Obama sells out to politics

RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.
THE UNION-TRIBUNE

June 4, 2008

Say it ain't so. Barack Obama has worked hard over the last 18 months to convince Americans that he is the untraditional politician – immune to special interests, loyal to his faith, close to the people, guided by principle. Part of the pitch was that, as a regular churchgoer, he could tap into values voters and show that – as he said in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention – those in the blue states also “worship an awesome God.”

And now Obama goes and does something foolish that shows he is a traditional politician after all and may suggest that his religious convictions are not all that firm: He quits Trinity United Church of Christ, the Chicago sanctuary he attended for two decades, where he was married and where his children were baptized. Not because he was uncomfortable sitting in the pews all those years but because other people were uncomfortable that he sat in the pews all those years.

The last straw was the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest who, while visiting Trinity, mocked Hillary Clinton for feeling entitled to the presidency because she's white and the wife of a former president.

Obama, in explaining why he had left the church, said the Pfleger controversy had convinced him that, as long as he remained in the congregation, he would have to respond to things that were said from the pulpit – no matter who said them – and that the issue would continue to be a distraction for his campaign.

Many inside-the-Beltway pundits applauded Obama's footwork. The Sunday talk shows were abuzz with praise for the fact that Obama realized that it was either his church or his shot at the presidency, and that he chose the latter. In fact, it is considered a sign of his political maturity. As one conservative pundit asserted, Obama simply could not be elected president if he had remained a member of the congregation.

They may be right. Still, I wonder how that analysis is playing at Trinity, where parishioners – the sort of folks who don't usually pop up on YouTube blasting the United States or antagonizing whites – had to have felt a deep sense of pride over the last few months that a member of their church might actually be elected president. And, suddenly, now that this person is one step closer to the presidency, he steps out the door.

That's a betrayal in my book. Some African-Americans assure me that there may be no hard feelings after all is said and done, and that they understand better than most of us how the game is played and what sort of accommodations have to be made to fit into the mainstream.

I won't defend a lot of what gets said at Trinity or, for that matter, at any other church around the country. I can't. But, to me, what is really indefensible is the fact that so many Americans are so thin-skinned when it comes to even talking about race.

There is also the politics of all this. John McCain is fond of calling Obama naive. That's far off the mark. The way I see it, Obama is wrong on a host of issues – from Iraq to No Child Left Behind to NAFTA – but it should now be clear that he has an intuitive understanding of the rough and tumble of politics and what is necessary to win the presidency. The senator from Illinois has demonstrated that he is quick on his feet, and able to adjust to changing circumstances. He possesses a sleight of hand reminiscent of Bill Clinton's abracadabra style of politics. From the nomination of Lani Guinier to Clinton's promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military, it was always the same story with the master politician: “Now you see it, now you don't.”

Long gone is Obama's admirable rhetoric about how he could “no more disown” his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and implicitly his now-former church, than he could disown his own grandmother. Now, Wright has been disowned. The church has been disowned. And Grandma should watch her back.

Barack Obama continues his wild ride through the world of American politics. And his supporters are right to worry about the price of the ticket.

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me@rescam.org

Obstacles for McCain and Obama

DAVID BROOKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 4, 2008

It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World – a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But last night, we reached our destination, and people in the Obama and McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.

Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.

So my role today is Dr. Doom – to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps.

Since effectively wrapping up the nomination, Barack Obama has lost seven of the last 15 primaries. Obama's confidants say that this doesn't matter. In states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, primary election results are no predictor of general election results.

That's dubious. Although voters now prefer Democratic policy positions on most major issues by between 11 and 25 points, Obama has only a 0.7 percent lead over McCain in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. His favorability ratings among independents has dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent since late February.

Furthermore, Obama has spent the past several months rolling up his sleeves and furiously courting working-class votes. It doesn't seem to be working. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal calculates that Obama did no better among those voters in a late state such as Pennsylvania than he did for 26 out of 29 earlier primary states where he lost the working class.

There is something about his magic that resonates powerfully with the well-educated but doesn't translate with the less-educated. As a result, you get all these odd poll results. Voters agree with Obama's original position on Iraq, but according to the Pew Research Center, they trust McCain more to handle the issue.

We haven't had two presidential candidates as far removed from the mainstream suburban lifestyle. McCain's family has been military for generations. But Obama's path through the university towns is particularly elusive.

Peter Hart did a focus group for the Annenberg Public Policy Center with independent voters in Virginia that captured reactions you hear all the time. These independent voters were intrigued by Obama's “change” message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s church. It's as if they can't hang Obama's life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction. As Hart points out, people's inability to come up with a clear narrative about Obama could make it easy to label him in the fall.

Finally, the Obama people are too convinced that they can define McCain as Bush III. The case is just factually inaccurate. McCain will be able to pull out dozens of instances, from torture to global warming to spending, in which he broke with his party, as Rush Limbaugh will tell you.

The Republican camp, meanwhile, is possessed of the belief that Obama is a charming lightweight. Republican senators have contempt for Obama's post-partisan image, arguing that he and his staff refused to even participate in backroom bipartisan discussion groups.

But Obama is far from a lightweight, as Republicans will learn if he agrees to do joint town meetings with McCain. McCain's jabs that Obama is naive will backfire. In this climate, a candidate can't define the other guy, only himself. When McCain attacks Obama for being naive, all voters see is McCain being sour and negative.

More fundamentally, McCain's problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the GOP sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom.

Many Republicans are under the illusion they are in trouble because they've betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they'd been more conservative, they'd be even further behind.

I've spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the state of free-market thinking on this subject is pathetic. There are a few creative thinkers (most of them under 30), but for the most part, McCain is forced to run in an intellectual void.

Yesterday, he gave a forceful speech on why “reform” is better than “change.” He described how to remobilize government and address economic anxiety. But McCain's reform message is only being carried by him and a few bloggers. Obama can draw on a coherent body of economic work and 10,000 unified voices.

This election will be asymmetric. Obama has to come up with a personal narrative voters can relate to. McCain needs to come up with a one-sentence description for why he represents a clean break and a compelling future. Neither campaign has done that. I don't know what they're so happy about.

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me@rescam.org

Farm bill is an international disgrace

ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
THE MIAMI HERALD

June 4, 2008

While most of us were looking elsewhere, the U.S. Congress passed a 2008 farm bill that could hardly be worse: it subsidizes rich U.S. farmers, hurts most American consumers, poisons the environment, doesn't help alleviate world hunger and harms Latin American and other world food producers.

What's worse, the $290 billion bill does all these things – and more – at a time when many rich U.S. farmers who will benefit from it are making record profits, thanks to sky-high international commodity prices.

It would be hard to understand, if we weren't in an election year. But widespread support for the legislation within the Democratic majority – including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who earlier opposed some of the subsidies – and 100 Republican House members helped the House override a White House veto by a vote of 316 to 108. The Senate followed with an 82-13 vote.

In addition to $5 billion in direct payments to farmers who in many cases are doing very well, the new law provides a plethora of election-year handouts, including $170 million for the West Coast salmon industry, $93 million in special tax breaks for racehorse owners in Kentucky, $260 million in tax cuts for the timber industry and $15 million for asparagus growers, who were not receiving this subsidy in the past.

“It's a national disgrace,” says Gary C. Hufbauer, a former U.S. Treasury official currently with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “These are booming times for many U.S. farmers. If there ever was a time in which you could liberalize the farming business, one would think that this would be the time.”

Likely Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama – who has received significant praise in this column in recent weeks – supported the bill. “I applaud the Senate's passage today of the farm bill, which will provide America's hard-working farmers and ranchers with more support and more predictability,” Obama said in a May 15 statement.

Farm bill supporters note that the legislation provides $209 billion for nutrition programs, including a significant increase in funds for food stamps.

Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain criticized the farm bill in a May 15 statement. At a time of record commodity prices, “American agriculture has progressed to the point where we no longer need government-grown farms,” he said.

Among the farm bill's worst features:

- It hurts most American consumers by continuing to subsidize corn-based ethanol, which is diverting 25 percent of the U.S. corn production into subsidized ethanol production. As a result, corn prices at the supermarket are going up, and so are prices of meats from corn-fed cows and chickens.

- It hurts the environment, among other things, because instead of lifting barriers to import sugar-based ethanol from Brazil and Central America – it is far more efficiently produced, cheaper and environmentally friendlier – the new law maintains tariff barriers that protect U.S. corn-based ethanol producers.

- It hurts Latin America because it maintains tariff and non-tariff barriers to the region's agricultural goods. Instead of helping reduce U.S. sugar prices by importing cheaper sugar from Caribbean or Central American countries, the new farm law maintains import quotas to protect Palm Beach sugar barons. As a result, Americans pay much more than the world market price for the sugar they consume.

- It makes a mockery of U.S. support for free trade in world trade negotiations. Until now, Washington was telling agricultural producers in Latin America: “I will reduce farm subsidies if the European Union does the same.” Now, with its bipartisan vote, Congress is effectively telling the world that it will not allow any U.S. president to reduce farm subsidies.

My opinion: The damage is already done. Now, President Bush should do something really bold, which could help him leave office in a state of less-than-total disgrace.

As the Peterson Institute's Hufbauer suggested to me, Bush should announce after the U.S. elections in November the most far-reaching proposal ever to slash farm subsidies in exchange for reasonable concessions from U.S. trading partners.

It would have zero immediate results, but it would force the next U.S. president to address the issue and – perhaps – give the next administration an excuse to follow up on an inherited policy. The alternative, doing nothing, would be bad for America and bad for the world.

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me@rescam.org

Time for Obama to change course

DAVID S. BRODER
THE WASHINGTON POST

June 5, 2008

From Iowa in January through South Dakota and Montana in June, Barack Obama has enjoyed one of the great rides in American political history, breaking precedents and setting records along the way. It has been an extraordinary journey, magnified, not diminished, by the gritty, resilient performance of his main rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. On that journey he has given Americans the gift of a new and hopeful chapter in our troubled racial history.

The two props that made it possible for this freshman senator, with far more meager governmental credentials than most of the other dozen candidates running in both parties this year, to capture the Democratic nomination, are clear.

One is his oratory. He was by far the most compelling speaker. He capsulized his message of hope and change brilliantly at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines last fall, and recycled that speech all the way to the end. And the other is his fundraising and voter-turnout organization that dazzled his rivals with its discipline and efficiency, despite going into this with minimal experience.

None of the establishment Democrats, not even Clinton, who had all the advantages going in, could match him in these regards, and the results showed.

But for all those achievements and all those advantages, Obama limped into the nomination as a vulnerable and somewhat diminished politician. After winning 11 primaries and caucuses in a row, his magic touch seemed to depart him. He lost the knack of winning the heart of the Democratic coalition, working families that look for help in meeting the economic challenges of their everyday lives. White, Hispanic, middle-aged or older, they had strong associations with Clinton and many questions about the commitments that lay behind Obama's sweeping, reformist generalizations.

What Democrats are just beginning to figure out is that John McCain is positioned to compete with Obama for the votes of the many Americans who are eager to put the hyper-partisanship of the past eight years behind them and witness a Washington that finally begins to address the nation's challenges.

But anyone who is realistic must recognize that forging fresh agreements in Congress and the interest group-dominated capital will take an exceptionally strong president. Since early March, Obama has not looked like that president. Once his streak stopped, his only significant win came in North Carolina. He lost Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and, on Tuesday, South Dakota – states where he didn't get that working-class vote.

In the last weeks, Obama visibly retreated. It is rare that you see a presidential candidate – let alone a man headed for nomination – back off from the contest to the extent Obama did. Instead of the frenetic schedule he had kept for months, Obama made a minimum of appearances in the final states, as if relying on his momentum to carry him through. That he lost all but one of the major tests was no surprise.

But the retreat spread further. Over the last two months, Obama has in slow stages backed away from his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., first criticizing some of his statements but clinging to their friendship, then strongly condemning those words and finally severing his ties to Wright's former church.

The net result has been to smudge one of the main clues voters had been given to Obama's fundamental values and beliefs, and to create a new aura of mystery about this man.

You could even characterize as a retreat the clever strategy the Obama forces devised for last weekend's meeting of the Democratic National Committee's rules committee, a strategy that closed down Clinton's last hopes of overcoming him. Obama could have stood on principle. He was in full compliance with the rules that were written in advance of the campaign, and he could have insisted that she also play by the rules. Instead, he backed off and gave her a meaningless gift of delegate votes.

Obama still has great gifts and substantial assets. So the first imperative at this point is to stop retreating and regain the initiative – starting with a clear assertion of his absolute right to choose his own running mate and not be pressured into a decision by the Clintons or their friends.

Like Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in 1980, having the wisdom to reject the plot to install Jerry Ford as his vice president, this is the big-time decision that could define a leader and lead to a victory.

Obama still has great gifts and substantial assets. So the first imperative at this point is to stop retreating and regain the initiative.

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me@rescam.org

Clinton's hold over Obama's future

E.J. DIONNE JR.
THE WASHINGTON POST

June 5, 2008

Hillary Clinton talked her way out of the vice presidency on Tuesday night.

Barack Obama may never have intended to make her the offer. But Clinton's largely self-focused non-concession speech suggested that what some call a dream ticket could turn into a nightmare.

Clinton did declare it an “honor” to have Obama as an opponent and “to call him my friend,” but she made no acknowledgement of the historic nature of her opponent's achievement. Democrats, once the party most associated with slavery and segregation, had just taken the decisive step of making Obama the first African-American to be a major-party nominee for president. But Obama was not really on Clinton's radar.

By contrast, Obama offered a lengthy tribute to Clinton and “her barrier-breaking campaign for the presidency.” He praised Bill Clinton's successes in office. And in a grace note highlighting one of Clinton's many honorable passions, he declared that when universal health care is achieved, “she will be central to that victory.”

Yes, Obama could be generous because he won. As for Clinton, she not only came heartbreakingly close but also outpaced Obama in the contests that have been held since early March. On the last day of voting, Obama could manage only a split of the final primaries.

Clinton's partisans argue that all this, plus the passionate devotion of a large constituency, gives her leverage. That is true. Obama needs Clinton and her supporters. He must reach out to women who believe that Clinton was mistreated in an onslaught of misogyny. Arguing over the exact role of sexism in her defeat is beside the point. The anger so many of her followers feel is a political fact rooted in certain realities of this campaign. It must be attended to.

But politics is also about signals and gestures, doing the right thing at the right moment, dealing with outcomes not to your liking.

Clinton's choice was to present Obama with an implicit critique that might be seen as a set of demands. Clinton told her supporters: “We won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.” Message to Obama: You failed to do that, and you need me to get it done.

She also offered an argument she made during the campaign that John McCain is certain to use, over and over, against Obama. “Who will be the strongest candidate and the strongest president? Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as commander in chief and lead our country to better tomorrows?” Whose purpose did she serve by repeating this?

“To the 18 million people who voted for me, and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you,” she said. “I hope you'll go to my Web site at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.”

Perhaps this was a final pitch for funds, understandable in light of her campaign debt. But it also seemed to have echoes of Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. Was she trying to create a groundswell to pressure Obama to give her the second spot?

The American vice presidency is a strange political job. Its formal responsibilities are so vague that the holder of the office can disappear – or turn it into a powerhouse, as Dick Cheney has and Clinton could. But the vice president's first task is to help elect the leader of the ticket.

Settling the debate over whether an Obama-Clinton team would be the aggregate of its strengths or the sum of its weaknesses may be beyond the capacity of pollsters. Deciding if putting Clinton on the ticket would undermine Obama's appeal as the candidate who can “turn the page” on the past involves a subjective judgment – though you can imagine the mocking appearance of “Change We Used to Believe In” posters.

But gaining the vice presidency by invoking leverage just can't work. It makes the presidential candidate look weak. It breaks in advance the trust that running mates need. It can only presage conflicts and power struggles in a new administration.

Hillary Clinton is an enormously talented public servant. Many who ended up supporting Obama once hoped to support her. But Clinton's political future requires her to accept that Obama has prevailed, that the primary campaign is over, and that graciousness in defeat can, paradoxically, be turned into the most powerful leverage of all.

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me@rescam.org

What really happens to terrorists

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me@rescam.org

Alex Jones_ BULLHORNS Ben Bernanke!!!

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010