus builder who works across the party lines to get the job done for voters. I had also thought that she may help Sen. Barack Obama assuage hurt feelings over defeating the strongest female candidate to ever run for president.

She was an early endorser of Obama who campaigned for him in several states. She is term-limited and cannot run for a third term.

Gerald Pomper, of the Board of Governors Professor of Political Science (Emeritus) at Rutgers University, thinks he has a better candidate. Writing for Larry Sabato’s Crystall Ball ’08, Pomper advanced U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, and argues persuasively that he would make a better choice on the ticket.

Webb is a former Republican who served as secretary of the Navy under Reagan, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and he is very vocal about his opposition to the current Iraq war, although he has a son serving there. Webb, in fact, matches McCain in war heroism and his younger and has better sense than McCain seems to have.

Webb also would bring specific political advantages to the Democratic ticket. His rural roots, vigorous language and championing of working class values would compensate for Obama’s evident weaknesses among these voters. Webb provides a populist platform on corporate regulation, trade, taxation and health care that would further extend the party’s appeal to its lower-income base. Born in Missouri, educated in Nebraska, California and the Naval Academy in Maryland, he encapsulates a national electoral appeal. Finally, to the limited extent that state residence matters, he would help to switch Virginia into the Democratic column for the first election since 1964.

Webb’s disadvantages include that he was a novelist who wrote some indecorous things about women. He can be blunt to the point of arrogance and once confronted George W. Bush in the White House about the war. Also, although he ran a highly contested U.S. senate race not too long ago, he might still need vetting.