Many black voters in Florida are worried that their votes will not be counted and an Obama victory will slip away.
Go to article
Share your thoughts on this op-ed column.
sexta-feira, 31 de outubro de 2008
quinta-feira, 30 de outubro de 2008
The songs - and the candidate - remain the same
Gavin Hewitt - BBC
Go to original article
Raleigh, North Carolina:Nothing in high-stakes modern American politics is left to chance.
At Barack Obama's rallies there is a music playlist. It is played at every rally. No local favourites sneak in. Just a mixture of old and new.
There is "The Adventure" by Angels and Airwaves, "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang and "Give the People What They Want" by the O'Jays.
I am reliably informed by Rob Magee, my cameraman, that the Obama playlist consists of 21 songs - all soon to be uploaded onto his iPod.
Two songs, however, are used to define the campaign. One is the arrival anthem, that plays Barack Obama onto the stage. It is U2's 'City of Blinding Lights' - with its line "oh you look so beautiful tonight".
And after his speech, when he lifts the bottle of water to his lips, in comes the heavy beat and then Stevie Wonder's scream in "Signed, Sealed, Delivered".
In the arena, a soundman stands at his console and fades in the music, much as if this was a rock show. And in a way it is. The timing is usually immaculate.
Four years ago, John Kerry also had a playlist. His campaign song was "No Surrender" by Bruce Springsteen.
But there was a difference. Mr Kerry lined up rock stars to appear with him: Springsteen, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters and Bon Jovi.
Mr Obama does not need the band. He is the star. He does not need Hollywood stardust.
I can remember a whisper going around the crowd in Philadelphia: "Will Smith is coming". He did not appear and no-one cared.
The crowds are pumping for Obama, even before he arrives on stage.
(I recall a lunchtime rally in Madison, Wisconsin with Bruce Springsteen and John Kerry in 2004. As soon as Springsteen had done his fifteen minutes, the crowds drifted back to their offices. I always thought Mr Kerry should have done a deal with the crowd: "Hang with me for a few minutes and you'll get Springsteen as your reward.")
The point about the Obama playlist is that it reflects the campaign. I have covered a number of these elections and I have never seen such a disciplined, tightly controlled organisation.
There are no leaks, no raised voices. I am sure there are arguments between David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs, but they do not show.
His critics may say he has never run anything, never accomplished anything, but his campaign management has been impressive.
So Barack Obama has begun what he calls his closing arguments. In these final days he charts his long, improbable journey from the cold of Maine to the sunshine of California.
There is much detail about tax and healthcare, but when all is stripped away the Obama message comes down to this: the country is on the wrong track and its time for change.
The riff line of his campaign is "change". And the crowd cry back: "Yes We Can".
Most of us desire change. Most of us dream of a better job, or life or relationship. We have all at one time stood on the brink of reinvention.
Change is beguiling when times are rough. And in that sense Barack Obama is a lucky politician.
America is less sure of itself and where it is heading than it has been for as long as I can remember.
What is wrapped inside the slogan of "change" is sometimes hard to pin down but it has served him well.
As the election has moved closer, so another theme has emerged - his populist attack on trickle-down economics.
He speaks of the "tired old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone".
He wants to grow the economy from the bottom up.
What will this mean in practice? I think an Obama administration will invest heavily in alternative energy programmes and infrastructure and hope that will be an engine-room for jobs.
There is a reflective element to Mr Obama's closing arguments. He thinks America has been living through a period of "profound irresponsibility" in the way its government and people have run up debt.
What he thinks has been lost in the past eight years is "a common sense of purpose".
As so often in modern politics, the message is inseparable from the man.
I have watched him closely at rally after rally.
His playlist does not change - and neither does he.
He is unruffled, disciplined. His organisation is tightly-controlled. They do not like the unpredictable.
Through set-backs and controversies he has conducted his campaign with grace and intellect. He does not strike me as a needy politician.
He has been carried to this point on the wings of rhetoric... to a degree. He has several speeds to his speeches.
I saw him on a cold Sunday in Wilmington. He spoke without notes. He was on fire, lifting up the crowd, letting them fall gently and lifting them again.
He knew how to surf the emotions of a crowd better than any politician apart from, perhaps, Bill Clinton.
In Berlin before a crowd of 250,000 he checked himself. He rowed back. He did not want to be the preacher on the world stage. He wanted to appear statesmanlike, showing off his knowledge of history.
And as the election approaches, he sticks to the words on the autocue. There is no need to take a risk. This is a campaign on cruise control.
The other night in Pittsburgh I had a recurring thought.
The expectations. That I was not at a political rally. The audience were not voters. They were fans, urging their man on to victory.
And as he drew to a close his oratory took off. He could not control himself. The passion flowed. The crowd sensed it. They were on their feet. Not listening to the words.
They were lost in the roar.
When the event was over, some of the crowds lined the streets. The light was on the turn.
The bitter cold had edged down from the North. Many of the people in the crowd were African-American.
They cheered their man out of town. Time and again they have told me "this is our time". This is their victory parade. It is as if the whole weight of their history is being lifted. At last.
But such expectations! What a burden! But that - if the polls are right - lies ahead.Go to original article
A 'Merely' Biracial Breakthrough?
By Tobin Harshaw
“Even if you vote for Obama, you’re still probably a racist, according to Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, in his remarks at a recent panel discussion at my alma mater,” writes Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s OpenMarket.org.
Ogletree, Obama’s top advisor on race issues, explains that since Obama is ‘biracial,’ his election won’t prove that racism has receded. White America won’t vote for blacks, Ogletree argues, and Obama’s election is possible only because he’s partly white. The ABA Journal predicts that Ogletree, who has long advocated race-based reparations, will be the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration.
(Audiotape available here.)
“It turns out that I’m wrong to think that Obama’s election would have even symbolic benefit,” writes a riled-up Ed Whelan at the Corner.
“So, under Ogletree’s drop-of-blood test, if you’re one of those folks who mistakenly think that the cases for Obama and McCain are reasonably close, there’s no symbolic achievement in electing Obama. You’d better wait for a real black candidate. Thanks, professor. … Maybe race-based reparations will be another way to ’spread the wealth’?”
Now this sounds more like Brazilian race relations - they'll be talking about the 'mulatto escape hatch' next - SG
Political Prime-Time
By Tobin Harshaw
“The combined overall household rating for Senator Barack Obama’s Wednesday night infomercial, in the top 56 local television markets where Nielsen maintains electronic TV meters, was 21.7,” the fine folks at Nielsen tell us.
James Hibbard of the Hollywood Reporter thinks that qualifies as a blockbuster: “If Barack Obama fails to win the election, perhaps the networks should hire him to entertain viewers on Wednesday nights,” he writes. “Obama’s 30-minute primetime infomercial was seen by 33.6 million viewers across seven networks — including CBS, NBC, Fox, Univision, MSNBC, BET and TV One. That’s 70% more people than watched the conclusion of the World Series last night on Fox (19.8 million).”
Taegan Goddard provides some historical context: “In contrast, the last presidential candidate to air a paid simulcast was Ross Perot in 1996, was seen by 16.8% of households. However, the ad was seen by fewer households than watched the presidential debates. The three debates were seen by 34.7%, 42% and 38.3% of households in these top markets, respectively.”
“The pundits on the cable nets may try to discount the power of the broadcast,” add Jonathan Singer at MyDD. “However, Obama was not trying to convince the Beltway cognoscenti with his event — he was trying to reach voters who might otherwise not have been reached. So the fact that what appears to have been tens of millions of people tuned in last night to a program with Oscar-like production values laying out a cogent case for why Barack Obama should be elected the next President of the United States cannot be a bad thing for the Obama campaign.”
Indeed — if only the Phillies and Rays had had equal production values …
Go to original articleTop hits of the YouTube election
| By Rajini Vaidyanathan BBC News, Washington DC |
A man stares down the lens, delivering a message to the camera.
Dear Mr Obama: Iraq veteran's message to Democrat
"Dear Mr Obama having spent 12 months in Iraq theatre I can promise you it's not a mistake."
At 1 minute 55 seconds, it's short, simple and powerful.
"When you call the Iraqi war a mistake you disrespect the service and sacrifice of everyone who has died promoting freedom... Because you do not understand or appreciate these principles Sir, I am supporting Senator John McCain for president."
The film, titled Dear Mr Obama, is the most-viewed election-related video on the YouTube website, attracting more than 11 million hits.
Made by an Iraq war returnee, it's an example of how ordinary Americans have used the website to get their voice heard.
In this election, YouTube has provided a new way for people to consume and communicate their views - from the serious to the silly, the official to the outrageous.
People power
Andrew Rasiej from the Techpresident blog, which has been monitoring the impact of the internet on the 2008 race, is one of many who says YouTube has helped transform the political landscape in this election.
 |  John McCain made a strategic decision not to spend as much money on TV spots as the other candidates and put more on YouTube  Julie Germany, George Washington University |
"It's now shared by the public at large. They can distribute a piece of media on YouTube faster in a 15-minute news cycle than traditional media can in a 24-hour news cycle"
Both the candidates have used YouTube to promote their message, posting videos, ads and speeches to their own channels.
Julie Germany, from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, says YouTube has helped the McCain team deal with its funding gap relative to the cash-rich Obama camp.
"They made a strategic decision not to spend as much money on TV spots as the other candidates and put more on YouTube, knowing that they would be picked up by the mainstream media. And they were right about that," she says.
Music
For its part, the Obama campaign has used the site to encourage participation on behalf of its supporters, Ms Germany says.
Obama Girl's R&B tribute
She cites the Yes We Can film as an example of a stirring video with great production. Will-I-Am stars in the black and white music video, singing lines from Barack Obama's speeches.
Another example of a YouTube video making a big impact in very little time is Obama Girl. Made by a group of film-makers, it was performed by student Leah Kaufman, who wrote the lyrics with two friends.
The song is lip-synched by model Amber Lee Ettinger - who became known as the Obama Girl.
She shows her affection for the Democratic nominee through lines including: "You're into border security. Let's break this border between you and me. Universal health care reform. It makes me warm."
Her performance has attracted more than 10 million views on YouTube.
The light stuff
Other popular videos include the John Edwards "Vain and Pretty Video", where he is seen preening himself and combing his hair repeatedly, and the Tina Fey send-ups of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.
Julie Germany says that while serious videos such as Barack Obama's landmark speech on race in March 2008 have notched up millions of hits, this is relatively rare.
It's the light stuff that users love best, and that spreads like wildfire on the web.
"Some of the most popular videos are the ones which show a lighter side and tap into pre-conceived notions and bias," she says.
"They tap into characteristics that we either find funny or we fear, and these sorts of messages help them become viral."Go to original article and more US08 Youtube hits
American Stories
Of the countless words Barack Obama has uttered since he opened his campaign for president on an icy Illinois morning in February 2007, a handful have kept reverberating in my mind:
“For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”
Perhaps the words echo because I’m a naturalized American, and I came here, like many others, seeking relief from Britain’s subtle barriers of religion and class, and possibility broader than in Europe’s confines.
Perhaps they resonate because, having South African parents, I spent part of my childhood in the land of apartheid, and so absorbed as an infant the humiliation of racial segregation, the fear and anger that are the harvest of hurt — just as they are, in Obama’s words, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Perhaps they speak to me because I live in New York and watch every day a miracle of civility emerge from the struggles and fatigue of people drawn from every corner of the globe to the glimmer of possibility at the tapering edge of the city’s ruler-straight canyons.
Perhaps they move me because the possibility of stories has animated my life; and no nation offers a blanker page on which to write than America.
Or perhaps it’s simply because those 22 words cleave the air with the sharp blade of truth.
Nowhere else could a 47-year-old man, born, as he has written, of a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” a generation distant from the mud shacks of western Kenya, raised for a time as Barry Soetoro (his stepfather’s family name) in Muslim Indonesia, then entrusted to his grandparents in Hawaii — nowhere else could this Barack Hussein Obama rise so far and so fast.
It’s for this sense of possibility, and not for grim-faced dread, that people look to America, which is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passions.
Americans are decent people. They’re not interested in where you came from. They’re interested in who you are. That has not changed.
But much has in the last eight years. This is a moment of anguish. The Bush presidency has engineered the unlikely double whammy of undermining free-market capitalism and essential freedoms, the nation’s twin badges.
American luster is gone. The American idea has, in Joyce Carol Oates’s words, become a “cruel joke.” Americans are worrying and hurting.
So it is important to step back, from the last machinations of this endless campaign, and think again about what America is.
It is renewal, the place where impossible stories get written.
It is the overcoming of history, the leaving behind of war and barriers, in the name of a future freed from the cruel gyre of memory.
It is reinvention, the absorption of one identity in something larger — the notion that “out of many, we are truly one.”
It is a place better than Bush’s land of shadows where a leader entrusted with the hopes of the earth cannot find within himself a solitary phrase to uplift the soul.
Multiple polls now show Obama with a clear lead. But nobody can know the outcome and nobody should underestimate the immense psychological leap that sending a black couple to the White House would represent.
What I am sure of is this: an ever more interconnected world, where financial chain reactions spread with the virulence of plagues, thirsts for American renewal and a form of American leadership sensitive to humanity’s tied fate.
I also know that this biracial politician, the Harvard graduate who gets whites because he was raised by them, the Kenyan’s son who gets blacks because it was among them that mixed race placed him, is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century. He is the providential mestizo whose name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of some child’s lullaby.
And what has he done? What does his experience amount to? Does his record not demonstrate he’s a radical? The interrogation continues. It’s true that his experience is limited.
But Americans seem to be trusting what their eyes tell them: temperament trumps experience and every instinct of this man, whose very identity represents an act of reconciliation, hones toward building change from the center.
Earlier this year, at the end of a road of reddish earth in western Kenya, I found Obama’s half-sister Auma. “He can be trusted,” she said, “to be in dialogue with the world.”
Dialogue, between Americans and beyond America, has been a constant theme. Last year, I spoke to Obama, who told me: “Part of our capacity to lead is linked to our capacity to show restraint.”
Watching the way he has allowed his opponents’ weaknesses to reveal themselves, the way he has enticed them into self-defeating exhaustion pounding against the wall of his equanimity, I have come to understand better what he meant.
Stories require restraint, too. Restraint engages the imagination, which has always been stirred by the American idea, and can be once again.
Obama's closing argument
I didn't get to see this here in Brazil because CNN declined to air it - thank God (again) for Youtube
What? Me Biased?
For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.
The scholars used a common research technique, the implicit association test, to measure whether people regarded Mr. Obama and other candidates as more foreign or more American. They found that research subjects — particularly when primed to think of Mr. Obama as a black candidate — subconsciously considered him less American than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
Indeed, the study found that the research subjects — Californian college students, many of them Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama — unconsciously perceived him as less American even than the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It’s not that any of them actually believed Mr. Obama to be foreign. But the implicit association test measured the way the unconscious mind works, and in following instructions to sort images rapidly, the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American. This result mattered: The more difficulty a person had in classifying Mr. Obama as American, the less likely that person was to support Mr. Obama.
It’s easy to be skeptical of such research, so test for your own unconscious biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo or at http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect.
Race is a controversial, emotional subject in America, particularly in the context of this campaign. Many Obama supporters believe that their candidate would be further ahead if it were not for racism, while many McCain supporters resent the insinuations and believe that if Mr. Obama were white, he wouldn’t even be considered for the presidency.
Yet with race an undercurrent in the national debate, that also makes this a teachable moment. Partly that’s because of new findings both in neurology, using brain scans to understand how we respond to people of different races, and social psychology, examining the gulf between our conscious ideals of equality and our unconscious proclivity to discriminate.
Incidentally, such discrimination is not only racial. We also have unconscious biases against the elderly and against women seeking powerful positions — biases that affect the Republican ticket.
Some scholars link racial attitudes to a benefit in evolutionary times from an ability to form snap judgments about who is a likely friend and foe. There may have been an evolutionary advantage in recognizing instantaneously whether a stranger was from one’s own tribe or from an enemy tribe. There’s some evidence that the amygdala, a center in the brain for emotions, flashes a threat warning when it perceives people who look “different.”
Yet our biases are probably largely cultural. One reason to think that is that many African-Americans themselves have an unconscious pro-white bias. All told, considerable evidence suggests that while the vast majority of Americans truly believe in equality and aspire to equal opportunity for all, our minds aren’t as egalitarian as we think they are.
“To me, this study really reveals this gap between our minds and our ideals,” said Thierry Devos, a professor at San Diego State University who conducted the research on Mr. Obama, along with Debbie Ma of the University of Chicago. “Equality is very much linked to ideas of American identity, but it’s hard to live up to these ideas. Even somebody like Barack Obama, who may be about to become president — we have a hard time seeing him as American.”
A flood of recent research has shown that most Americans, including Latinos and Asian-Americans, associate the idea of “American” with white skin. One study found that although people realize that Lucy Liu is American and that Kate Winslet is British, their minds automatically process an Asian face as foreign and a white face as American — hence this title in an academic journal: “Is Kate Winslet More American Than Lucy Liu?”
One might argue that Mr. Obama registers as foreign in our minds because he does have overseas family connections, such as his father’s Kenyan ancestry. But similar experiments have found the same outcome with famous African-American sports figures.
Moreover, Professor Devos found that when participants in the latest study were told to focus on the age of each candidate, or on the political party of each candidate, then Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain were perceived as equally American. It was only when people were prompted to focus on skin color and to see Mr. Obama as black that he was perceived as foreign.
This 2008 election is a milestone and may put a black man in the White House. That creates an opportunity for an adult conversation about the murky complexities of race, in part because there’s evidence that when people become aware of their unconscious biases, they can overcome them.
Why would anyone want to stop you from voting?
Why would anyone want to stop you from voting? It's simple -- because when you can control who votes, you can control who wins. Check out this compelling new video put together by the folks at VideoTheVote. It's fun, dynamic, and does a great job of telling the story of what's at stake and the power of our vote.
http://colorofchange.org/
This year, with so many Black voters, young voters, and folks from all backgrounds who want change participating in huge numbers, those who want to hold onto power by suppressing the vote are in full force. But they can't stop us.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to make sure you successfully cast your vote, and to help others do the same.
Be Prepared, and Conquer the Lines.
We can't let long lines stop anyone from voting. There are several ways you can reduce lines and make sure they don't prevent you or anyone else from voting:
Vote early if you can.
You can find early voting times and locations at govote.org.
Double-check your polling location before you go to vote.
You can look it up at govote.org.
Have a Plan & Have Fun.
Have a plan in case there are lines. Bring some food, drinks, friends, books, games, a chair -- anything that will prevent you and other voters from walking away. Have fun while you wait and encourage your friends and neighbors to stay in line so their vote is counted.
Don't give up--don't walk away without voting.
Two numbers you should have in your phone.
Put these numbers in your phone so you're prepared to report problems and help other voters find their polling place:
866-OUR-VOTE
It's a hotline that's been set up to collect information about problems on election day--lawyers and election protection advocates are ready to respond. It's the best way to make sure someone addresses any problems you see.
The number for your local election board
Have it in case you need to tell someone where they can vote. Enter your zip code at govote.org, then look for "Contact [your county] election officials" on the right.
Beware of lies, misinformation and dirty tricks; spread the truth.
Republican operatives are spreading plain lies to frighten new voters. In Philadelphia, anonymous flyers in Black neighborhoods have falsely claimed that voters with unpaid traffic tickets or outstanding warrants will be arrested at the polls. If you hear a scary rumor, it's probably a lie. Call your local election officials to check it out--and make sure your friends and neighbors know the truth.
Leave the Obama gear at home.
In some places, you won't be allowed into the polling place if you're wearing clothes and pins that support a given candidate. This isn't true everywhere, but it's best to play it safe. You can contact your local board of elections to find out if it's a problem in your area. If it is, bring some extra plain T-shirts or sweaters to loan neighbors who show up unaware of the rule.
Read the ballot carefully, and ask questions!
Some ballots can be confusing even for smart and informed voters. Read instructions on the ballot carefully, and if you're not sure you understand something, ask a poll worker to explain. Remember what happened in 2000 in Florida--a confusing ballot caused thousands of people to mistakenly vote for the wrong Presidential candidate. Don't let that happen to you!
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, Andre, Kai, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org PAC team
October 30th, 2008
quarta-feira, 29 de outubro de 2008
BBC: Muslim vote split in US elections
| By Sima Kotecha Newsbeat US reporter |
With America set to decide between Barack Obama and John McCain for their new president next Tuesday, Newsbeat visits a mosque in a New York suburb to find out how Muslims feel about the election.
At prayers at a mosque in Jamaica, Queens - a suburb of New York City, the women have their heads covered.
They are kneeling in prayer, the men sitting separately opposite them.
The scene provides an insight into how some of America's 4 million Muslims are feeling about the Presidential race. And the truth is, many are angry.
They feel they've been rejected by mainstream politics in the US, a result perhaps of the 9/11 attacks by followers of Osama Bin Laden, the Islamic extremist, and for which many still feel hated and alienated by their fellow citizens.
|  I do find it offensive that being Muslim is being considered as a slur. That is offensive, it is racist and it is unfortunate  Azeem Khan, 27, from New York |
She thumbs her prayer beads and tells me that a Barack Obama victory would make the world a better place.
She said: "He seems like a truthful person and he has good policies."
She also happens to think, wrongly, that he's a Muslim.
Most of the Muslims here are pro-Obama. After all New York is a state that normally supports his Democratic Party.
BBC: Muslim vote split in US elections
| By Sima Kotecha Newsbeat US reporter |
With America set to decide between Barack Obama and John McCain for their new president next Tuesday, Newsbeat visits a mosque in a New York suburb to find out how Muslims feel about the election.
At prayers at a mosque in Jamaica, Queens - a suburb of New York City, the women have their heads covered.
They are kneeling in prayer, the men sitting separately opposite them.
The scene provides an insight into how some of America's 4 million Muslims are feeling about the Presidential race. And the truth is, many are angry.
They feel they've been rejected by mainstream politics in the US, a result perhaps of the 9/11 attacks by followers of Osama Bin Laden, the Islamic extremist, and for which many still feel hated and alienated by their fellow citizens.
| I do find it offensive that being Muslim is being considered as a slur. That is offensive, it is racist and it is unfortunate Azeem Khan, 27, from New York |
She thumbs her prayer beads and tells me that a Barack Obama victory would make the world a better place.
She said: "He seems like a truthful person and he has good policies."
She also happens to think, wrongly, that he's a Muslim.
Most of the Muslims here are pro-Obama. After all New York is a state that normally supports his Democratic Party.
Brazil: The Obama Samba
Brazilians love to mix things up -- never afraid to grab hold of an idea and incorporate it seamlessly into their constantly evolving culture. Take their national drink, the caipirinha, add fruit juice, and you have a caipifruta (try guava, passionfruit, or kiwi). And samba, the most Brazilian of dances, is itself a mix of African rhythms and European melodies. In Rio, they put a hip-hop beat to it, and call it "funky."
So it should be no surprise that the country's politicians exhibit the same flare when running for office. Brazilian law allows candidates to register under any name they choose -- as long as it's not offensive. In the past, "Lula," the nickname of the popular president, was taken by scores of politicians. This year, inspiration is coming from a politician a continent away: Barack Obama.
At least eight candidates across the country have chosen to identify themselves with the U.S. presidential hopeful. Using names that sound like welterweight champions, there is the "Brazilian Obama," and the "Obama of the Savannah." Outside of Rio, in the region known as the Baixada, or "Lowlands," there is Claudio Henrique, also known as the "Obama of the Baixada."
Hoping to become the first black mayor of his hometown of Belford Roxo, Henrique sees the senator from Illinois as an inspiration, who has been able to break boundaries and overcome obstacles -- many of which stand in Henrique's way.
Poverty, violence and corruption are the norm in Belford Roxo. Its beloved mayor and two city councilmen were assassinated in recent years. Streets are unpaved, and sanitation, health care and education are all lacking.
When Henrique began campaigning, asking residents to join him in a dream of a better city, his supporters started calling him their Barack Obama. The name stuck, and a campaign jingle followed -- set to the funky Rio beat. His popularity soared.
Crisscrossing town in a caravan of family and friends, Henrique meets and greets everyone in town. On the streets he is a crowd favorite, but as we see in the piece, when election day arrives in Brazil, Henrique finds even more obstacles to overcome in trying to make history in the Baixada.
-- Andrés Cediel
Go to articleSleepless in Tehran
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 28, 2008
Published: October 28, 2008
Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran’s mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone down. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the country their leaders call “The Great Satan” has just elected “a guy whose middle name is the central figure in Shiite Islam — Hussein — and whose last name — Obama — when transliterated into Farsi, means ‘He is with us,’ ” said Sadjadpour.Go to article
Recycling rubbish or "How it Works"
I don't get FOX News here in Brazil (though I do subscribe to CNN and BBC News) so I can only "enjoy" the third link in the Axis of Weasel via YouTube and Jon Stewart, but this is a very familiar pattern. I've taken to reading the Drudge Report often, for leads, hints and content for this blog.
It seems that Matt Drudge's "strategy" for ensuring a McCain win was to make sure Obama won the primary. If Barack wins the presidency, parts of Matt's anatomy will be black-and-blue from self-inflicted kicks on November 5th...
segunda-feira, 27 de outubro de 2008
Take election day off for Barack
Ask your Boss. Ask your Professor.
Take Election Day off and volunteer to make history.
Watch this video and sign up to help get out the vote on Tuesday, November 4th:
![Watch the video]()
This election will be decided by what this grassroots movement can accomplish on Election Day.
We have volunteer shifts to fill throughout the day -- make calls, knock on doors, and make sure your fellow voters get to the polls.
No previous experience is required. Sign up now to take the day off and make history on November 4th:
http://my.barackobama.com/taketheday
Thanks,
Jon
Jon Carson
National Field Director
Obama for America
P.S. -- This Wednesday, October 29th, supporters are gathering in homes across the country to watch Barack's 30-minute primetime presentation and make phone calls to voters in battleground states.
Sign up to host or attend a Last Call for Change house party:
http://my.barackobama.com/lastcallparty
Take Election Day off and volunteer to make history.
Watch this video and sign up to help get out the vote on Tuesday, November 4th:
This election will be decided by what this grassroots movement can accomplish on Election Day.
We have volunteer shifts to fill throughout the day -- make calls, knock on doors, and make sure your fellow voters get to the polls.
No previous experience is required. Sign up now to take the day off and make history on November 4th:
http://my.barackobama.com/
Thanks,
Jon
Jon Carson
National Field Director
Obama for America
P.S. -- This Wednesday, October 29th, supporters are gathering in homes across the country to watch Barack's 30-minute primetime presentation and make phone calls to voters in battleground states.
Sign up to host or attend a Last Call for Change house party:
http://my.barackobama.com/
Sharing Brazilian electoral know-how with the US
The elections for mayor in 30 Brazilian cities ended two hours ago and in most part of them we already know who the winners are. In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, cities where almost ten million people voted, the results came out exactly two hours and ten minutes after the last elector pressed the button.
Despite being satisfied or not with the results, the fact is that the Brazilian voting system proves once more its perfection. Our voting machines made in Brazil and used since 1996 once again were responsible for making the elections quick and safe. In terms of elections technology, Brazil is ahead of many developed countries, including the U.S. Many South American and European representatives already came to Brazil to learn more about our voting system. Four years ago, observers from eight countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Thailand followed closely our election process as an example of fleetness and accuracy.
For the next time, US representatives would be also welcome to come.
Source: GetBrazil
"Rope-a-dope on a grand scale"
The Power of Passive Campaigning
Stanley FishThe dynamic of the presidential campaign is in one key sense reminiscent of Milton's "Paradise Regained."
In the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better campaign.
When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?
The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning.
We saw it in the 10 days when the activity around the mounting economic crisis was at its height. Henry Paulson alternated between scaring members of Congress and scaring the public. Nancy Pelosi alternated between playing the responsible Congressional statesperson and playing the partisan attack dog. Media commentators went from one hysterical prediction to another. John McCain went from saying there’s nothing to worry about to saying there’s everything to worry about to saying that he would fix everything by suspending his campaign to saying that he was not suspending his campaign and that he would debate after all.
And Barack Obama? He didn’t do much and he said less (O.K., he did say some reassuring, optimistic things), and his poll numbers went up.
Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.
In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time, points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change.
What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five, or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice.
Meanwhile, McCain’s surrogates get red in the face on TV when they try to explain away the latest jaw-dropping thing Sarah Palin has said, or proclaim that anything can happen in seven days, or respond to ever more discouraging poll numbers by saying (how’s this for a weak cliché) that the only poll that counts is the poll on election day. (I know things are bad when my wife, a staunch Democrat, feels sorry for them.)
What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way), just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates. What Satan wants to do is draw Jesus out, provoke him to an unwisely exasperated response, get him to claim too much for his own powers. What Jesus does is reply with an equanimity conveyed by the adjectives and adverbs that preface his words: “unaltered,” “temperately,” “patiently,” “calmly,” “unmoved,” “sagely,” “in brief.”
In response, Satan gets ever more desperate; he conjures up rain and wind storms (in the midst of which Jesus sits “unappalled in calm”); he tempts him with the riches of poetry and philosophy (which Jesus is careful neither to reject nor deify); and finally, having run out of schemes and scares and “swollen with rage,” he resorts to physical violence (McCain has not gone so far, although some of his supporters clearly want to), picking Jesus up bodily and depositing him on the spire of the temple in the hope that he will either fall to his death or turn into Superman and undermine the entire point of his 40-day trial in the wilderness. He doesn’t do either. He does nothing, and Satan, “smitten with amazement” — even this hasn’t worked — “fell.”
Toward the end, the poem describes the mighty contest in a metaphor that captures its odd and negative dynamic. Jesus is “a solid rock” continually assaulted by “surging waves”; and even though the repeated assaults result only in the waves being “all to shivers dashed,” they keep on coming until they exhaust themselves “in froth or bubbles.” The power Jesus generates is the power of not moving from the still center of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him, leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale.
And McCain knows it. Last Wednesday, campaigning in New Hampshire, he spoke sneeringly about Obama’s campaign being “disciplined and careful.” That’s exactly right, and so far the combination of discipline and care — care not to get out too far in front of anything — along with a boatload of money is working just fine. Jesus is usually the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.
NY Times: Democrats in Steel Country See Color, and Beyond It
John McCain hopes for an opening in Pennsylvania, where race talk is sometimes submerged, sometimes open.
ALIQUIPPA, Pa. — Voting for the black man does not come easy to Nick Piroli. He is the first to admit that.
To the sound of bowling balls smacking pins, as the bartender in the Fallout Shelter queues up more Buds, this retired steelworker wrestles with this election and his choice. A couple of friends, he says, will not vote for Senator Barack Obama.
“I’m no racist, but I’m not crazy about him either,” said Mr. Piroli, 77. “I don’t know, maybe ’cause he’s black.”
He winces at himself. “We was raised and worked with the black, the Serb,” he said. “It was a regular league of nations. And the economy now, it’s terrible.”
“I’ve got to vote for him,” he said finally.
Him? “The Democrat, Obama,” Mr. Piroli replied. “I can’t be stupid.”
domingo, 26 de outubro de 2008
CNN: Poll: 7 of 10 say candidates' race not a factor in their vote
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A new national survey suggests that race won't be a major factor in the outcome of the presidential election.
Race has played a large role in the election campaign narrative for Sen. Barack Obama.
That 70 percent figure is up 9 points from July, when the same question was asked. Only 5 percent of those polled said race will be the single most important factor in their choice for president, with 11 percent saying it's one of several important factors, and 13 percent indicating race will be a minor factor in their vote.
Sen. Barack Obama, if elected, would be the first black American to win the White House. 
Watch more on the state of the campaign »
"First, don't assume that everyone who says that race is factor in their votes are voting against Obama. Some voters are choosing Obama because of his race. And many of those who say that race will influence their votes are Republicans who were highly unlikely to vote for any Democrat this year," said Keating Holland, CNN polling director.
"By one complicated measure, the number of votes Obama may lose due to his race is roughly equal to the number who will vote for him because he is black. And both those numbers appear to be small, possibly just 1 percentage point in each direction," Holland said.
Don't Miss
One question that often comes up when discussing polling regarding race is whether those being polled are telling the truth.
"Take all this with a grain of salt -- race is a complicated topic and polls may not reveal each respondent's true feelings on this hot-button issue. Nonetheless, the poll suggests that race may largely be an influence on Americans who aren't typical Democratic voters, and that race works both for and against Obama in roughly equal proportions," Holland said.
So, what about age? If elected, the 72-year-old John McCain would be the oldest person to be inaugurated as president.
Roughly half of those polled said the age of the candidates will affect their vote. That's essentially unchanged since July. Three percent said age would be their most important factor, with 19 percent saying it would be one of several important factors and 25 percent saying it would be a minor factor.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted October 17-19, with 1,058 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.Go to original article
Guardian/Observer: Coming of Age
Obama as we knew him... man and boy
Schoolfriends remember his love for comic books, basketball and teasing the girls. A former boss recalls him as a young man running a community project in Chicago. A fellow senator remembers being beaten by him at poker. Gifted student, quiet persuader, charismatic speaker, loyal friend... We speak to the people who knew Barack Obama best, revealing an intimate, often touching, portrait of a man on the brink of greatnessGo to article
In Defense of White Americans
White Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist.
IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.
That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.
It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others.
The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man who Allen maligned: a high-achieving son of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California.)
Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC.
After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, she asserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.
We don’t know yet if McCain will go the way of Allen in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964, when L.B.J. vanquished another Arizona Republican in a landslide. But we do know that Obama swept like a conquering hero through Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, last week and that he leads in every recent Virginia poll.
There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness and showcased Colin Powell as its opening-night speaker, the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans (Powell himself now included), immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics who once gave Bush-Cheney as much as 44 percent of their votes) and the extended families of gay Americans (Palin has now revived a constitutional crusade against same-sex marriage). Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.
But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.
That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that “in the privacy of the voting booth” ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.
A leading vehicle for this journalistic mind-set has been the unending obsession with “the Bradley effect” — as if nothing has changed in America since 1982, when some polls (possibly for reasons having nothing to do with race) predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the California governorship. In 2008, there is, if anything, more evidence of a reverse Bradley effect — Obama’s primary vote totals more often exceeded those in the final polls than not — but poor old Bradley keeps being flogged anyway.
So do all those deer hunters in western Pennsylvania. Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it’s been a bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp’s line) that a black guy is doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low point settled on “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”) Michigan in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach because of incorrigible racism — until McCain abandoned it as hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead.
The constant tide of anthropological articles and television reports set in blue-collar diners, bars and bowling alleys have hyped this racial theory of the race. So did the rampant misreading of primary-season exit polls. On cable TV and the Sunday network shows, there was endless chewing over the internal numbers in the Clinton victories. It was doomsday news for Obama, for instance, that some 12 percent of white Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania said race was a factor in their choice and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. Ipso facto — and despite the absence of any credible empirical evidence — these Clinton voters would either stay home or flock to McCain in November.
The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania (more than double the 2004 gap), even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. When the Democratic Representative John Murtha described his own western Pennsylvania district as a “racist area,” McCain feigned outrage and put down even more chips on the race card, calling the region the “most patriotic, most God-loving” part of America.
Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.
Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.
The original “racist for Obama,” after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.
When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of “throwing his grandmother under the bus.” But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.
Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.
BBC: Jefferson's hidden slave legacy
| By Allan Little BBC News, Monticello, Virginia |
 Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and third US President |
Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello is a place of pilgrimage for Americans of every political stripe.
Thousands come every day.
They stand on the terrace and look down on the forested green plains of Virginia.
They gaze in awe at Jefferson's little chess set, where he sat, two hundred years ago, with his friend and apostle James Madison.
Between them, these two men in effect dreamed a new nation into existence.
Jefferson designed Monticello himself.
| JEFFERSON AND HIS SLAVES   |
It is true to the man - the elegant proportions, the white domed roof above pillared porticoes, the bricks so brown they are almost ebony - the colour of the Virginia soil from which they were hewn and baked.
Huge sash windows bring light flooding in. This is the aesthetic of the rational eighteenth century mind - the Enlightenment in architectural form.
But slave hands baked those bricks and stacked them, and throughout his life time more than two hundred slaves - Jefferson's personal property - worked the fields of his estate.
Slavery and equality
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal".
The words of the American Declaration of Independence are Jefferson's own.
| In the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson's election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants Michael Lind, New America Foundation |
All men, he goes on, "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" and among these are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
How did the author of that ringing declaration of universal human rights reconcile himself to the ownership of slaves?
It is one of the great contradictions of Jefferson's life, of his age, and of the America that he and the founding generations conjured into being.
Jefferson's wife, Martha, died in the tenth year of their marriage.
Present in the room at the moment of her death, with Jefferson himself, was Martha's half sister, a young slave girl called Sally Hemings. She was the daughter of Martha's own father and a slave called Elizabeth.
Slave Mistress
Years later, in Paris, Jefferson began a relationship with Sally. Together, they had six children.
Jefferson's enemies accused him of misconduct and tried to use the scandal against him when he ran for president. It didn't work. Jefferson said nothing, neither confirming nor denying it.
For two hundred years, Jefferson scholars for the most part dismissed what came to be known as the "Sally Question" as implausible.
The Jefferson that Americans had written into their national mythology - the Jefferson who is carved into Mount Rushmore - could not have had such a relationship.
It could not be allowed to stand.
New evidence
Recently, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed rescued Sally and the entire slave population of Monticello from the shadows and gave them flesh and blood, names, characters, personalities, and life stories.
Author Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and his family of slaves.
DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that Jefferson fathered Sally's children.
Her remarkable research challenges a certain conception of America, an idea of the Republic that has prevailed for two hundred years.
Why, I asked her, do so many Americans continue to resist the idea that Sally was so intimately involved in the life of the greatest of all the founding fathers?
"I think it points to contemporary racial attitudes," she told me.
"They are very much like past racial attitudes. Jefferson is seen as the embodiment of the American spirit. It is absolutely about ownership of the story of the Republic, of the Republic itself.
"If you founded something, you own it. And the founding story is of a group of white men who come together with high ideals and found this new nation".
Jeffersonian Democracy
Jefferson is so identified with the founding ideals of the Republic that he gave his name to great American experiment itself.
Republicans or Democrats, northerners or southerners, black, white Hispanic, recent immigrant or settled for generations, Americans are all children of "Jeffersonian democracy".
It is a democracy in which the citizen is free to live a life without interference or instruction from government; a democracy of small, weak, unobtrusive government.
Jefferson's great rival, his near contemporary Alexander Hamilton, dreamed a different America into being, an America that sat alongside Jefferson's ideal in a relationship of dynamic tension.
Hamilton's America needed a strong federal government, a standing army, a national currency and a central bank.
Jefferson thought all that smacked of the European - and specifically British - monarchism and imperialism he despised.
Jeffersonian America was conceived as the alternative to all that.
Jefferson's United States is spoken in the plural - "the United States are…" he thought of, and referred to, Virginia as his "country".
Hamiltonian America is emphatically singular.
Defender of states' rights
Jefferson the Virginian, the Southerner, the defender of the rights of the slave holding states believed in an agrarian America of free and independent gentlemen farmers, living their lives unmolested by government.
He believed the likes of Hamilton, the New Yorker, and the Northern states in general had been lured away from that ideal by urbanisation, industry, commerce, banks, finance and the accumulation of money.
Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, believes the fault line that opened up between Jefferson and Hamilton two hundred years ago still operates in America's two-party system:
"You can make the case that in the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson's election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants".
Look at America today - its powerful federal government, its enormous army, its commitments overseas, the still-mighty US dollar.
America may be a Hamiltonian country.
But its heart, both nostalgic and aspiring, still belongs to Thomas Jefferson.
Allan Little's programme on Thomas Jefferson will be broadcast on BBC World Service radio on Sunday 26 October.
sábado, 25 de outubro de 2008
Politico.com: "Polls: White support for Obama at historic level"
The most recent two weeks of Gallup polling, which includes roughly 13,000 interviews, show 44 percent of non-Hispanic white voters presently support Obama — the highest number for a Democrat since 47 percent of whites backed Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Until the stock market swoon in mid-September, Obama had never reached 40 percent among white voters.
No Democrat has won a majority of white voters since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. John McCain has shuffled between 48 percent and 50 percent support in recent weeks — which would be the lowest share for a Republican candidate in a two-man race since Barry Goldwater's run.
If Obama's share holds, it would top the 43 percent of white voters who backed Bill Clinton in 1996, when the Democrat won a plurality among white females and 38 percent of white men, the best performance by a Democrat in all those categories since 1976.
Go to article
Lessons for the human race
Nowadays, many countries require foreigners to take a general-knowledge test on their history and culture before they can be naturalised as citizens. There should be a requirement for everyone born on this planet to be "naturalised" at a certain age (say, 12) after spending a few years studying up on world history and culture. A few lessons in logic, ethics and compassion would also be useful. That way, no one would come up with the illogical association made not only by that "crazy lady" (as SNL calls her) at a McCain rally but implied by McCain himself, to wit: "Arab = Muslim = Terrorist."
What many Americans don't realise is that there are Arabs of many faiths, including Christians.
There are Muslims of many nationalities, including Americans.
And there are terrorists of many nationalists and faiths, including American Christians (remember Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to name just two?).
I'm very glad that the BBC brought this up last night on BBC America, hosted by Katty Kay, spotlighting Colin Powell's remark that any 7-year-old Muslim American should be able to dream of being president one day. I discussed this subject in this blog entry back in July. Fortunately, the media and at least one public figure are finally waking up and speaking out.
--Sabrina Gledhill
What many Americans don't realise is that there are Arabs of many faiths, including Christians.
There are Muslims of many nationalities, including Americans.
And there are terrorists of many nationalists and faiths, including American Christians (remember Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to name just two?).
I'm very glad that the BBC brought this up last night on BBC America, hosted by Katty Kay, spotlighting Colin Powell's remark that any 7-year-old Muslim American should be able to dream of being president one day. I discussed this subject in this blog entry back in July. Fortunately, the media and at least one public figure are finally waking up and speaking out.
--Sabrina Gledhill
sexta-feira, 24 de outubro de 2008
Fighting the lies, smears and hoaxes
John McCain is running one of the sleaziest campaigns in American history -- and just the other day he told an interviewer he's "absolutely" proud of it.
Attacking Barack Obama with dark insinuations in TV ads must have been drawing too much negative attention to McCain's lies, because now he's using automated "robocalls" and hateful mailings to spread doubt and fear under the radar.
The most powerful way to expose McCain's dirty campaign is to drag his shadowy attacks into the light of public scrutiny.
Today we're launching Under the Radar, a website where you can get the truth about some of these deceptive "robocalls" and mailers. Check it out and share it with anyone you know who has received one of these smears:
http://radar.barackobama.com
Back in his 2000 campaign, John McCain said, "Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads, you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it."
He was right.
Keep fighting the good fight,
Obama Action Wire
P.S. -- If you've received a deceptive McCain mailer or "robocall," report it and upload a copy so the campaign can bring it into the light and fight back:
http://www.fightthesmears.com/report
Attacking Barack Obama with dark insinuations in TV ads must have been drawing too much negative attention to McCain's lies, because now he's using automated "robocalls" and hateful mailings to spread doubt and fear under the radar.
The most powerful way to expose McCain's dirty campaign is to drag his shadowy attacks into the light of public scrutiny.
Today we're launching Under the Radar, a website where you can get the truth about some of these deceptive "robocalls" and mailers. Check it out and share it with anyone you know who has received one of these smears:
http://radar.barackobama.com
Back in his 2000 campaign, John McCain said, "Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads, you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it."
He was right.
Keep fighting the good fight,
Obama Action Wire
P.S. -- If you've received a deceptive McCain mailer or "robocall," report it and upload a copy so the campaign can bring it into the light and fight back:
http://www.fightthesmears.com/
BBC: 'Race question mark' over US town
| By Dumeetha Luthra BBC News, Uniontown, Pennsylvania |
Advertisement
Fayette County residents on the race issue
Charles is a registered Democrat in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
"If it wasn't for Obama I would vote Democrat. Blacks just cause trouble, that's the taste I've got in my mouth."
Race is the question mark hanging over this election.
Barack Obama is ahead in the polls. There's a widespread feeling now that the election is his to lose.
But there is something that is worrying Democrats. How accurate are the polls? How many voters are saying they will vote for Mr Obama because they do not want to be perceived as racist?
Once they enter the polling booth will it be an entirely different story?
Simply put, how many people out there think like Charles but are not admitting it?
'Not from here'
Charles said the vast majority of his friends felt the same way as him.
Uniontown is a rural town in south-west Pennsylvania. Its countryside is breathtaking, particularly now as the leaves change their colour from green to gold to burnt red.
But the area is poor and unemployment is high. Traditionally it is staunchly Democrat - but race is an election issue.
|  Obama will get as many votes from the blacks, as he will not get from the whites Todd Hackley |
She shrugged, she was not even sure when the election was to be held, she could not pronounce Mr Obama's name.
"I like McCain because I can say his name, so I'll probably vote for McCain."
She was not well informed, but her views were clear.
"He's from Africa or something. I don't even know where he's from. I know he grew up here, but he's not from here. I think American presidents should be from America."
These are not isolated opinions - just not often voiced publicly.
In the primaries 12% of voters across the state said race was a factor - and that is close to Mr Obama's current lead in the polls here.
Recently, Congressman John Murtha had this to say about his home state: "There is no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area".
He did, however, predict that Mr Obama would still win the state, and he later apologised for the remarks.
The polls show Mr Obama is ahead in Pennsylvania, which also has a Democratic governor and traditionally huge Democratic majorities in the major cities - Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
'A good show'
In Uniontown, of course I met Democrats who are voting for Mr Obama, and I also met a couple of Republicans who said they were voting Obama.
This is not about a town being racist, but rather how much the race issue is reflected in the polls.
|  He tries to put a good show for the people, but I don't think he is American Brandon Hafield |
Todd Hackley, a registered Republican said he would vote for Mr McCain and had this to say on the race question:
"Race is an issue, it has to be, not that we want it to be. My thoughts are that Obama will get as many votes from the blacks, as he will not get from the whites.
"I do believe there are a lot of whites who won't vote for him because of the colour of his skin, but I believe there are a lot of blacks who will vote for him because of his colour."
Todd has always voted Republican and when I asked him if colour was an issue for him he said it might have been years ago, but not now.
Brandon Hafield said said he was undecided who to vote for, but when I asked if Mr Obama was a patriot he said no.
When I asked if he was American, he said: "I think he tried to be, I don't think he is, he tries to put a good show for the people, but I don't think he is."
| I hate to think we would have racial prejudice entering into a campaign here, but I think perhaps we do Russ Mechling |
Local radio presenter Bob Fultz, who hosts a regular talk show, says prejudice is definitely present, even though few callers are willing to discuss it openly.
"White voters aren't saying what they really think, whether that's here in Fayette County or nationally. I had one caller who said he thinks Obama is Osama with plastic surgery."
However, Mr Obama has gained points for his perceived ability to handle the credit crunch - and Uniontown has its own financial woes.
Russ Mechling is a retired engineer who used to be the president of the local company Fayette Engineering. He is a registered Democrat who will be voting for Mr Obama.
"There is a little bit of a racial backlash, but I think it's becoming less and less as the economic situation gets worse and worse.
"I think that will probably cost McCain more votes than any other single factor."Go to original article
THE WORLD IS BLUE
Susan Glasser's Foreign Policy magazine, in a project with Gallup, lets you click on a country to see the choice for U.S. president 'If the World Could Vote.'
Source: Mike Allen's Politico Playbook Daily Update
Sadly, Brazil is not among the top 10 pro-Obama countries (but then again, it's absent from McCain's top 10 too).
Source: Mike Allen's Politico Playbook Daily Update
Sadly, Brazil is not among the top 10 pro-Obama countries (but then again, it's absent from McCain's top 10 too).
The GOP's daily attack, erm tactic: "fake umbrage"
Hat-tip: England for Obama
From Mike Allen's Politico Playbook Daily Update:
Jeff Zeleny's pool report from Honolulu: 'Senator Barack Obama stepped off the plane about 7:25 p.m. local time, walking directly into a waiting SUV. It was a subdued arrival, with no waving and no welcoming party. He was tieless after a more than 9-hour flight, plus a refueling stop in Sacramento. A scaled down motorcade – about six cars – made its way through easy traffic to the apartment building where Madelyn Dunham lives. Mr. Obama arrived about 7:45 p.m. and drove directly into the underground parking garage. About three-dozen people stood across the street watching the small spectacle. Several residents of the apartment building stepped out on their balconies, looking down on Mr. Obama's arrival. ... The motorcade drove to the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, a little more than a mile away, and a campaign day that spanned six time zones ended shortly after 9 p.m. (3 a.m. Eastern Time.)'
Senator Obama, to ABC's Robin Roberts, in taped interview on 'Good Morning America,' on his 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, the woman who largely raised him: 'I want to give her a kiss and a hug. And then we're going to find out what chores I can do, because I'm sure there's been some stuff that's been left undone ... Without going through the details too much, she's gravely ill. ... [recently broke a hip] She had some other problems that were getting worse. You know, we weren't sure, and I'm still not sure, whether she makes it to Election Day. We're all praying and we hope she does.'
ABCNews.com says he calls her 'Toot, which is short for the Hawaiian word tutu, meaning grandparent.'
The dangers of "a raw appeal to division"
The recent critique made by Representative John Lewis of Georgia was not meant to liken John McCain to George Wallace, who was known for race-bating rhetoric, but rather meant as a collegial caution.
JOHN McCAIN deplored them, Barack Obama distanced himself from them, but the comments that Representative John Lewis of Georgia delivered on Oct. 11 may turn out to be some of the most trenchant — and generous — of the campaign. Mr. Lewis charged Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin with “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” in their fervently red-meat rallies, not unlike “a governor of the State of Alabama named George Wallace” whose race-bating rhetoric, Mr. Lewis noted, contributed to the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church in which four young girls were killed.
The context of Mr. Lewis’s critique is not as has been presented: a saint of the civil rights movement likening a decorated war hero to an infamous racist. Rather, it was a collegial (if rough) caution from one brother to another, about a third, politicians all.
Mr. Lewis’s authority to chastise Mr. McCain comes not from his Bloody Sunday stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, but rather from his subsequent record on the hustings. His mettle was tested not only in Selma but also in three tough campaigns, characterized by tactics of personal destruction.
The first was his race in 1966 to retain the chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. For three years, Mr. Lewis had used his office to promote SNCC’s early emphasis on black and white activists working hand in hand. But by 1966, that inclusive and nonviolent climate was under siege. Peaceful marchers found themselves shadowed by a volunteer bodyguard of shotgun-wielding black militants, and a group known as the Atlanta Separatists was demanding that all whites be expelled from the civil rights leadership.
Things came to a head at SNCC’s convention in May that year, when late-night, back-room maneuvering elevated Stokely Carmichael to the chairmanship, ousting Mr. Lewis. Whites were purged from the organization, and its longtime white supporters were vilified. Carmichael’s successor, H. Rap Brown, changed the group’s name to Student National Coordinating Committee and directly advocated violence. Mr. Lewis’s long labor for racial comity lay in tatters.
In 1982, Mr. Lewis, along with other newly elected black Atlanta city councilmen, faced sound trucks rolling through their neighborhoods accusing them of race treason for not supporting a major road project favored by Mayor Andrew Young. Mr. Lewis stood his ground. He confided to me, then a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution, how upset he was at some of the bullying aimed his way.
In his first bid for Congress, in 1986, the battle that counted was the Democratic primary, where he faced off against Julian Bond. Mr. Lewis was running behind, crippled, some said, by his lack of eloquence. Partisan portrayals (not necessarily perpetrated by Mr. Bond) rewriting his role in civil rights history angered him, and hardened his steel. He fought his way into office by outworking his opponent and — eloquently enough — outdebating him. He brought to Congress not only a visceral understanding of what it’s like to be clubbed into unconsciousness, but also a deep familiarity with the damage inflicted by take-no-prisoners political campaigning.
So to call Mr. Lewis simply a Freedom Rider is to give incomplete acknowledgment to his political struggles.
Likewise, to describe George Wallace as a simple racist is to give his biography short shrift. As a circuit court judge in the 1950s, Wallace was respectful toward blacks, and as a legislator from 1947 to 1953, he was a moderate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the Southern delegations out of the Democratic convention to protest the party’s pioneer civil rights plank, Wallace stayed in his seat. Though no fan of the plank, he was yet more Democrat than demagogue, and was instrumental in rallying the other Southern alternate delegates to save the convention’s quorum, and pass its platform.
He might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”
After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.
I once saw that price on vivid display, at a Wallace for president rally in downtown Boston. In 1975, that city was contorted by its own race war over school busing, and the enormous two-tier assembly hall was packed. It was an angry crowd — a black television cameraman was punched as he walked up the aisle. In the middle of Wallace’s remarks, there was a loud explosion, and Wallace, who had been paralyzed by a bullet three years earlier, fell forward from his wheelchair into safety behind the podium.
The noise was caused by a crashing klieg light, knocked over in a fracas as a heckler in the balcony was attacked by the crowd. As Wallace clambered back into his chair, his supporters beat the protester bloody and tried to dump him over the balcony rail. “Just an undecided voter, folks. Just an undecided voter,” Wallace pleaded into his microphone, but there was no quelling the fire. “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” people in the hall thundered, until the man was rescued — barely — by Secret Service agents.
In the final debate of this presidential campaign, faced with John McCain’s demand that he repudiate Mr. Lewis’s analogy, Barack Obama said he didn’t think his opponent was another George Wallace, and that sounds reasonable if you assume Mr. Lewis was referring to Wallace the vile racist, not the more tragic Wallace, the one-time straight campaigner who bartered conviction for expedience when he thought a raw appeal to division could gain him crucial votes.
It would behoove everyone in the current race for America’s highest offices to pay attention to what Mr. Lewis was really saying, and judge it for its provenance in his long experience. Better than perhaps any living American, he knows that courage on the front line is one thing, and on the campaign stage quite another, knows how tiny and harmless the seeds of fanaticism can seem, how one cry of “kill him” can crescendo into a chorus that can’t be stifled. Mr. Lewis might be deemed generous in wishing on no other member of his profession the harrowed look I witnessed in George Wallace’s eyes as he struggled up off the floor in Boston and beheld what a hell he’d wrought.
quinta-feira, 23 de outubro de 2008
Plumbers, Lies and Videotape
"Tell a lie often enough, loud enough, and long enough, and people will believe you." This quote is attributed to Hitler (sounds more like Goebbels) but I believe I've heard a variation of it in the McCain campaign - in relation to Obama of course. Which brings me to "Joe the Plumber."
Shortly after McCain first made him the "third person" in the last debate, it was discovered that (a) Joe isn't technically a plumber, (b) he has very little chance of earning upwards of $250,000 a year (the income bracket taxable under the Obama plan) and (c) he has a lien on his house because of back taxes owed, but (d) under Obama's plan, he would actually stand to benefit.
So I'm amazed to find that "Joe the Plumber" is still a fixture at McCain rallies, as the GOP fights for the rights of plumbers who earn a quarter of a million dollars (US) per year. Is this because people don't read? Are they ignorant? Are they stupid? I don't think so. At this point, the people who will buy the "Joe the Plumber" story and vote for McCain have drunk the "GOP Kool-Aid" and been brainwashed into voting against the "Muslim Arab terrorist" (notice the adjective that is never mentioned) who will "spread the wealth" of hardworking quarter-millionaire plumbers.
The Bush administration truly has failed - it has spent so much time and energy protecting America's borders, that it never noticed that a "Muslim Arab terrorist" (not to mention "Commie pinko liberal socialist") has been right inside the Beltway all this time - in the US Senate. Sounds silly, doesn't it? It is. But there's no rational argument against nonsense, and so, goodnight. And good luck!
Shortly after McCain first made him the "third person" in the last debate, it was discovered that (a) Joe isn't technically a plumber, (b) he has very little chance of earning upwards of $250,000 a year (the income bracket taxable under the Obama plan) and (c) he has a lien on his house because of back taxes owed, but (d) under Obama's plan, he would actually stand to benefit.
So I'm amazed to find that "Joe the Plumber" is still a fixture at McCain rallies, as the GOP fights for the rights of plumbers who earn a quarter of a million dollars (US) per year. Is this because people don't read? Are they ignorant? Are they stupid? I don't think so. At this point, the people who will buy the "Joe the Plumber" story and vote for McCain have drunk the "GOP Kool-Aid" and been brainwashed into voting against the "Muslim Arab terrorist" (notice the adjective that is never mentioned) who will "spread the wealth" of hardworking quarter-millionaire plumbers.
The Bush administration truly has failed - it has spent so much time and energy protecting America's borders, that it never noticed that a "Muslim Arab terrorist" (not to mention "Commie pinko liberal socialist") has been right inside the Beltway all this time - in the US Senate. Sounds silly, doesn't it? It is. But there's no rational argument against nonsense, and so, goodnight. And good luck!
--Sabrina Gledhill
GOP Pulls the Plug on Bachmann
http://www.truthout.org/102308L
The Associated Press: "National Republicans have yanked TV advertising for Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann's re-election bid after she suggested Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may have 'anti-American' views and urged an investigation of unpatriotic lawmakers."
The Associated Press: "National Republicans have yanked TV advertising for Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann's re-election bid after she suggested Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may have 'anti-American' views and urged an investigation of unpatriotic lawmakers."
McCain Is Faltering Among Hispanic Voters
http://www.truthout.org/102308K
Larry Rohter, The New York Times: "In the early days of the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain seemed to be in a good position to win support among Hispanic voters. He had sponsored legislation for comprehensive immigration overhaul in Congress, made a point of speaking warmly about the contributions of immigrants and was popular among Latinos in Arizona, his home state, which borders three battleground states here in the Southwest: New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. But less than two weeks before Election Day, those advantages appear to have evaporated."
Larry Rohter, The New York Times: "In the early days of the presidential campaign, Senator John McCain seemed to be in a good position to win support among Hispanic voters. He had sponsored legislation for comprehensive immigration overhaul in Congress, made a point of speaking warmly about the contributions of immigrants and was popular among Latinos in Arizona, his home state, which borders three battleground states here in the Southwest: New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. But less than two weeks before Election Day, those advantages appear to have evaporated."
Republican food stamps (just when you think they can't stoop any lower)
Obama, fried chicken, watermelon
Not everyone in California is a liberal. Meet
Diane Fedele and the Chaffey Community Republican
Women's group. They sent out a newsletter last
week showing a fake $10 “food stamp” with Barack
Obama’s face on it... alongside a watermelon,
ribs and fried chicken. But of course this wasn't
racist. Oh no. As Diane said after, it was all
Obama's fault for claiming he doesn't look like
all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
"It was strictly an attempt to point out the
outrageousness of his statement", claimed
Fedele. Of course.
The food stamp:
http://tinyurl.com/3zbgw5
Source: Popbitch
Confessions of a Phone Solicitor
If you can come up with something that would send a telemarketer over the edge, you have really overachieved on the offensiveness front.
The entire column is excellent and well worth reading, but this part was shocking:
Right now, all the polls predict that in less than two weeks, Barack Obama is going to be elected president. The McCain campaign disputes this. Large numbers of Obama supporters are also in doubt, possibly because they keep getting e-mails from their relatives in Toledo revealing that Obama has gone to Hawaii not to visit his ailing grandmother, but to destroy evidence that he is not actually an American citizen.It's hard (and frightening) to imagine what McCain & Co. would do if "the gloves came off"...
Read the entire article here
Rebranding the U.S. With Obama
In the western industrialized world, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough.
The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:
She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?
Me: Yes, exactly.
She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?
Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.
She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.
Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.
She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?
Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.
[Long pause.]
She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!
We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.
In his endorsement of Mr. Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.” That’s not because we crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.
In his endorsement, Mr. Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, I think it’ll electrify the world.” You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain in every single country — by four to one over all. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Mr. Obama, an African-American, would “fundamentally change” their perceptions of the United States.
Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: “Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania.”
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
“It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Mr. Kull said.
Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.
As for Africa, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.
In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
I invite you to visit my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.Readers' Comments
quarta-feira, 22 de outubro de 2008
...and my wish came true!
Thanks to an efficient and helpful Gracie intern. But then again, I should have known it was on Youtube (doh!)
Sally Anthony video on change
I wish I could embed this - it's brilliant.
http://www.sallyanthony.com/newsite/sallyanthony/site_flash/index.php
Pass along to your friends and family
http://www.sallyanthony.com/
Pass along to your friends and family
Obama Takes Time for a Woman Dear to Him
In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, Senator Barack Obama spoke of how his grandmother started as a secretary without a college degree and worked her way up to be a vice president of a bank.
“She’s the one who taught me about hard work,” Mr. Obama said in that speech in Denver. “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight and that tonight is her night as well.”
Mr. Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has been a powerful figure throughout his life, one he has frequently invoked in his speeches, in his television advertisements and in his memoir. But now 85, she has a broken hip and other ailments, and her medical condition has been described by his campaign as “very serious.” He is therefore canceling his campaign appearances for two days to fly to her bedside on Thursday, with less than two weeks to go in his quest for the presidency.
The timing is something Mr. Obama could not have foreseen when writing in his memoir about the grandmother he calls Toot, a tough-as-nails woman who loved playing bridge, reading Agatha Christie mysteries and coming home from work to slip into a muumuu and have a smoke.
Ms. Dunham has rarely been interviewed, but Mr. Obama has woven her into the narrative of his campaign as the influential presence who was there even when his father, a black Kenyan, abandoned him, and his mother, a free-spirited anthropologist, lived thousands of miles away. She is the last survivor of the people who raised him.
In a television advertisement, Ms. Dunham was deployed as a reminder of Mr. Obama’s family roots in Kansas. In a voice-over, he said she “taught me values straight from the Kansas heartland.”
Mr. Obama talked about his grandmother in March when he defended the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in one of the most wrenching speeches of his career. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” Mr. Obama said. “A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
And in his memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Mr. Obama recalled an incident from his childhood, when his grandmother refused to take the bus to work after being harassed by a panhandler at a bus stop.
“She’s been bothered by men before,” Mr. Obama’s grandfather told him at the time. “You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason why she’s bothered.”
Mr. Obama recalled that his grandfather’s words were “like a fist in my stomach.”
The trip on Thursday will be the second time since August that Mr. Obama has flown to Hawaii, where he grew up. While on a weeklong vacation there, Mr. Obama visited Ms. Dunham at her modest apartment building in Honolulu nearly every day, often with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters in tow.
During the trip, Mr. Obama told reporters that Ms. Dunham was “sharp as a tack,” but that her osteoporosis prevented her from traveling.
While in Hawaii, Mr. Obama also visited Punchbowl National Cemetery, where his grandfather Stanley Dunham, a World War II veteran, is buried. During the war, Ms. Dunham worked on a bomber assembly line in Kansas while her husband was overseas.
Ms. Dunham’s illness may remind some voters of Mr. Obama’s white, Midwestern family at a time when Republicans are trying to create doubts about his identity. Some supporters worry, however, that the visit to Hawaii will cost him precious time on the campaign trail.
But Mr. Obama may be troubled by the painful memory of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995.
“The biggest mistake I made was not being at my mother’s bedside when she died,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “She was in Hawaii in a hospital, and we didn’t know how fast it was going to take, and I didn’t get there in time.”
Enough Joe the Plumber; Here's to Kareem the Soldier
http://www.truthout.org/102208N
Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers: "'Joe the Plumber' was only one of two Americans injected into the presidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama."
Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers: "'Joe the Plumber' was only one of two Americans injected into the presidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama."
Excitement at Obama rally
US Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama's rallies across the country have drawn thousands of people.
Andy Gallacher joined the crowds at an event in Miami to get a flavour of the atmosphere.How your brain looks at race
Not even Obama thinks
Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 1:38 p.m. ET Feb 23, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Mar 3, 2008
Robert Kurzban remembers when he felt a whisper of hope that racism was neither inevitable nor permanent, and certainly not something hard-wired into the human brain. He had just Photoshopped different colored basketball jerseys onto images of eight young men, some black and some white, that he was using for a psychology experiment. Volunteers viewing the photos on a computer screen heard each man say something like "you were the ones that started the fight"; a few minutes later they had to remember who said what. Human memory being what it is, the volunteers made mistakes. But it was the nature of the mistakes that gave Kurzban hope. If a quote was spoken by a white man wearing a yellow jersey, the volunteers typically misattributed it to a man also wearing a yellow jersey—but of either race. In a startling twist on the old saw that "they all look alike to me," the volunteers mistook one yellow-shirted guy for another, but not one African-American for another or one white man for another. The brain, then, can override racial categories with something as arbitrary as shirt color. "This happened even though people have a lifetime of experience of categorizing others by race, but only a few minutes of categorizing by shirt color," says Kurzban, a professor of psychology at the
Is this presidential campaign such a circumstance? One experiment in the artificial setting of a lab might not be very persuasive on the question of whether racism is eradicable, especially when pitted against real-world evidence of how African-American home buyers are discriminated against by financial institutions, for instance, and dark-skinned criminal defendants are treated more harshly than whites by jurors. But the primaries and caucuses have produced equally real-world evidence that race may matter much less than it once did. Barack Obama won the 93 percent white
Obama himself does not believe that
Just a few short years ago, neuroscientists as well as political consultants would have called that wishful thinking. Scientists believed that the human brain automatically classifies individuals by race, just as we classify them by sex and age. Recent research confirms that the brain evolved specialized circuits that make the latter two classifications. But the idea of a brain module for racial categorization was always problematic. Simply put, back when the human brain was evolving a few million years ago, our ancestors didn't get around much. They therefore had no chance to encounter people who looked different from themselves. "There would be no adaptive advantage to a mental module that automatically took note of someone's race," says Penn's Kurzban. His basketball-jersey experiment and others that have confirmed its results suggest that humans do have brain circuits for classifying people—but according to whether they are likely to be an ally or an enemy. In some societies, skin color can indeed be a true clue to that: in the Jim Crow South, if you had black skin, it would have been quite useful to quickly classify a white-skinned person as someone who might shove you off a sidewalk, or worse. In other societies, however, skin color is no indicator of whether someone is friend or foe, as the recent tribe-on-tribe bloodshed in
Candidates have a choice about which such signs they present to voters. In his 1984 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson said repeatedly that it was "black people's turn" in
Obama has assumed additional identities beyond party affiliation—or, as scientists put it, offered voters novel ways to show he is one of them. "He's run a campaign that is defined by a certain generational change, and a certain change in operation," says Kuwata. "That's what's allowed him to bring so many people together." In a general election against John McCain, he can also forge an identity as the out-of-Iraq and increase-taxes-on-the-rich candidate, the change candidate, or any number of issues that signal to large blocs of voters that he is on their side.
Which is not to say there are no "over my dead body" voters—those who would vote for an African-American or biracial candidate only on the day after hell froze over. Their ranks, however, are smaller than they were in 1982, when large numbers of white voters who expressed support for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's gubernatorial run in pre-election polls couldn't bring themselves to pull the lever for him on Election Day. Bradley lost. The phenomenon is still known as "the Bradley effect." "It's foolish for anyone to assume these conditions have disappeared," says political consultant Paul Maslin of the Bradley effect. "There may still be people who are taken with the romantic notion of Obama's historic candidacy, but then are reminded of his race, and change their mind." Still, says Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, "I don't think they're a large component of the Democratic Party. And in a general election, they probably wouldn't vote for [Obama] anyway, regardless of race."
Lest this seem Pollyannaish, let's note that racism isn't dead. Because
Many whites who profess to be race-blind unconsciously associate dark skin with negative traits and ideas (evil, failure, dangerous), and light skin with positive ones (joy, love, peace), shows an assessment called the Implicit Association Test. When white Americans see photos flashed so quickly that they can be detected only subliminally, the amygdala, which signals "Watch out!," is significantly more active in response to black than white faces. If the photos appeared long enough to be processed consciously, however, the amygdala quieted down and the rational, thoughtful prefrontal cortex perked up. You could practically hear the cortex telling the amygdala to pipe down and stop being a racist jerk.
There is another way to quiet the amygdala's response to people it decides are not like you and therefore threatening. Reminiscent of the basketball-jersey experiment, scientists find that if volunteers are told they are on the "tigers team" or the "leopards team," the brain regroups: the amygdala gets upset when it sees a member of the other team, regardless of his skin color, but not members of its own team, again regardless of skin color. "That's why I'm optimistic that people can overcome racism," says psychologist William Cunningham of the
Moved by a Crescent
In a gratifying “have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?” moment, Colin Powell went on “Meet the Press” and pushed back on ugly innuendo.
Here's an excerpt:
Here's an excerpt:
Read the entire column hereHe told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”
Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.
“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”
terça-feira, 21 de outubro de 2008
NY Times: This Election’s Poster Child
The outpouring of independent posters created for Barack Obama seems unprecedented in the history of American presidential campaigns. [I would also like to point out my sister-in-law's portrait of Obama, which adorns this blog]
By Steven Heller 
A poster designed by Shepard Fairey. (Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images) 
(Design by Rdebris. Courtesy of designforobama.org) 
(Left, design by Dcredeur; right, design by Quemadura. Courtesy of designforobama.org) 
(Left, design by Chaz Maviyane-Davies; right, design by Luba Lukova. Courtesy of 30reasons.org
By Steven Heller
Steven Heller is the co-chairman of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts. (Full biography.)
In the past, artists and designers occasionally contributed their own images to a candidate’s campaign as a sign of solidarity or as an alternative to the mundane election fare. But never, as far as I can tell, in the history of presidential campaigns has such a huge outpouring of independent posters been created for a single candidate. This election’s poster child is definitely Barack Obama.
A poster designed by Shepard Fairey. (Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)What started with Shepard Fairey’s now famous social realist poster, has exploded not only into variations on that original design (including some biting oppositional parodies), but hundreds of missives, many displayed on Web sites (and free for downloading) like designforobama.org, which collects and aggregates dozens of posters from around the country, most by artists with web-pseudonyms, and 30reasons.org, which has been offering users one downloadable poster a day since Oct. 5 until Election Day, Nov. 4, created by known and unknown graphic designers. In addition, more specialized sites like yeswecarve.com provides a forum for “featured pumpkins” carved with Mr. Obama’s likenesses and slogans. And spellingchange.com enables users to literally spell “change” or any other Obama slogan by using bizarre, digital alphabets, some made from people.
So why have so many designers produced so much material? How high or low is the quality? And what is the cumulative effect?
Designers speak best when they are designing, and posters have long been the medium of choice for most designers, as explained in this statement of purpose for designforobama.org:
It is in this spirit Design/ers for Obama was created. With the goal of supporting Barack Obama’s campaign for presidency, Design/ers for Obama will introduce new tools and opportunities to web-powered grass roots organizing that has already revolutionized campaigning. Design/ers for Obama is a community for Obama supporters, whether visually inclined or not.
(Design by Rdebris. Courtesy of designforobama.org)
Not all designers support Mr. Obama, but those who do are making certain their voices are seen.
The second question begs another question. What is an engaging poster? Sophisticated, colorful, dynamic are all ways defining effective design. Clever is also an important attribute. While many of the posters on designforobama.org are a little strained, some are clever for different reasons — “I Want O and a plumber (plumber is crossed out) V.P. named Joe” by Rdebris is astute parody of James Montgomery Flagg’s famous Uncle Sam poster and “I’m Voting for ‘That One’” by Dcredeur, was inspired by John McCain’s comment during the second debate.
(Left, design by Dcredeur; right, design by Quemadura. Courtesy of designforobama.org)Another antidote to “That One,” features the phrase, “That Won”; yet despite the attempt at irony, the composition lies flat. In fact, a good many of these posters, most featuring smiling, romantic or heroic images of Mr. Obama, fail to add anything new to the visual vocabulary of the campaign. In fact, some are quite clichéd like “Change We Need McCain Can’t Provide” by shootingasterisk, which superimposes an American flag on a photo of the candidate giving a speech.
(Left, design by Chaz Maviyane-Davies; right, design by Luba Lukova. Courtesy of 30reasons.orgThe Web site 30reasons.org has more visually stimulating posters that are conceptually more ambitious. Chaz Maviyane-Davies’s image of someone (the electorate) shooting themselves in the foot under the dates “2000, 2004, 2008?” and Luba Lukova’s “Health Coverage” showing the skeleton of an umbrella, the protective covering gone, with a caduceus as the handle are memorable. Larkin Werner’s McCain as a jack-in-the-box collage with his statements on the health of the economy is also more striking for its adversarial tone.
So, do these posters have any impact on voters? Not the specific images or messages but cumulatively they are a grassroots effort that excite through the show of collective support. What’s more, posters often appeal to personal needs and emotions, not all rouse in the same way for everyone. Having many options allows partisans to engage as they choose. This show of support goes in the plus column for Barack Obama.
Original article herePowell's Endorsement an Indictment of GOP
http://www.truthout.org/102108S
David Yepsen, The Des Moines Register: "Gen. Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday was more than just a nod of approval. It was also an indictment of the state of the Republican Party and the way John McCain has conducted himself and his presidential campaign."
David Yepsen, The Des Moines Register: "Gen. Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday was more than just a nod of approval. It was also an indictment of the state of the Republican Party and the way John McCain has conducted himself and his presidential campaign."
BBC: Obama's chance of winning big
As they say in Brazil, 'Deus te ouça!' (From your lips to God's ears)
| Analysis By Professor Larry Sabato University of Virginia |
The whisper of September has turned to a roar in October: Barack Obama may be on the verge of a landslide victory.
A year ago, no one on the planet could have conceived of such a thing.
 Jimmy Carter took 50.1% of the vote, in 1976 |
In 2008 Democrats took a daring leap of faith and chose a far more liberal nominee who is the first African-American standard-bearer - no minor matter in a nation that is just 11% black and has been plagued by racial divisions since its founding.
Yet the improbable is becoming probable.
With the presidential debates completed, Obama appears to have an unobstructed path to the White House.
The polls show he won all three debates and is viewed more positively than opponent John McCain.
Voters also believe Obama has the more qualified vice-presidential candidate, Joseph Biden. Sarah Palin, who once gave McCain hope for attracting a generous share of Hillary Clinton's supporters, did so poorly in a series of well-publicised media interviews that she has become a liability outside of the conservative Republican base.
The 'wrong track'
More importantly, the fundamentals of the election year have conspired to create a perfect storm for Democratic victory:
|  Analysts are straining to come up with ways McCain could reverse the flow of the election at this late date. The truth is, such a task is out of his hands |
• The rocky economy, with an ongoing mortgage crisis and other troubles, became a major disaster area with the financial meltdown of Wall Street in September and October. Americans are now convinced that a major recession - some insist it is a depression - has begun, and the traditional "pocketbook" issue has powerfully taken over the campaign. The party not in control of the White House (in this case, the Democrats) always benefits from the fear and anger such conditions create.
• An astounding 91% of the voters say that the country is seriously on the wrong track - a level of dissatisfaction never registered in the history of polling.
Obama had held a modest lead in the popular vote and the electoral college count since June, save for the period immediately following the Republican National Convention, when McCain enjoyed a decent "bounce".
By late September the financial crisis had converted Obama's edge into a gulf, and his margin expanded to an average of seven percentage points. In more than a few respectable polls, he has been outpacing McCain by 10% or more.
Obama's lead
The electoral college has followed suit. Based on current polling averages, Obama is already above the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
This map shows Obama at 273, and includes only those states where Obama has leads outside the margin of error in current surveys. McCain has just 155 electoral votes firmly in his column.
This leaves nine states unaccounted for: Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. At present, Obama has modest leads in all of them, save Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia - which are essentially tied toss-ups.
Should Obama capture all the states where he is ahead with two weeks to go in the campaign, his electoral college total would be a remarkable 364 - 94 more than needed for election.
If he also wins the three pure toss-ups, he would go to 383, an excess of 113 votes. Such a total would exceed that of Jimmy Carter in 1976 (297), Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 (370 and 379), and both of George W. Bush's elections (271 in 2000 and 286 in 2004).
Close finishes
Realistically, many observers doubt that Obama will hit the 383 mark, and perhaps even the lower 364. Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia may be a bridge too far, and no-one would be surprised to see McCain hold on to Missouri and North Carolina.
Should McCain win relatively conservative Florida, Ohio, or Virginia, it would count as only a mild upset. After all, these eight states backed George Bush twice, and only Ohio was even close.
|  Are there some people who just cannot bring themselves to vote for an African-American? Yes Douglas Wilder |
A major terrorist strike or an international crisis might give McCain the opportunity to demonstrate his commander-in-chief credentials, though there are no guarantees this would work.
The much-discussed "Tom Bradley-Doug Wilder" effect, named after two black politicians who unexpectedly lost many white votes on election days in the 1980s, could enable McCain to sneak past Obama on 4 November. Yet the country has made great strides in race relations over the past several decades, and it would be a major surprise if so-called "racial leakage" at the polls cost Obama the White House.
It is important to note that some presidential contests have tightened considerably in their final days, resulting in a closer-than-expected finish.
This phenomenon was observed in 1968 (Richard Nixon v Hubert Humphrey), 1976 (Jimmy Carter v Gerald Ford), 1992 (Bill Clinton v George HW Bush), and 2000 (George W Bush v Al Gore). In each case, though, the frontrunner managed to hold on.
In 1980, the opposite happened, as a tight match-up between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan turned into a Reagan landslide. A late debate conquest by Reagan and the collapse of the Iranian hostage negotiations pushed the lion's share of the undecided voters to the Republican in the campaign's final week.
Political capital
Tightening aside, at this point, a McCain victory would rival that of President Harry Truman's giant upset in 1948. It's always possible Truman will be reborn, but the 33rd chief executive is invoked every four years by the trailing candidate - and nothing like Truman's triumph has happened in a presidential election since his long-ago shocker.
 When governing, the size of your electoral college majority matters |
Of course, if asked today, Obama would be pleased to take the absolute minimum of 270 electors, and be done with it.
However, if elected, he will inherit a deeply troubled economy, $10 trillion in national debt, and controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He will need all the help he can get.
Large electoral college majorities confer political capital on a new president, enabling him to claim a mandate for swift passage of his platform.
The essential question to be resolved in two weeks is the identity of the 44th president.
A second vital query will be answered then, too: Will the new president have enough clout to deal confidently and effectively with the enormous challenges that await him on 20 January?
In the electoral college, for governing at least, size matters.
Professor Larry J Sabato is the director of the Center for Politics, University of Virginia, and author most recently of A More Perfect Constitution.
NY Times: Hate Groups Mostly Quiet in Election
WASHINGTON — A tall, extra-hot mocha in his hand and a .380-caliber pistol on his hip, Bill White sat near the window of a Starbucks in Roanoke, Va., last month and discussed his political predicament as the leader of one of the nation’s more established neo-Nazi groups.
Enlarge This Image 
Casey Templeton for The New York Times
Bill White, the leader of a neo-Nazi group, last month in Roanoke, Va. He said his group was planning to deliver leaflets condemning Senator Barack Obama, but he was arrested last week.
“Right now,” said Mr. White, the head of the American National Socialist Workers Party, “we’re facing the potential of a half-black candidate financed by Jewish money going up against a white candidate financed by Jewish money, who are both advocating the same policy. So you’ve got two terrible choices.”
On Friday, about three weeks after that interview, Mr. White was jailed on suspicion of making threats against a juror who was on a panel in 2004 that convicted a white supremacist of plotting to kill a federal judge.
So stands the state of organized racism in 2008, paralyzed and at a crossroads in what would presumably be a pressing moment of action — the possibility that Senator Barack Obama will become the first black president — but has so far not been.
There have been sporadic reports throughout the country of Obama signs vandalized with swastikas, windows smashed at local Obama campaign offices and racist pamphlets dropped on doorsteps. Overt and thinly veiled racist comments about Mr. Obama have been caught on camera at rallies, and a Republican women’s group in California — the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated — has made headlines for a flier that showed Mr. Obama’s face on a faux food stamp that also included watermelon and fried chicken.
But party officials and organizations that monitor hate groups, always concerned about the specter of violence, report far less activity from the more traditional sources of open racism late in the race than they had expected.
“What we really haven’t seen is white supremacists really rallying over an Obama presidency,” said Mark Potok, the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. “Hate groups are in a more or less stunned position right now; they haven’t been able to figure out how to proceed just yet.”
Some attributed the relative lack of activity so far from white supremacist groups and other sources of racial attacks to the same cultural shifts that led the Democrats to become the first major party to choose a black presidential nominee.
“It’s not like we’re finally reaching Martin Luther King’s promised land,” said Michael Gehrke, the research director for the Democratic National Committee, whose unit monitors such activity, “but as a political force, they’ve been marginalized.”
In one sign of shifting mores, James Knowles, a former Ku Klux Klan member who was convicted in a 1981 lynching, said in a Discovery Channel documentary by Ted Koppel that Mr. Obama was a potentially acceptable candidate. “People need to vote for him because of his ideas and the veracity that he displays in what he does, and not because he’s African-American,” Mr. Knowles said.
There have been only sporadic reports of racist mailings, though Democrats say they are on the lookout for more. And there has been scant evidence that Mr. Obama’s candidacy has helped hate-group recruitment, unlike the recent debates over immigration policy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
White supremacist leaders, while threatening some political action before Nov. 4, similarly attribute their relative lack of activity this year to demographic and societal changes they cannot stop. But they also point to a Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, whose liberal immigration views and staunch support for Israel are against everything they stand for.
On top of that, the leadership is plagued by scandal and infighting in the absence of a unifying group like the Ku Klux Klan, which is no longer pre-eminent even among open racists, or figures like the former K.K.K. leader David Duke, whose power waned after he was convicted on fraud charges early this decade. (Mr. Duke has, in fact, written positively about the prospect of Mr. Obama’s being elected, though arguing it would stir a white backlash and “result in a dramatic increase in our ranks.”)
“There’s a real problem,” Mr. White said in the interview last month, “in what’s called the ‘white movement.’ One, there’s a lot of people who are just mentally ill, and we deal with those a lot. No. 2, there are people who have serious sexual problems.”
Mr. White, 31, who says he has a following of at least 1,200 people, considers himself a reformer in the white movement. A landlord of low-income tenants of all races, he devotes as much of his energy to attacking rival leaders he hopes to purge from the supremacist leadership as he does attacking Jews and blacks.
His Web site recently featured a blog post reporting that a fellow white supremacist, Curtis Maynard, was “married to a mestizo and raising half-breed children.” (Mr. Maynard, in turn, has written that Mr. White is “a Jew and an agent of the A.D.L. and S.P.L.C.,” the initials of the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
Mr. White’s Web site abruptly went offline this month. On Friday, The Roanoke Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had seized his computer equipment as part of the investigation that led to his arrest. Mr. White told the newspaper he had posted the address of a juror who served on the panel that convicted the white supremacist Matthew Hale of plotting to kill a federal judge in Chicago. But the newspaper quoted him as saying he had not called for any particular action against the juror. Arrested late Friday, he is being held without bail.
Another leader, Alex Carmichael of the League of American Patriots, has sued Mr. White for linking him in an article to what Mr. White called the “pedophile sex network” of Kevin Alfred Strom. Mr. Strom, the head of the now-defunct white supremacist group National Vanguard, was released from prison this fall after serving time for possessing child pornography.
Last month, Mr. Carmichael’s group became the first to deliver racist leaflets about Mr. Obama, distributing them to homes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in a small effort that drew wide news coverage.
In the interview last month, Mr. White said his group was planning a similar but larger effort. With a donation of about $8,000 from a supporter in Michigan, he said he was planning to print and distribute to white working-class neighborhoods 20,000 copies of his party’s latest magazine, The Nationalist Socialist. The newest edition has on its cover a photograph of Mr. Obama with a rifle’s crosshairs focused on his head and a headline using a racial slur and seemingly calling for his assassination. Mr. White said the cover was satirical and pointed to a subheading that read, “Negro Deification and the ‘Obama Assassination’ Myth.”
As of last week, there were no reports that the magazine had been distributed, and it was unclear how Mr. White’s arrest would affect his plans.
Historians Size Up Obama’s Time-Out
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/historians-size-up-obamas-time-out/
When Senator Barack Obama announced he would stop campaigning for more than 36 hours starting on Thursday, and would instead fly to Hawaii to visit his gravely ill grandmother, presidential historians noted that it was an unprecedented step for a candidate this close to Election Day, but they differed about the political risks of such a personal decision.
With just two weeks of campaign time remaining, Mr. Obama, who is ahead of his opponent, Senator John McCain, in most national polls, will travel five time zones and six hours west from the critical battleground state of Ohio. He will visit Madelyn Dunham, 85, the woman who raised him from the age of 10 until he went away to college.
Mr. Obama, who was campaigning in Florida on Tuesday, will make an appearance in Indianapolis on Thursday, but he canceled stops planned for Wisconsin and Iowa after that so that he can fly to Honolulu. His wife, Michelle Obama, will attend rallies in Akron and Columbus in his place.
Though Mr. Obama is leading in the polls, “there are still so many uncertainties, and 36 hours is a lot of time in two weeks,” said Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. “Even having television campaigning isn’t the same as being there in person. There is a cost.”
Still, he said, the lost personal connection with undecided voters could be offset by the focus of media attention on Mr. Obama’s personal life and his compassion.
“One of the issues that Obama has faced is people literally knowing who he is,” Mr. Zelizer continued, noting that opponents had tried to raise questions in voters minds like “is he a socialist, aligned with terrorists?”
Steve Hess of the Brookings Institution also saw potential that the trip could help flesh out voters’ image of Mr. Obama. “They say he’s too mechanical, he’s cool, and here he does something terribly human,” Mr. Hess said in a telephone interview. “This isn’t planned by his strategist. He made the case in his book that she is very important to him. You can turn it around and ask, ‘What if he didn’t go?’ ”
In short, he said, “It’s an awful thing to say — but it’s a political plus.”
And besides, Mr. Hess added, “people in Ohio have grandmothers, too.”
Mr. Obama calls Ms. Dunham “Tutu,” a local term for grandparent that he sometimes shortens to “Toot.” Known as a trailblazer in her career, she was one of the Bank of Hawaii’s first two female vice presidents, and still lives in the Honolulu apartment where she raised Mr. Obama. He last visited in August after the Democratic convention.
When he spoke in March in response to swirling criticism of the views of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., Mr. Obama cited Ms. Dunham and the emotionally complex issues of race within his own family:
I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
Mr. Obama’s trip is the latest interruption in a presidential race that has already seen Mr. McCain announce a brief suspension of his campaign to tackle the financial crisis in Washington, and Sen. Joe Biden scrap a day of vice presidential campaigning to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law.
But historians said that Mr. Obama’s step off the campaign trail has almost no precedent for a presidential candidate in modern times.
Doug Wead, the controversial presidential historian — he has written about presidential families and revealed in 2005 that he had secretly taped George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas — found a somewhat comparable situation from a century ago, involving William Howard Taft.
In 1907, Taft was vice president under Theodore Roosevelt, his close friend and advisor, who had promised not to run again and had chosen Taft as his preferred successor. Roosevelt urged Taft to make a round-the-world goodwill trip and get to know world leaders before the 1908 election. But there was a problem. “Taft was very much a mamma’s boy,” Mr. Wead said in a telephone interview today. “His mother was dying, and he thought that he had to cancel the trip.”
Louisa Torrey Taft would not hear of it, though. Mr. Wead said she wrote her son a letter that said, in effect, “No Taft to my knowledge has ever turned down a public duty to fulfill a private need.”
Taft went on the world tour, and his mother died while he was away, two months before her 80th birthday. Still, he won the presidency the following year, in an era before the extensive personal campaigning that marks today’s presidential politics.
Though cynical observers will be inclined to think that Mr. Obama is using the visit to engender voter sympathy, Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers, believes that is anything but the case.
“This is an individual whose influence was much greater on him than his mother,” Mr. Ross said in a telephone interview, referring to Mr. Obama and Ms. Dunham. “I read his two books and I got the audio books. You don’t get the incredible emotional tinge without such deep feelings.
“I think that perhaps inadvertently, and perhaps tragically, this is showing a side of him that even the best and most eloquent presentations of himself can’t achieve. This is no stunt. This is the act of a loving grandchild.”
VIDEO | Keith Olbermann on the Tone of the Presidential Race
http://www.truthout.org/video/
Keith Olbermann discusses the tone of the presidential race and excoriates Sarah Palin for her description of "real America." Olbermann also examines the racism behind negative right-wing attacks on Colin Powell for his endorsement of Barack Obama.
segunda-feira, 20 de outubro de 2008
What Bradley effect?
WITH only two weeks to go before the election, talk has turned to the Bradley effect. The phenomenon is named for Tom Bradley, the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, who lost the 1982 California governor’s race even though exit polls predicted he’d defeat his Republican opponent, George Deukmejian. Some white people, the theory goes, tell pollsters they will vote for black candidates and then, once in the voting booth, don’t.
Enlarge This Image 
Ron Cala Jr. II
While it’s no surprise that this has become a topic of discussion as John McCain and Barack Obama near the finish line, as someone who worked for Bradley’s campaign, I think it’s worth pointing out that the effect has been widely misunderstood.
On election night in 1982, with 3,000 supporters celebrating prematurely at a downtown hotel, I was upstairs reviewing early results that suggested Bradley would probably lose.
But he wasn’t losing because of race. He was losing because an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee ballot program generated hundreds of thousands of Republican votes no pollster anticipated, giving Mr. Deukmejian a narrow victory.
This is not to say that race wasn’t an issue; it was in 1982 and it has been since. But to those who keep citing the Bradley effect — not so fast. It’s more complicated than you think.
As we’re on the subject, we should free Tom Bradley’s name from an association he would have abhorred. After all, he practiced the sort of politics whose goal was to bring people together, not to play up their differences. He was the opposite of the “Us vs. Them” politics so often cited as demonstrating the Bradley effect.
I worked for Bradley in his 1973 mayoral campaign against Sam Yorty, the incumbent. Bradley was holding his own. But a key group, Jewish voters, was up for grabs. One Sunday, I drove Bradley to a banquet with a Jewish group. Walking in, I noticed many men wearing yarmulkes. I had one in my jacket and gave it to Bradley. He put it in his pocket.
When the event began, Yorty was called to the podium and given a yarmulke, which he put on. Then Bradley was called up. When offered a yarmulke, he said, “I have my own,” reached into his pocket, took it out and put it on. The response? Laughter, applause, smiles. It sent a message not of pandering — “I am one of you” — but rather, “We are all in this together.”
Bradley won the day and then the election. Over 20 years as mayor, he had the same effect on many diverse audiences. To me, that’s the real Bradley effect.
The view from Canada
I've been appalled at seeing McCain supporters claiming that Obama is
Muslim and using that as a *negative* thing. I was relieved to see
Colin Powell's presentation on Meet The Press today. He was very
eloquent on the issue of religious freedom and cited the following as
an example:
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/44363/original.jpg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-invokes-imag_n_135977.html
The image is evocative. The story behind it even more so. The
sentiment is one that I would love to see more US leaders express
openly. The very fact that certain people in the Republican party were
using a suggested Muslim faith as an argument against Obama scares the
heck out of me. Does freedom of religion in the States today only
include certain faiths? Am I seeing things with a certain bias given
that I now live north of the US/Canada border in a country that
doesn't tolerate religious intolerance?
Muslim and using that as a *negative* thing. I was relieved to see
Colin Powell's presentation on Meet The Press today. He was very
eloquent on the issue of religious freedom and cited the following as
an example:
http://images.huffingtonpost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The image is evocative. The story behind it even more so. The
sentiment is one that I would love to see more US leaders express
openly. The very fact that certain people in the Republican party were
using a suggested Muslim faith as an argument against Obama scares the
heck out of me. Does freedom of religion in the States today only
include certain faiths? Am I seeing things with a certain bias given
that I now live north of the US/Canada border in a country that
doesn't tolerate religious intolerance?
-- Alain Chesnais
Still obsessing over the 'Bradley effect'
| By Laura Smith-Spark BBC News |
Two decades ago, Douglas Wilder watched as a 9% lead in the polls going into Virginia's gubernatorial election slipped to just one-tenth of 1% when the ballots were counted.
| Are there some people who just cannot bring themselves to vote for an African-American? Yes Douglas Wilder Mayor of Richmond, Virginia |
The theory goes that some white voters tell opinion pollsters they will vote for a black candidate - but then, in the privacy of the polling booth, put their cross against a white candidate's name.
And the fear among some supporters is that this could happen to Barack Obama on 4 November, when the country votes for its next president.
The phenomenon is known as the Bradley, or Wilder effect.
Tom Bradley was an African-American mayor of Los Angeles who, running for California's governorship in 1982, saw a sizeable eve-of-polling lead evaporate on election day, giving victory to his white rival, Republican George Deukmejian.
In 1989, the year Wilder became governor of Virginia, David Dinkins was elected the first African-American mayor of New York - but he also saw an 18-point lead in the polls shrink to a winning margin of just two points on the day.
Charles Henry, a California professor who was among the first to research the Bradley effect, says Mr Obama would need a double-digit lead to feel confident of victory.
Other pundits have suggested a six- to nine-point cushion may be sufficient.
|  |
"Will there be some effect? Yes. Are there some people who just cannot bring themselves to vote for an African-American? Yes."
But, he said: "America has grown, people have grown."
Controversies over race have cast a shadow over this campaign.
Popular conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has referred to Mr Obama as the "little black man-child" and a Fox News has called his wife, Michelle Obama, his "baby-mama".
One Republican senator described Mr Obama as "uppity", a word formerly used to describe blacks who had ideas above their station.
Reports of racist jibes among audiences at some recent McCain rallies led John Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Georgia, to accuse Mr McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" - a charge they deny.
The surfacing of videos showing Mr Obama's former pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, preaching "God Damn America!" for its treatment of blacks, did nothing to promote the process of racial reconciliation.
Scepticism
Nonetheless, Mr Wilder remains optimistic about Mr Obama's chances for a number of reasons.
"I do think there is going to be a so-called 'reverse Bradley effect' because I think there are some Republicans who won't openly say they are going to vote for Barack Obama, but will," he said.
 Mr Wilder was the first African-American to be elected state governor |
The 77-year-old puts that down in part to discontent with Republican President George W Bush, with polls suggesting that up to 90% of registered voters believe the country is on the wrong track.
Evidence from recent elections seems to confirm that a reverse Bradley effect could be at work.
Research by psychologist Anthony Greenwald and political scientist Bethany Albertson of the University of Washington, suggests Mr Obama benefited from a reverse Bradley effect in 12 states during the primary elections, while the Bradley effect itself was noticeable in only three.
A study by Harvard researcher Daniel Hopkins of 133 gubernatorial and senatorial elections from 1989 to 2006 also showed no recent significant Bradley-Wilder effect.
Other polls, meanwhile, suggest that white Americans have steadily become less reluctant to vote for a black person in the last few decades.
A recent Gallup poll suggested that 9% of Americans would be more likely to vote for Mr Obama, because of his race, compared with only 6% who said they would be less likely to vote for him.
'Masterful job'
Mr Wilder also believes Mr Obama is picking his way through the minefield of racial - or post-racial - politics with consummate skill.
He says he gave Mr Obama guidance a year ago - and the Illinois senator seems to have followed it.
 John McCain has sought to tone down the rhetoric at campaign rallies |
"He never mentions race as such. He doesn't speak to race other than that particular speech, [a speech in March addressing the Jeremiah Wright controversy] in which he did a masterful job," Mr Wilder said.
"He's not running to make history. Is that going to help you [the voter] with your livelihood, pay for your kids' education?"
Mr Wilder also advised Mr Obama not to become too closely allied with longstanding African-American political figures, such as civil rights leaders the Rev Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
The key for Mr Obama now is to continue to present the same message of change to all voters, black and white, Mr Wilder adds, and the American voter will be "smarter" than to fall for last-minute attacks on his character.
"If things stay as they are, with effort and commitment and determination and drive he will win," he said.
"I always say to people, I hope the Wilder effect takes place in this election, because Wilder won - so if that's the effect it has, Obama wins."domingo, 19 de outubro de 2008
Can Obama close the deal with those white guys?
Working for the Working-Class Vote
For a guy who just four years ago was running his first statewide campaign, Barack Obama has made startlingly few missteps as a presidential candidate. But the moment Obama would most like to take back now, if he could, was the one last April when, speaking to a small gathering of Bay Area contributors, he said that small-town voters in Pennsylvania and other states had grown “bitter” over lost jobs, which caused them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” That comment, subsequently posted by a blogger for the Huffington Post, undercut one of the central premises of Obama’s campaign, an argument he first floated in his famous 2004 convention address — that he could somehow erode the tired distinctions between red states and blue ones and appeal to disaffected white men who had written off national Democrats as hopelessly elitist. Instead, in the weeks that followed, white working-class primary voters, not only in industrial states like Pennsylvania but also in rural states like Kentucky and West Virginia, rejected his candidacy by wide margins, and he staggered, wounded, toward the nomination.
“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently. We were sitting across from each other on his plane, the one with the big red, white and blue “O” on the tail, flying some 35,000 feet above Nebraska. “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.”
Obama was wearing his classic starched white shirt (how many of those shirts does he have, exactly?), along with a tie the color of a robin’s egg. One on one, he has a crisp and effortless conversational style; his answers are thoughtful, but you rarely glimpse the thought process itself, the internal calibrations that every politician is constantly making. The only outward sign that Obama is laboring over his formulations is the way he will often elongate the word “and” for several seconds, a processing hitch that enables him to preview in his own head what he is about to tell you, like one of those five-second delays the networks use so they can bleep out profanity.
“I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, ‘You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,’ ” he continued. “Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.”
In a few minutes, Obama would arrive in Colorado for a campaign stop, followed by another in Nevada — two critical states that neither of the previous two Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry, came all that close to winning, largely because of their abject failure to connect with white men, especially lower- and middle-class men in rural and exurban counties. A few weeks earlier, I watched Obama campaign in the coal country of Appalachian Virginia, where no one I talked to could remember ever seeing a Democratic nominee come through town. I asked Obama how he thought he could convey to these voters that he was not, in fact, an anthropological observer of the culture. Four years ago, Kerry, a man who was once actually pretty comfortable holding a semiautomatic weapon, donned his hunting gear and traipsed into the woods of Ohio, trailed by cameras, to shoot some geese. The stunt made him look absurd, like an investment banker at rock-’n’-roll fantasy camp.
“First,” Obama said, “you have to show up. I’ve been to Elko, Nev., now three times.”
“Elko?” I asked twice, straining to hear him over the engine noise.
“E-L-K-O.” He sounded vaguely annoyed, as if I had just confirmed something about the media he had long suspected. “That, by the way, is the reason we got more delegates out of Nevada, even though we lost the popular vote there during the primary. We lost Las Vegas and Clark County, but we won handily in rural Nevada. And a lot of it just had to do with the fact that folks thought: Man, the guy is showing up. He’s set up an office. He’s doing real organizing. He’s talking to people.
“No. 2 is how we talk about issues,” Obama went on. “To act like hunting, like somebody who wants firearms just doesn’t get it — that kind of condescension has to be purged from our vocabulary. And that’s why that whole ‘bittergate’ episode was so bitter for me. It was like: Oh, this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. This is what for the last five or six years I’ve been trying to push away from.”
As we talked, consequential events were reshaping the world below. At that very moment, Republicans in Washington were scuttling a $700 billion emergency plan for Wall Street, causing the markets to hemorrhage more value in a single day, in terms of sheer dollar amounts, than at any time in American history and dragging the economy back into the center of the campaign — precisely where John McCain and the Republicans didn’t want it. And yet, what Obama and I were discussing, this cultural disconnect between Democrats and large swaths of white men, remained a lingering and crucial question. It now appeared that the only thing that could still threaten Obama’s march to the presidency was the same resistance from these voters that had, at the last moment, dashed the dreams of both his Democratic predecessors. Gore and Kerry tried, somewhat dutifully, to prove their cultural affinity for regular white guys; when that didn’t work, they tried to change the subject to policy platforms instead, hoping in vain that voters would just sort of forget about all that guns and church stuff. In both cases, that failure translated directly into defeat. According to exit polls in 2004, Kerry lost white men by a crushing 25-point margin.
Given the fact that he is not, in fact, a white male, Obama would seem to face an even-less-forgiving landscape among white-male voters. While voters overall give Obama the advantage over John McCain when asked which candidate is better equipped to navigate these tumultuous economic times, Gallup polls throughout the summer and into the fall consistently showed McCain with a double-digit lead among white men who haven’t been to college.
And yet Obama has persevered, devoting far more time and money than either of the last two Democratic nominees on an effort to persuade working-class and rural white guys that he is not the elitist, alien figure they may be inclined to think he is. The Obama campaign has more than 50 state offices throughout Virginia, a state no Democrat has seriously contested since Obama was a teenager. In Indiana, there are 42 offices; in North Carolina, another 45.
Mathematically, Obama can probably win the election without winning any of these states — or Nevada or Montana or any of the other conservative states where he has campaigned in the past several months. What he probably can’t do, if he doesn’t convert enough voters to throw at least a few traditionally red states into the blue column, is get beyond what he dismissively refers to as the “50-plus-1” governing model, the idea that a president need only represent 50 percent of the country (plus 1 additional vote) to command the office. From the start, Obama has aspired not simply to win but also to stand as a kind of generational break from the polarized era of the boomers, to become the first president in at least 20 years to claim anything more than the most fragile mandate for his agenda. Absent that, even if he wins, Obama could wake up on Nov. 5 as yet another president-elect of half the people, perched uncomfortably on the edge of an impassable cultural divide.
WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON SIGNED the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he famously predicted that his party had just signed away the South for a generation to come. In truth, the outcome was more profound than Johnson could have imagined. The culture war, whose Bunker Hill was the campus quad of the 1960s, soon spread to just about every region of the country, where rural and working-class white voters, already anxious over economic change, recoiled at the vehement strain of antimilitary, antiestablishment liberalism that took hold of the Democratic Party in the era after Selma and Saigon. The effect, especially on the presidential level, was immediate and drastic. In the 32 years before Johnson made his pronouncement, Democrats controlled the White House for all but 8 of them, and only twice — in 1948 and 1960 — had the Democrat won by what could be considered a narrow margin. In the four decades since, only two Democrats have managed to get elected, and only one has claimed a majority of the popular vote. (This was Jimmy Carter, who eked out exactly 50.1 percent without winning a single state west of Texas.) By the turn of the century, almost completely driven from the South and West, Democratic presidential candidates had taken to focusing all their efforts on an ever-shrinking pool of coastal and industrial states.
Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a “50-state” campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Mont., and Las Cruces, N.M. To a large extent, this reflects Obama’s personal conviction about modern politics, which he first laid out in his 2004 convention speech when he talked about worshiping “an awesome God in the blue states” and having “gay friends in the red states.” He told me, when we talked, that Washington’s us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. “If voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done,” Obama said.
It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the president more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there’s the advent of the Internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history (about $460 million, at last count), meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama’s campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over — a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.
For Obama’s political advisers, expanding the electoral map is not about making a philosophical statement; it is simply a strategic imperative. Presidential campaigns, after all, are about getting to 270 — the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win. In relying on the same 20 or so winnable states over the past few elections, Democratic nominees have given themselves almost no margin for error. By contrast, Obama’s campaign, in addition to fighting for the usual complement of about a dozen swing states, has shifted considerable resources into a group of states — the list has, at one time or another, included Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Georgia — that haven’t been strongly contested for at least three elections, if not longer. (Alaska was on the list, too, until McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.) The idea here is that the more states you put in play, the more permutations there are that lead to victory.
“If you expand the map, you improve your chances,” David Axelrod, Obama’s lead strategist, told me recently. “We didn’t want to be in that same dreary position where the entire election hinges on three states, and you stay up all night waiting to see who won them.”
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama starts with the same relatively safe 19 states (plus the District of Columbia) Kerry won in 2004, along with Iowa, which Gore won and where polls have shown Obama comfortably ahead. He could actually prevail without winning either of the two big perennial battleground states, Ohio and Florida, simply by winning Indiana by itself or by winning both New Mexico and Virginia. It is McCain, in fact, who, having earlier this month abandoned a foray into blue-collar Michigan, seems now to be facing the more restrictive map, betting on the notion that he can hold just about every reliably Republican state while also winning in battlegrounds like Florida and Ohio.
At times during these final months of the campaign, though, Obama’s optimism about the impermanence of blue and red shading has run up against the hard reality that after 40 years of culturally divisive politics, colors don’t easily bleed. Before the conventions, for instance, most polls in North Dakota showed McCain in front by only a few points. When I spoke to Byron Dorgan, the Democratic senator from North Dakota, last month, he sounded ecstatic about Obama’s multiple trips to the state and the more than $400,000 the campaign had already dumped into ads there. “I think it’s the first time you’ve turned on a television set and seen a persuasion ad for a Democratic candidate,” Dorgan said.
Not a week later, however, a new round of post-convention polls showed McCain opening up a double-digit lead in North Dakota, and the Obama campaign abruptly pulled its ads. Dorgan called me back. “I do think this is going to come back to be a fairly close race in North Dakota, but I understand we need the resources in some of the other battleground states at this point,” he said, sounding resigned. “I just called to say, ‘Never mind.’ ”
THE ONE STATE THAT NO ONE expects Obama to surrender before Election Day is Virginia, which may be the most critical of what the Obama campaign labels its “nontraditional” battleground states, both symbolically and mathematically. Like North Dakota, Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee since Johnson beat Goldwater. (It was the only state of the Old South to go with Gerald Ford over Carter in 1976.) But the onset of the postindustrial economy has probably wrought more change on Virginia in the last 15 years or so than the state saw in the half-century before that. The new technology corridor running along I-66 in Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, is one of the nation’s most vibrant, and the self-sustaining exurbs growing up around it have rapidly transformed horizons of farmland into expensive town-house clusters and strip plazas. (The area now boasts such high-end stores as Tiffany, Gucci and Hermès.) New exurbs in the central part of the state aren’t far behind, populated by commuters who work in corporate offices in Richmond, the capital of the old Confederacy. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties in the country, 6 of them are in Virginia.
The influx of new residents — many of them highly educated, some of them recent immigrants — has created in Northern Virginia one of the nation’s more reliable and rapidly expanding Democratic voting blocs. In the more socially conservative south and southwest of the state, however, where manufacturing towns once thrived and coal miners once worked the Appalachian seam, the population has been falling steadily as high-school graduates strike out in search of stable work elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the number of statewide voters identifying themselves as Democrats has risen sharply over the last two years, far outpacing Republican growth. The last two governors have been Democrats, and come January — when Mark Warner, the former governor, is widely expected to replace John Warner (no relation) in Washington — both of its senators will likely be Democrats, too. John Kerry lost the state by nine points in 2004, but that was a relatively small margin when you consider that he never bothered to contest it. The McCain campaign is concerned enough about holding onto Virginia, where polls this month showed Obama pulling ahead, that it recently opened 10 new offices there.
Any Democrat who wants a general blueprint for how to win Virginia need only look to election maps from the last few statewide elections, in which the voters narrowly installed Tim Kaine as governor and Jim Webb in the Senate. First, you have to pile up huge margins among liberal voters in the state’s Democratic strongholds, most notably the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia, where Kaine captured more than 60 percent of the vote in his race. (In the southeastern part of the state, black voters are a major Democratic constituency; overall, African-Americans could account for close to a fifth of the statewide vote.) Next, you want to pull off wins in the exploding exurban counties in Northern Virginia and at least come close in the exurbs outside Richmond. Finally, in order to make the overall math work, you have to hold down your losses in the rural areas to the south and southwest. That probably means capturing at least 40 percent in the economically devastated, gun-loving countryside that borders North Carolina and Tennessee to the south and Kentucky and West Virginia to the west.
Obama should have at least a good shot at achieving the first two of those objectives. His campaign says it’s on pace to register as many as 200,000 new voters in reliably liberal parts of the state, and most analysts expect black voters to come to the polls in higher numbers for Obama than they have for other Democrats. For turnout, the campaign is relying on some 10,000 volunteers in the state, who are being trained to work in “neighborhood teams” that go door to door registering and lobbying voters. Obama’s campaign seems to have patterned its turnout effort after George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, which employed a fervent volunteer network to churn out the suburban votes that put Ohio, among other states, into the Republican column.
In the mostly white exurbs, meanwhile, the economy alone should guarantee Obama a better hearing than Kerry could have expected. Like their counterparts in other states, young Virginians began moving into the exurbs over the last decade in search of something closer to their parents’ version of the American dream. In the cities and suburbs where many of them grew up, housing prices were rising so rapidly that they couldn’t afford to live in the towns with large lots and great schools. Farther out, however, in the brand-new exurbs that used to be farming towns, they found lower taxes, sprawling malls and affordable mini-mansions with driveways big enough for a couple of S.U.V.’s. For some Virginians, the extended commuting time to Richmond or Washington was worth the extra quality of life.
Perhaps no one is feeling as disoriented by the economic reversal of the past few years as these exurban voters, whose paradises are fast becoming prisons. They’re watching as the value of their stocks and homes plummets, even as the cost of filling up the tank and heating the house soars. Traffic congestion along the state’s main arteries has become a potent political issue, but fixing the problem requires more tax dollars. L. Douglas Wilder, the former Virginia governor and now mayor of Richmond, has seen the desperation rise. “They’re saying, ‘I’m working as hard as I’ve ever worked in my life, but I can’t save any money and I have to cut back, so what’s gone wrong here?’ ” Wilder told me recently. “People who think they had it made — doctors, lawyers, engineers — everybody is feeling the pinch.”
FOR A NATIONAL DEMOCRAT, the hardest part of the electoral formula is probably the last piece — holding one’s own in the sea of small towns in the southern and Appalachian regions of the state that are far more similar to the rest of the Deep South than they are to Virginia’s northern counties. Voters here haven’t known economic expansion in decades, and they seem to have decided long ago that neither party was especially serious about stopping the decline, or even knew how. There is a strong sense in these communities, and not unreasonably, of suffering endless condescension — a feeling that urbane America has already written off the rural lifestyle as a relic or, worse, as a joke. For that reason (and this is actually the point Obama says he was trying to make in San Francisco), cultural issues matter far more in the rural areas than they do in the exurbs, because voters see those issues as a test of whether politicians respect their values or mock them — a construct that Republican strategists have become expert at exploiting.
Democrats running for governor or the Senate can spend a lot more time shaking hands in these parts, working to distance themselves from the national party’s smug image, than can a presidential candidate, who also has to carry all of the extra baggage of the party’s stands on social issues — especially if he happens to be the first black nominee of either party. It probably isn’t encouraging for Obama that in this year’s Virginia primary, which he won easily, Hillary Clinton nonetheless dismantled him in the rural southwest. In tiny Dickenson County, along the western border with Kentucky, Clinton received 1,491 votes to Obama’s 210. Next door in Wise County, it was Clinton 2,310; Obama, 459.
Obama has responded to this challenge principally by doing precisely what he told me he had to do: he has shown up. The first thing he did as his party’s presumptive nominee in June, two days after closing out the final primaries in South Dakota and Montana, was to get on a plane and come to Bristol, Va., on the Tennessee border. He has returned twice more since then to the southern part of the state, and Joe Biden recently headlined a mineworkers’ rally there. Local Democrats told me that Obama’s campaign office in the old manufacturing town of Danville was so unusual for a candidate of either party that its opening was treated almost as a curiosity, as if a smoldering meteor had smashed into the town green.
No Virginia Democrat knows more about how to win over white rural voters than Mark Warner, whose “Virginia story” is now legend for national Democrats. Running for governor in 2001, when Republicans had a virtual monopoly in Virginia, Warner visited the southern areas of the state dozens of times, promising to revive local economies by bringing broadband lines through the region and luring high-tech companies. He not only cut his losses in those remote counties; he carried many of them outright. His proudest achievement as governor, or at least the one he talks about with the most enthusiasm, came just weeks before the end of his term (Virginia is the last state in the union to limit its governors to one term), when he induced two large high-tech companies to open facilities in the tiny southwestern town of Lebanon, bringing more than 700 jobs with them.
When I asked Warner, who has campaigned with Obama, what Obama needed to say to earn the trust of rural Virginians, he suggested Obama spend less time talking about economic despair and more time reminding voters of the hopeful things happening in southern Virginia.
“Celebrate Lebanon,” he said. “Celebrate that we’ve got a place for your community in the 21st century.” “Change” was a good slogan, Warner told me, and people surely wanted it, but you also had to give them a sense that you understood the challenges specific to their communities. “I’d like to hear him talk more about infrastructure, about broadband,” Warner said. “I think he’s still got to make the case that your kids shouldn’t have to leave your hometown to find a world-class job.
“People make a judgment about whether you really care or not. Is it just a drive-by, or are you really going to invest?”
IF YOU WANT TO GET TO LEBANON, a town of about 3,200, the easiest way is to fly into the Tri-City Airport on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, then drive about 45 minutes northeast through some of the most gorgeous hill country in America. The back road that leads to Lebanon High School is lined with trailer-size houses on the edge of collapse, their front porches buckling in the sun. But then, as you approach the school, you see a few neat rows of brand new town houses, with prices in the high $200,000s — the unmistakable landscape of the new economy. Lebanon is slowly becoming a symbol of hope for towns all over the region that dream of turning southwestern Virginia, with its abundant land and cheap labor, into the next high-tech hub. Local counties have raised up a half-dozen “shell buildings” — essentially empty warehouses already connected to sewers and broadband lines — to attract businesses looking for ready-made space. Inspired by the influx of tech jobs, officials in the area have started what they call the Return to Roots program, in which they aggressively seek out qualified graduates who have moved away for other jobs and try to lure them back home.
Barack Obama came to Lebanon High for a town-hall meeting with voters on the Tuesday after Labor Day, marking the first time any presidential candidate stepped foot in the area since Jimmy Carter came to nearby Castlewood in 1976. The campaign made tickets available to its local offices a few days before the event, and a lot of the roughly 2,400 attendees waited in line to get them. As a result, most of the voters in the school gymnasium seemed to be committed Obama backers already.
The program opened with the validators. This is a critical part of Obama’s small-town strategy — getting respected surrogates to stand up and say that Obama is a guy you can trust. The first person on stage was Ralph Stanley, the 81-year-old legendary bluegrass musician, who was born in nearby Stratton and makes his home in Dickenson County. He unfolded a piece of paper and read, in a shaky voice: “I want to endorse Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Thank you very much!” The gymnasium exploded. (When the candidate met Stanley backstage, Obama told him that he had some of Stanley’s banjo music on his iPod. Stanley nodded appreciatively, but a few minutes later he turned to a friend and asked, “What’s an iPod?”)
Stanley was followed by Cecil Roberts, the white-bearded president of the mineworkers’ union, who preached as if he were at a revival, putting Obama’s early years into a framework that southwestern Virginians could understand. “Moses was a community organizer!” Roberts thundered. “And yes, Jesus was a community organizer!” Then came Rick Boucher, the owlish congressman who represents Lebanon and its surrounding counties in Washington. “Senator Obama is a friend of coal and the thousands of jobs it brings to Southwestern Virginia,” Boucher assured the crowd. In fact, he repeated this line — “Barack Obama is a friend of coal” — no less than five times in 10 minutes.
Obama finally bounded onstage to an ovation that rocked the bleachers. He delivered a newly sharpened version of his basic rally speech, pacing the stage as he spoke, his pitch rising as he punctuated each point in a long list of indictments against the Bush years and John McCain. He stressed his own American story — the mother on food stamps, the grandfather who fought in “Patton’s army,” the father-in-law who worked a shift job with multiple sclerosis and never missed a day. The speech wasn’t appreciably different from one he would have given at an arena packed with 20,000 people in Philadelphia or St. Louis.
It was only after the speech, prompted by questions from the audience, that Obama tried to reassure the crowd — without ever referring to the “bitter” comment, of course — that he was not some San Francisco liberal who pitied rural people for their religiosity and their pastimes. One man wanted to know what Obama thought of those who looked down on Sarah Palin because she was evangelical. No doubt thinking of the persistent rumors still flying around the Internet that say he is a closet Muslim, Obama reiterated, for about the seven millionth time this year, that he, too, is a practicing Christian. “This is a nation of believers,” he said, “and I’m one of them.”
A teenage girl asked Obama what he might do specifically for rural America. I found it odd that Obama had to be prompted to address this question, but he warmed to it immediately, ticking off a list of public investments that his administration could bring to the region: broadband lines, school financing, the development of biodiesel fuels. He talked about creating more jobs for local students, “so when they graduate from college those kids can stay here and live in Lebanon instead of having to go and work someplace else.”
Having finished that thought, Obama suddenly straightened up, as if something else important had just occurred to him. “One thing I want to make clear while we’re on this topic of rural America,” he said, looking around the gym. “There are a lot of folks who come up to me and say, ‘You know, Barack, I like your economic plan, and I’m tired of George Bush, but you know, I got my N.R.A. mailing, and I’m worried you’re gonna take my gun away.’ ” Obama likes to do this — to momentarily inhabit the mind of some composite character and act out his side of the conversation — and he was met with knowing chuckles.
“I just want to be absolutely clear, O.K.? I just don’t want any misunderstanding when you all go home and you talk with your buddies, and they say, ‘Oh, he wants to take my gun away.’ You heard it here, and I’m on television, so everybody knows. I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away.
“So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one!” Obama said, eliciting laughter and cheers from the crowd. “It just ain’t true!”
OBAMA ACHIEVED his main objective in Lebanon: he showed up where no modern Democratic nominee had before, taking on social issues and planting himself squarely in the mainstream, and he hit on the list of issues that Warner and others urged him to mention. When I caught up with Congressman Boucher not long after the event, he told me it had been “terribly important.” Boucher had recently commissioned a poll in his district, which he gave to the Obama campaign, and while he wouldn’t tell me any of the specifics, he did volunteer that McCain was “significantly ahead.” Still, the poll showed an unusually high number of undecided voters — perhaps not surprising given that in the Republican primary McCain lost badly to Mike Huckabee in the southwestern counties. “People are not enthusiastic about McCain,” he told me. “They want to get to know Barack Obama better. They’re waiting to be persuaded.
“The grapevine is the single most powerful form of communication in my district,” Boucher continued. “All those people in that gymnasium, I’ll bet every one of them went out and told 10 people, ‘Hey, he was terrific.’ ”
Still, it occurred to me that during his appearance in Lebanon, Obama did little more than briefly nod to a series of local concerns, as if he had been carrying around a list that needed to be checked off before he got back on his plane and headed east to Norfolk. “Keeping jobs at home” was a great applause line, but Obama didn’t betray any awareness of the novel public programs that might make that goal possible, like the shell buildings or the Return to Roots campaign. Far from celebrating Lebanon, as Warner suggested, Obama made only passing reference to the new jobs that were revitalizing the town, a success story that would seem to have justified his coming there in the first place. Obama mostly made the same general appeal he was making in more diverse and liberal parts of the country, with a few perfunctory detours along the way.
It is often said in politics that a candidate’s strength is also his weakness. Obama’s greatest asset as a candidate, the trait that has enabled him to overcome both a thin résumé and the resistance of his own party’s establishment, is his placidity. Even more than through his ability to give a rousing speech (plenty of other candidates, from Ted Kennedy to Howard Dean, could do that), Obama has differentiated himself from recent Democrats by conveying a sense of inner security that is highly unusual in a business of people who have chosen to spend every day asking people to love them. He does not seem like a candidate who’s going to switch to earth tones in his middle age or who’s going to start dressing up in camouflage to rediscover his inner Rambo. Obama is content to meet the world on his terms, and something about that inspires confidence.
And yet that same lack of pathetic neediness may in fact be a detriment when it comes to persuading voters who, culturally or ideologically, just aren’t predisposed to like him. I once heard a friend of Obama’s compare him with Bill Clinton this way: if Clinton sees you walking down the other side of the street, he immediately crosses over to shake your hand; if Obama sees you coming, he nods and waits for you to cross. That image returned to me as I watched Obama campaign in Lebanon. Clinton wouldn’t have wanted to leave that gym until every last voter had been converted, even if that meant he had to memorize the scheduled sewer installation for every home in Russell County. Mark Warner, a similarly tenacious glad-hander, went to rural Virginia again and again because, deep down, he needed to change people’s perceptions of who he was. Obama doesn’t connect to the world that way, which is probably why his campaign has always preferred big rallies to hand-to-hand venues. Obama gives the impression that he’s going to show up and make his case, and if you don’t fall in love with him, well, he’ll just have to pick up the pieces and go on.
In some other election year, that probably wouldn’t have been enough to sway the subset of undecided voters who came to see Obama at Lebanon High. But this isn’t any other election year. Bush’s approval ratings are the lowest on record, the Republican nominee is an erstwhile foe of the N.R.A. and taxpayers are doling out loans to Wall Street while their own credit suddenly dries up. As this campaign’s symbol of change (the word is all but tattooed on his forehead), Obama has become, in a sense, the default candidate — the guy you choose if he can clear even a modest threshold of acceptability. Voters in places like Lebanon were not, as Obama joked, looking for excuses not to vote for him; they were looking for reasons they should. The uncommitted voters in the gymnasium might not have run back home to tell their friends how “terrific” Obama had been, but they may well have said that Obama didn’t seem alien or condescending — that he wasn’t the contemptuous, tax-loving liberal they had heard so much about. And maybe, this time, that would be enough.
A WEEK AFTER OBAMA VISITED Lebanon and Norfolk, I went to see Jim Webb in his Capitol Hill office. Obama’s campaign considers Webb, a war hero and former Republican, to be one of its most critical validators all over Virginia, specifically because he appeals to white men who are skeptical of Democrats in general. In fact, Webb’s Scots-Irish family hails from coal country. Not long after he entered the Senate, he became embroiled in a mini-controversy when an aide accidentally carried one of Webb’s favorite guns onto the Capitol grounds.
I was surprised, then, when Webb told me that while he was enthusiastic about Obama and would campaign for him, he did not intend to vouch for him on social issues. “I believe that Barack Obama has the temperament and the intellect and the ideas to be president,” Webb said. “But I don’t talk about his positions, and I don’t defend his positions.” When I commented that Webb wasn’t where Obama was on gun rights (Obama favors what he calls some “common sense” restrictions), Webb cut me off. “No, he’s not where I am on guns,” he said pointedly. It occurred to me that this was probably the kind of validation Obama could do without. (Webb appears to have softened his stance. A few weeks later, he decided to tape an ad promising voters in southwestern Virginia that Obama would not, in fact, confiscate their guns.)
Webb and I discussed the conventional wisdom taking hold — in discussions not only about Virginia but about Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan as well — that white men weren’t breaking Obama’s way mostly because he’s black. Webb disagreed. When it came to white working-class and rural voters, Webb said, what mattered was whether Obama seemed to share the same basic small-town values. “Does he understand me?” Webb said. “Can I trust him?”
At one point, when we were talking about the southwestern part of the state, Webb suggested, half seriously, that I should talk to his cousin Jimmy, who writes a column for The Lebanon News. (The number of Webb’s cousins is something of a joke in Virginia; he’s basically related in some way to the entire western part of the state.) So when I got back to my office, I tracked down cousin Jimmy, who, it turns out, is 78 years old and knows Virginia politics as well as he knows the old coins he sells to collectors. Jimmy Webb told me he was a strong Obama supporter, but he had a slightly different take on things than his famous cousin.
“When you get past Roanoke and out this way,” he told me, “in southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee, blacks are just not that popular. That’s one of Obama’s problems. I’ve had Democrats tell me that they’re not even going to the polls.” I heard much the same thing from Steve Cochran, the Democratic committee chairman in Montgomery County. (Believe it or not, Cochran, too, is somehow a distant cousin of Webb’s.) “I think if the people of southwestern Virginia had the opportunity to meet Barack Obama and see how intelligent he is and how genuine he is and how caring he is, there would be no question,” Cochran said. “But there is still this little bit of skepticism in Appalachian Virginia, as there is in a lot of other parts of the country, that this guy is still just a little bit not like me. I see people having a little trouble getting around that color barrier.”
How race affects Obama’s effort to broaden the electoral map is the most persistent question surrounding his campaign — and perhaps the least answerable. A bracing poll released last month by The Associated Press and Yahoo, in conjunction with Stanford University, concluded that Obama might be losing as many as six percentage points nationally because he’s black. This was based on the finding that 40 percent of white Americans admitted to some negative views toward blacks. Such polls are frequently cited as proof that Obama would be walking away with the election were he more than half white.
And yet from all available data Obama isn’t actually doing any worse with white men than the last two Democratic nominees, both of whom also ran at a time when the national climate offered considerable advantages — Gore because the country had enjoyed a long period of prosperity, Kerry because of the failing war in Iraq. According to exit polls, Kerry lost the overall white vote by 17 points in 2004. Recent Gallup tracking polls, while somewhat erratic from week to week, have shown Obama running above that level; polling in early October had him down by only eight points among white voters. “Obama’s doing better than Gore or Kerry,” says Dee Davis, who founded the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, Ky. “And I think both of those guys were white the last time I looked at the paper.” According to exit polls, Kerry received only 27 percent of the white-male vote in Virginia in 2004, a figure Obama is poised to surpass, according to a pollster from another campaign who is working in the state.
Perhaps the problem with this entire discussion about race is that it begins with the wrong question. Most polls focus on determining the prevalence of racial bias among white voters and whether it will affect their choices on Election Day. This may be the best way we have to measure the impact of race, but it is hardly revelatory; no one should be surprised to learn that racial stereotypes exist, particularly among lower-income and less-educated white men, or that such stereotypes affect the way voters see Obama. The more important question is not whether race is a factor in people’s votes but whether it is a determinative factor — that is, whether Obama’s being black is the disqualifying fact for white voters that it might have been 20 years ago or whether it has now been reduced to one of those surmountable obstacles that any candidate has to overcome.
When Al Smith, New York’s Democratic governor, ran for president in 1928, his Catholicism was a deal breaker. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960, the prejudice remained, but it had lost its defining intensity. Kennedy felt sufficiently disadvantaged by his religion to address it in a major speech, just as Obama did on race during the primaries, but in the end, some sizable segment of Protestant voters who had concerns about pulling the lever for a Catholic did so anyway. In other words, it may be possible for racial prejudice to exist, as all the polls suggest it does, but for it to be only one significant influence among many, including voters’ views on the economy and on McCain as an alternative.
There is another parallel in the Kennedy example that may prove relevant if Obama’s strategists have their way. While Kennedy undoubtedly lost the votes of some Protestants who feared papal influence over the White House, their numbers were more than canceled out by the Catholic voters who came to the polls at a level never before seen. Obama’s strategists accept that there will be some number of voters — particularly white men — who will reject Obama solely because he is black. But they are betting, first, that most of these voters wouldn’t have voted for a Democrat in any event and, second, that the groundswell of black support for Obama will produce enough new African-American votes in a lot of states to offset them.
In 2004, 60 percent of voting-age black Americans went to the polls (compared with 67 percent of white voters), and about 88 percent of them voted for Kerry. Those are pretty impressive numbers, historically. And yet, with Obama on the ticket, it is not unrealistic to think that black turnout could increase by as many as five points and that Obama could increase the Democratic share of that vote to well over 90 percent. All of which means that if Obama can perform at least as well as Kerry among white men in some of the reliably red states he’s trying to turn blue, most notably Virginia and North Carolina, race as an overall factor in the election could end up winning Obama more votes than it takes away.
WHEN I SAT WITH OBAMA on his plane, just three days after his first debate with McCain and not quite a week since the nation’s credit system went into meltdown, the White House must have felt, finally, within his reach. National tracking polls showed him holding a consistent lead of four to six points for the first time in the campaign. In a string of familiar battleground states where Obama had been struggling to capitalize on anti-Bush sentiment and economic angst, a new round of polls showed him breaking out at last. He had finally put some distance between himself and McCain in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and he was on the verge of driving the Republicans from the latter state altogether. In Ohio and Florida, states that Bush carried twice, Obama appeared to have broken a stalemate and moved solidly into the lead. Such readings were merely snapshots, of course, subject to change at any moment, but even so, both campaigns seemed to sense that McCain’s window for taking command of the campaign was beginning to close.
In Virginia, according to both private and public polling, the shift was especially pronounced. Several polls would soon show Obama pulling ahead of McCain by a significant margin, and two would have his lead in the state soaring into double digits. More staggering was the data concerning white voters and, specifically, men. According to a random telephone poll by SurveyUSA (though often derided by rival pollsters, the outfit compiled a surprisingly strong track record in the primaries), McCain was leading among men in Virginia by 10 points just after the conventions; by the beginning of October, Obama was leading by 11. Among white voters in the state overall, McCain’s 22-point September lead had shrunk to single digits. In the rural Shenandoah Valley region, running along the state’s western border and down into coal country, McCain had led by 24 points in September. Now he and Obama were tied.
And yet it seemed fair to question whether anything about this sudden movement actually validated Obama’s central argument about American politics — this notion that the cultural fault line in the electorate can somehow be bridged by a generational change in leadership — or whether it spoke to some more immediate, more desperate impulse in a shaken electorate. The campaign had become pretty much a referendum on the current economic carnage and eight years of mostly bad news turning to worse, and for the moment, at least, the crisis on Wall Street appeared to have accomplished what Obama’s strategists had been unable to do for months leading up to it: change the focus from Obama’s readiness and supposed elitism to George W. Bush’s myriad failures. In 2004, voters in the newly influential exurbs chose cultural identity over their concerns about war and the economy, and this choice cost John Kerry Ohio and the presidency; this year, it seemed increasingly likely that those voters might tip the other way — and take the election with them.
OBAMA WOULD gladly take that outcome, of course. But it would not be the transformational victory he envisioned when he set out to run, the one in which white men in exurbs and rural counties wouldn’t just grudgingly vote for a Democrat out of frustration with the alternative but actually come around to the idea that a Democrat can share their values. “If I’m able to change this,” he told me on his plane, meaning the cultural breach in our politics, “then it’s probably going to be most powerful after I’m elected, when you’re no longer in the context of day-to-day battle, and I can prove it by what I do.”
I asked Obama if it was frustrating to have seen, throughout the campaign, so many polls that showed him trailing badly among white men with lower incomes or less education.
“It’s not frustrating,” Obama said, shaking his head. I found this believable; Obama seems almost impervious to frustration. “There are a couple of things at work here. No. 1, let’s face it — I’m not a familiar type.” He laughed. “Which means it would be easier for me to deliver this message if I was from one of these places, right? I’ve got to deliver that message as a black guy from Hawaii named Barack Obama. So, admittedly, it’s just unfamiliar.
“Which, by the way, is a different argument than race,” Obama continued, pausing to make sure I understood. “I’m not making an argument that the resistance is simply racial. It’s more just that I’m different in all kinds of ways. I’m different even for black people. I went through similar stuff when I ran against Bobby Rush on the all-black South Side of Chicago.” In that race, a Democratic primary for Congress in 2000, Rush, the black incumbent, handed Obama his first and only political defeat. “It’s like: ‘Who is this guy? Where’d he come from?’ So that’s part of it.
“The second part of it is that I’m trying to do this in an environment where the media narrative is already set up in a certain way. So it’s hard to not be dropped into a box.”
He reminded me that back in March, for instance, he accepted a spontaneous invitation from a voter in Altoona, Pa., to bowl a few frames, and it turned out Obama was basically a god-awful bowler. Some commentators gleefully used this deficiency to portray him as out of touch with the common man, in a John Kerry-windsurfing sort of way. (Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, used the word “prissy.”) To Obama, this brought home the bleak reality that, as a Democratic nominee, he was going to be typecast, fairly or not.
“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?
“I guess the point I’m making,” he went on, “is that there is an entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it’s powerful. People want to know that you’re fighting for them, that you get them. And I actually think I do. But you know, if people are just seeing me in sound bites, they’re not going to discover that. That’s why I say that some of that may have to happen after the election, when they get to know you.”
Hearing him say this a second time, it seemed to me a remarkable admission — if not a retreat from his driving vision, then at least a deferral. Normally, in political campaigns, you hope people get to know you and then decide to vote for you; Obama now believed that perhaps only the inverse was possible. Once, he might have thought that if he could only win a bunch of red states and pile up 350 electoral votes, he could obliterate the red-blue paralysis of the last decade and wield his mandate like a machete against the culture warriors in Washington. Now, it seemed, he understood that even a Reaganesque triumph wouldn’t suddenly erase the effect of 40 years of exploiting peoples’ darkest fears or ignoring their legitimate anxieties, the twisted and bipartisan legacy of a lost political generation. If he won, Obama would likely start out as a 50-plus-1 president, no matter what the map had in store. And then the campaign would begin again.
Michelle Bachmann Channels McCarthy
http://www.truthout.org/article/101908A
Sam Stein, Huffington Post: "In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn't be trusted in the White House."
Sam Stein, Huffington Post: "In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn't be trusted in the White House."
BBC: Video of Powell endorsement
Colin Powell backs Barack Obama (video courtesy of NBC Meet the Press)
US President George W Bush's first Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has endorsed Democratic election candidate Barack Obama for the White House.
Backing Mr Obama over John McCain, the Republican Party's choice to succeed Mr Bush in November, he said the Democrat had the "ability to inspire".
"All Americans... not just African-Americans" would be proud of an Obama win, he argued.
Mr McCain said he was not surprised at his "long-time friend's" decision.
He pointed out that other former secretaries of state had backed his own candidacy, naming them as Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Alexander Haig - all Republicans.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign announced it had raised a record monthly total of more than $150m (£86m) in September.
The total figure of $605m dwarfs the total of Mr McCain, who chose to stay within the public campaign financing system.
Difficult decision
Mr Powell's endorsement carries weight, says the BBC's Rachel Harvey in Washington.
| It [an Obama victory] would not just electrify our country, it would electrify the world Colin Powell former US secretary of state |
This is in part because, as a former chairman of the Joint chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state, Colin Powell's backing says to undecided American voters "I trust this man as the Commander in Chief and so you should too", our correspondent adds.
Mr Powell's support will be seen as a significant boost to the Obama campaign a little over two weeks before voting day.
This is not a decision Colin Powell has taken lightly, our correspondent says.
He has spoken to both Mr McCain and Mr Obama regularly and watched carefully and he has concluded, he says, that Barack Obama has the style and substance to lead America in the future.
But it is perhaps the sharp criticism of the recent conduct of John McCain's campaign, for being too negative and too narrow, that will do most damage to the Republican candidate, our correspondent adds.
That approach, Mr Powell said, is not what the American people are looking for.
'Electrifying' choice
"I think he [Barack Obama] would be a transformational president," Mr Powell told NBC's Meet The Press.
An Obama victory would should "not just electrify our country, it would electrify the world", he said.
Mr Obama was better suited to handle America's economy, the former secretary of state said.
"In the case of Mr McCain... you got the sense that he didn't have a complete grasp of the economic problems that we had," he argued.
Mr Powell was also "concerned" at the selection of Governor Sarah Palin" for running mate believing her not ready for the White House.
And President Bush's first secretary of state criticised his own party for allowing the campaign to turn negative.
"I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the [Republican] Party say... such things as 'Well, you know that Mr Obama is a Muslim'.
"Well the correct answer is, 'He's not a Muslim, he's a Christian, he's always been a Christian'. But the really right answer is, "What if he is?' Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is 'No', that's not America."
'No surprise'
"It isn't easy for me to disappoint Sen McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that," Mr Powell added.
 Mr McCain was campaigning in Virginia this weekend |
Speaking on Fox News, Mr McCain said he had "always admired and respected Gen Powell".
"We're long-time friends," he said. "This doesn't come as a surprise."
Mr McCain criticised Mr Obama for opting out of public financing for his campaign.
"History shows us where unlimited amounts of money are in political campaigns, it leads to scandal," he added.
Mr Obama was heading for North Carolina on Sunday after drawing big crowds in traditionally Republican Missouri. Mr McCain has been campaigning in Virginia.
Extra, extra!
Powell Endorses Obama
By The New York Times By Jeff ZelenyFormer Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Sunday endorsed the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, calling him a “transformational figure” who has displayed “a steadiness” during his race against Senator John McCain.
“He has both style and substance,” Mr. Powell said, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He added, “Obama has displayed a steadiness; showed intellectual vigor. He has a definitive way of doing business that will do us well.”
While Mr. Powell and Mr. Obama have spoken occasionally, including a face-to-face meeting earlier this year, the endorsement caught the Democratic presidential nominee by surprise. Aides to Mr. Obama said they did not know about the endorsement before the television interview on Sunday morning.
Mr. Powell, a Republican and a retired U.S. general, also questioned Mr. McCain’s decision to chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as the party’s vice presidential candidate. Mr. Powell said he did not believe Ms. Palin was ready to become president.
In the appearance on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Powell also said he was disappointed by the McCain campaign’s decision to seek to tie Mr. Obama to William Ayers, who four decades ago was a domestic terrorist who violently protested the Vietnam War.
In offering his endorsement, Mr. Powell becomes the highest profile Republican to add his support to the Democratic ticket. Aides said it was not yet known whether the two men would campaign together – or what Mr. Powell would do alone – in the final two weeks of the presidential campaign.
Those talks, aides said, were underway on Sunday.
Mr. Powell answered reporters questions outside NBC’s Washington studio after taping “Meet the Press”:
“I think that Senator Obama brings a fresh set of eyes, fresh set of ideas to the table. I think that Senator McCain, as gifted as he is, is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it, but I think we need more than that.”
sábado, 18 de outubro de 2008
Is Obama the Sidney Poitier of politics?
Politico: Racists for Obama?
New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African Americans.
Race has become the elephant in the room of the 2008 presidential campaign, with Obama’s prospect of becoming the first black president drawing some Americans closer to him while pushing others away. At times, the contest has slipped into a familiar dynamic of allegations of racism and outraged denial—but it's also challenged some easy assumptions about race, racism and prejudice.
“What you see is it’s perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Racial feelings are not as cut and dried — not as black and white — as people often say.”
Franklin explored those contradictions in a large, national survey taken in mid-September, when the Illinois Democratic senator's rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led in many polls and the nation’s economic woes had not yet produced a deep crisis. The poll asked voters whether they agreed with the statement that “African Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing." About a fifth of white voters said they “strongly agreed.” Yet among those who agreed, 23 percent said they’d be supporting Obama.
“This result is reasonable if you believe that race is not as monolithic an effect as we might easily assume,” Franklin said, noting that 22 percent of those who "strongly disagreed" said they'd be supporting McCain.
Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there’s a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man.
“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.
One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”
The notion that there might be “racists for Obama,” as one Democrat called them, comes against the backdrop of a country whose white voters largely accept the notion of a black president.
“The economy is trumping racism,” said Kurt Schmoke, the dean of Howard University Law School and a former Baltimore mayor. “A lot of people who we might think wouldn’t vote their pocketbook because of race — now they are.”
“If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, ‘How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,’ they would say, ‘That doesn’t sound good to me,’” said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. “But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it’s a different situation.”
“The house is on fire, and one guy seems like he’s calm and confident and in charge, and that’s the only option,” he said.
That is, in less dramatic terms, more or less the campaign’s official talking point, a version of the longtime Democratic hope that class will — or at least should — matter more than race.
“Voters are less interested in the hot button and are more interested in the cooling economy,” said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), an Obama ally who is as on-message as his father is off.
But other, more nuanced, questions of race are also in play.
One senior congressional Democrat mused about prejudice among his own supporters. “They’ve all got one black friend,” he said, “and they won’t stop talking about their black friend.”
“That’s Obama,” he said.
And some argue that elements of Obama’s story and persona make him specifically acceptable to voters who hold broadly negative views of African Americans.
“Not all whites associate the generic African American with Obama,” said Ron Walters, a longtime student of race and politics and aide to the senior Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. “They give him credit for having half a Caucasian ancestry, and give him credit for his education, and give him credit for his obvious ability to take complex subjects and parse them.”
The geography of racial conflict and tolerance has been a strong overlay of the electoral map. Obama has run better than past Democrats in prosperous states with little history of tension, such as Colorado and Iowa, and worse in working-class states in the Appalachian belt. His campaign has been structured around this dynamic and may actually have overestimated the number of white Democrats in the region unwilling to vote for him because of his race. Obama had ignored West Virginia, for instance, until a spate of positive polls prompted him to start advertising there this week.
Obama has also ignored Southern states with a history of deep racial division, from Arkansas to Missisissippi, in favor of those that have seen an influx of new voters from the north — Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
Until this fall, both campaigns viewed Michigan — a heavily Democratic state, but one with a history of tension between Detroit and its white suburbs — as Obama’s Achilles’ heel. In 2006, the state was deeply divided by a referendum to ban affirmative action. The measure was opposed by most African-American voters as an assault on hard-won gains, but it won broad support among whites and passed by a double-digit margin.
But earlier this month, McCain gave up the state for lost as economic concerns appear to have trumped racial ones.
“Obama’s personality — his speech, his look — he provides [white voters] with a non-threatening way to move forward on this issue, and that’s a very positive development,” said David Waymire, who led the unsuccessful opposition to the anti-affirmative action initiative. “He is not Kwame Kilpatrick,” he said, referring to the Detroit mayor who resigned last month after pleading guilty in a sex and misconduct scandal.
For black observers of American politics in particular, Obama’s ability to win over voters who harbor negative views of African Americans at large is a complex, but hopeful, sign.
“I didn’t think the election itself is necessarily going to transport a lot of people, but I’ve been changing my view on that a bit lately,” said Walters. “I’ve been in personal circumstances where I said to myself, ‘I wonder if this person sees me differently because a black person is about to be the president of the United States?’”
sexta-feira, 17 de outubro de 2008
Robo-sleaze
Thirty-six hours ago, John McCain said to everyone watching the debate, "I don't care about some washed-up terrorist," and "every time there's been an out-of-bounds remark made by a Republican, no matter where they are, I have repudiated them."
A few hours later he was saying something very different to voters in key battleground states.
A new "robocall" paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 tells voters who answer their phones that Barack "has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers" whose organization "killed Americans."
In the past, these "robocalls" -- phone calls where a machine delivers the message over and over -- have flown under the radar. The McCain campaign expects them to go largely unnoticed by the mainstream press, but thanks to the Internet, reports and records of these underhanded tactics are popping up all over the country.
Listen to McCain's "robocalls" now
We knew things were going to get uglier, and now they have.
These attacks aren't coming from a fringe outside group or a rogue Republican with a bone to pick.
They're paid for by John McCain and the RNC. The "robocallers" even say, right up front, "I'm calling on behalf of John McCain" before they launch into false and discredited attacks.
We're hearing reports of calls like this from all across the country. It just shows how much we still need to do -- reaching out to voters with the truth requires twice as much work as flooding homes with "robocalls" filled with lies.
There are only 18 days left, and Barack needs your help to fight back.
These tactics are all that the McCain campaign and their allies have left.
We're fighting back, but it's going to take all of us working together to keep these lies from taking hold.
Thanks for your support,
David
David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
Barack's Brazilian spirit (Brazilians always face crises with humour)
Here's the rest, where Obama lampoons Fox News:
quinta-feira, 16 de outubro de 2008
Portraying Obama as the bogey man
| By Stephen Sackur Presenter, HARDtalk, BBC World News |
Over the past few weeks of the US presidential election campaign, the tone has turned increasingly negative, especially from the Republican side.
BBC News has been talking to two key Republican advisers about whether the personal attacks on Senator Obama can be justified.
Across America, ghosts, ghouls and snaggle-toothed jack o'lanterns peer out from a million suburban stoops; it is just two weeks until Halloween.
 This may be the year for the politicians to save the scare tactics for Halloween |
But this fall. a genuinely frightening spectre is said to be lurking in the bushes, ready to pounce on the good people of Middle America.
He is tall and slim but his past is dark. He 'pals' with a terrorist intent on blowing up American values.
He was raised in a strange land amongst Muslims. His religious mentor in more recent times is a preacher of hate.
His name alone is enough to strike fear into many a God-fearing soul. Whisper it quietly: Barack Hussein Obama is coming to get you.
Fair game
Over the top? You bet, but then that is the tone adopted by some of the die-hards in the Republican campaign for the White House.
| Do you know whether radical Islam was part of Barack Obama's background? Gary Bauer, president, American Values |
Early this month they looked at the polls showing a significant and growing Obama lead. They saw the economy in a tailspin and they felt the anger of a nation disgusted by Wall Street greed. And they reached a conclusion: it was time to go negative.
Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and prolific advocate of the Conservative cause, put it this way:
"The McCain campaign has to convince 51% of voters they can't trust Barack Obama to be our next president".
In an interview with BBC News HARDtalk programme, Mr Kristol described how he had discussed the campaign with Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
She expressed her determination to tell Americans "who the real Barack Obama is."
Within days Ms Palin, the self-styled pitbull with lipstick, was accusing Obama of 'palling around with terrorists' - a reference to his relationship in his Chicago past with William Ayers, a one-time leader of the Weather Underground, which launched a haphazard and short-lived campaign of violence against the US Government in the 1960s.
The charge was repeated by Senator McCain in his final debate on Wednesday.
Kristol says Palin's reference to 'palling around with terrorists' is fair campaigning
Mr Ayers has for many years been a university academic and community activist. He was named Chicago's 'Citizen of the Year' in 1997.
Mr Kristol defended the William Ayers line of attack on Senator Obama as fair game.
He, like many other Republicans, knows that negative campaigning has worked in the past.
Hussein and Sidney
But how far can the Republicans go?
At one recent McCain/Palin rally the candidates were introduced to the stage by a local activist, Bill Platt, who warmed the crowd up with these words:
"Think about how you'll feel on November 5 if you wake up in the morning and see the news, that Barack Obama -- Barack Hussein Obama -- is the president-elect of the United States. "
 Although his father and step-father were Muslim, Mr Obama is a Christian |
He went on: "The number one most liberal senator in the United States of America was, you guessed it, the ambassador of change, Barack Hussein Obama'"
Needless to say, Mr Platt did not introduce John McCain as John Sidney McCain, and it does not take an expert in semiotics to spot the key word in Mr Platt's peroration.
Obama's middle name, Hussein (taken from his Kenyan father), is for some on the social conservative right a signifier of his suspect status as an alien, a man with connections to a (frightening) Muslim world.
Christian conservative viewpoint
 Gary Bauer is worried about Muslim influence on Mr Obama |
I asked Gary Bauer, president of the Christian Conservative movement American Values, and an influential figure amongst the Republican base, whether this use of Obama's middle name made him uncomfortable.
His answer was revealing:
"Each person can make their own judgement about whether at a time that we live in when radical Islam has declared war on your country and my country, whether this is something that people want to weigh or not.
"Do you know whether radical Islam was part of Barack Obama's background? He went to a religious school in Indonesia. Nobody's been able to find out how things were run in that school.
"The people that were in the school at the time say it was a typical religious Muslim school, and they were being taught the things that we've seen being taught in many Muslim schools around the world that are troubling".
McCain uneasy
In the light of Mr Bauer's response, I was not surprised to hear that a lady in her seventies stood up at a McCain rally last week and referred to Obama as an 'Arab'.
McCain himself immediately contradicted her and described Obama as a 'decent family man' with whom he happened to disagree.
 John McCain does not use 'Hussein', but he did choose Sarah Palin |
It was an awkward moment which Senator McCain handled with dignity, but it points to a growing problem within his campaign.
The truth is the Republican candidate does not seem to have the heart for the deeply negative and personal campaign some of his own advisers want to run.
He has publically disavowed the use of Obama's middle name, but some of his supporters keep doing it.
He has refused to run negative advertisements about Obama's ties to the radical black pastor Jeremiah Wright even though conservatives are begging him to bring it back up.
With fewer than three weeks left until election day and Obama's poll lead widening, McCain may yet go negative with both barrels.
But Americans are preoccupied with economic worries. They want a President who can safeguard their jobs and their savings; a man who knows how to restore American strength not tear down the opposition.
This may be the year for the politicians to save the scare tactics for Halloween.
HARDtalk with Stephen Sackur is broadcast on BBC World News at 0330, 0830, 1430, 2030, and 2230. The interview with Gary Bauer will be broadcast on Thursday 16 October 2008.
CNN: Front-runner Obama cautions against overconfidence
(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama cautioned supporters Thursday against becoming complacent during the final days leading up to the election, noting he lost the New Hampshire primary despite a lead in the polls.
After debating Sen. John McCain, Sen. Barack Obama says there's still plenty of campaigning to be done.
"For those of you who are feeling giddy or cocky and think this is all set, I just [have] two words for you: New Hampshire," the Democratic presidential nominee said during a fundraiser breakfast in New York. "You know I've been in these positions before where we were favored and the press starts getting carried away and we end up getting spanked. And so that's another good lesson that Hillary Clinton taught me."
About 10 hours after debating Sen. John McCain, Obama urged top campaign contributors at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan to not be overconfident, despite leading in a number of national polls.
A CNN Poll of Polls calculated Wednesday showed him leading 51 percent to 42 percent.
"We've got 19 days," Obama said. "We're going to have to work absolutely as hard as we've ever worked in our lives in order to just to get to the start of what is going to be a very difficult and very challenging but ultimately a very fulfilling four years where we can get this country back on track."
Hours later, Obama spoke to a crowd in Londonberry, New Hampshire, lashing out at McCain's debate tactics.
"Well, New Hampshire, last night we had a debate. I think you saw a bit of the McCain attack strategy in action," he said. "But here's what Sen. McCain doesn't seem to understand: With the economy in turmoil and the American dream at risk, the American people don't want to hear politicians attack each other -- you want to hear about how we're going to attack the challenges facing middle-class families each and every day."
quarta-feira, 15 de outubro de 2008
VIDEO | Olbermann: McCain, Latest Pander Plan
http://www.truthout.org/101508A
Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Countdown: "During the warm-up act by a Red Meat Congressional Candidate aptly named Chris Hackett, Hackett mentions Obama and a Palin audience member shouts 'Kill Him.' And Gov. Palin, as usual, does nothing about it says nothing to these thugs and psychos. She may not have heard this one. It is impossible to believe that by now she has not heard about the other ones. Her silence is deafening. Just as, Sen. McCain, you have done nothing when violence has been asserted. Correction. You have done one thing."
Another amusing Olbermann rant on a disturbing subject
Yet another hat-tip to England for Obama
(I'm a Brit living in Brazil, so this blog is trans-Atlantic)
(I'm a Brit living in Brazil, so this blog is trans-Atlantic)
Poll Says Attacks Backfire on McCain
http://www.truthout.org/101508L
Michael Cooper and Megan Thee, The New York Times: "The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found. Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 percent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain."
Michael Cooper and Megan Thee, The New York Times: "The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found. Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 percent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr. Obama and 39 percent said they would vote for Mr. McCain."
Barack O'Lantern
When I first arrived in Brazil in 1986, Halloween barely registered on the national radar, but the vast number of English language schools in this country have managed to establish the tradition here at long last, to the wrath of nationalists and graffiti pundits. I wonder if Barack O'Lanterns will be turning up here as well?
More on race and the 08 race in the NYT
The New York Times is giving me plenty of fodder for this blog today - here's the link to another interesting article on that subject:
Young voters at two universities said many members of their generation remained as tangled in racial bias as their parents.
Here's an excerpt:
Here's an excerpt:
At the University of Cincinnati, Anthony Galarza, a graduate student in urban planning, said he had heard off-color jokes about an Obama presidency that suggested the White House would become “more ghetto” with “barbecues on the front lawn.”
“I would think on a college campus we would be a little more liberal,” said Mr. Galarza, 29. “To hear it so openly talked about, it’s disturbing — it really is. I don’t think anyone who is colorblind would make a comment like that.”
CNN: African-American enthusiasm could tip scales toward Obama
By John King
CNN Chief National Correspondent
Read original article here
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (CNN) -- Ollie James is 84 years old and a doubter no more.
Ollie James, 84, says he knows Obama is going to win, because he believes "God answers prayers."
"I know he is going to win," James said after services at Leonard Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis. "See, God answers prayers, and I am a praying man, and I know he is going to win."
The "he" James is referring to is Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. "From where I came from, with the segregation and all the hatred, I never thought an African-American would get this far in the United States. Really."
But three weeks until Election Day, James and many other African-Americans are now optimistic they will be part of history.
"I am kind of anticipating it will happen," said Raymond Henderson, a soft-spoken African-American man in his 60s. "But no, I did not expect it to happen in my lifetime."
It is the flip side of the "race debate" in Campaign 2008: While the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies are aggressively working to address the concerns of blue-collar and rural whites who are reluctant to support a black candidate for president, there is an enthusiasm in the African-American community that Democrats believe could lead to dramatically increased turnout and perhaps tip the scales in several key battlegrounds, Missouri among them.
Don't Miss
* Democrats target voters who think race is an issue
* Commentary: Anti-Obama vote doesn't make you racist
* In Depth: Election Center
African-Americans cast 10 percent of the ballots for president in 2000 and about 12 percent in 2004. Obama aides believe if that percentage increased just modestly in 2008, it could make the difference in at least a half-dozen states: Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Wisconsin and Nevada are additional battlegrounds where Obama organizers are counting on an increase in African-American turnout in their Election Day game plan.
To reach its goal, the campaign is counting on a combination of newly registered African-Americans and aggressive outreach to tens of thousands black voters who are registered to vote but have stayed home in past elections. Video See why African-Americans are finding hope in Obama »
At Leonard Missionary Baptist, the Rev. Steven Thompson is careful not to preach from the pulpit: He exhorts his congregants to vote but does not preach in favor of or against any specific candidate.
Still, a visit to his services found an overwhelmingly pro-Obama crowd, and Thompson says the enthusiasm level about this election is unprecedented in his two decades as the inner-city church's pastor.
"The energy comes from the fact that it is historical, and we've got a lot of first-time voters and many like myself who have been through a few, and it still has that pumped up energy in it," Thompson said.
Increased African-American turnout is all the more important because of Obama's tougher challenge in more conservative, rural areas. In the Missouri Ozarks, a roadside billboard shows a cartoon of Obama with a turban, his middle name "Hussein" in bold red letters.
"Hmmmm," Thompson said when shown a photograph of the billboard, keeping his trademark calm.
"If I spent my time getting angry about the things people do, then I can't do what I effectively do here," Thompson said as he gestured toward the pulpit. "Those people who do stuff like that, the only thing I can say is, we pray for them."
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Fredrick Lemon II says that for months, he doubted that Obama could win, but now he believes he can. Still, Lemon took time after services to compliment Republican nominee John McCain for trying to calm angry supporters at recent rallies, including a woman last week who incorrectly said she was worried about an Obama presidency because he is Arab.
"It has gotten a little nasty," Lemon said. "But I think that John McCain really showed some integrity and some character when he was at the last town hall meeting and some people said some disparaging remarks and he corrected them. And that just shows that he does have integrity."
CNN Chief National Correspondent
Read original article here
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (CNN) -- Ollie James is 84 years old and a doubter no more.
Ollie James, 84, says he knows Obama is going to win, because he believes "God answers prayers."
"I know he is going to win," James said after services at Leonard Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis. "See, God answers prayers, and I am a praying man, and I know he is going to win."
The "he" James is referring to is Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. "From where I came from, with the segregation and all the hatred, I never thought an African-American would get this far in the United States. Really."
But three weeks until Election Day, James and many other African-Americans are now optimistic they will be part of history.
"I am kind of anticipating it will happen," said Raymond Henderson, a soft-spoken African-American man in his 60s. "But no, I did not expect it to happen in my lifetime."
It is the flip side of the "race debate" in Campaign 2008: While the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies are aggressively working to address the concerns of blue-collar and rural whites who are reluctant to support a black candidate for president, there is an enthusiasm in the African-American community that Democrats believe could lead to dramatically increased turnout and perhaps tip the scales in several key battlegrounds, Missouri among them.
Don't Miss
* Democrats target voters who think race is an issue
* Commentary: Anti-Obama vote doesn't make you racist
* In Depth: Election Center
African-Americans cast 10 percent of the ballots for president in 2000 and about 12 percent in 2004. Obama aides believe if that percentage increased just modestly in 2008, it could make the difference in at least a half-dozen states: Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Wisconsin and Nevada are additional battlegrounds where Obama organizers are counting on an increase in African-American turnout in their Election Day game plan.
To reach its goal, the campaign is counting on a combination of newly registered African-Americans and aggressive outreach to tens of thousands black voters who are registered to vote but have stayed home in past elections. Video See why African-Americans are finding hope in Obama »
At Leonard Missionary Baptist, the Rev. Steven Thompson is careful not to preach from the pulpit: He exhorts his congregants to vote but does not preach in favor of or against any specific candidate.
Still, a visit to his services found an overwhelmingly pro-Obama crowd, and Thompson says the enthusiasm level about this election is unprecedented in his two decades as the inner-city church's pastor.
"The energy comes from the fact that it is historical, and we've got a lot of first-time voters and many like myself who have been through a few, and it still has that pumped up energy in it," Thompson said.
Increased African-American turnout is all the more important because of Obama's tougher challenge in more conservative, rural areas. In the Missouri Ozarks, a roadside billboard shows a cartoon of Obama with a turban, his middle name "Hussein" in bold red letters.
"Hmmmm," Thompson said when shown a photograph of the billboard, keeping his trademark calm.
"If I spent my time getting angry about the things people do, then I can't do what I effectively do here," Thompson said as he gestured toward the pulpit. "Those people who do stuff like that, the only thing I can say is, we pray for them."
advertisement
Fredrick Lemon II says that for months, he doubted that Obama could win, but now he believes he can. Still, Lemon took time after services to compliment Republican nominee John McCain for trying to calm angry supporters at recent rallies, including a woman last week who incorrectly said she was worried about an Obama presidency because he is Arab.
"It has gotten a little nasty," Lemon said. "But I think that John McCain really showed some integrity and some character when he was at the last town hall meeting and some people said some disparaging remarks and he corrected them. And that just shows that he does have integrity."
Halloween display aims for 'shock value'
Stargazette.com
By Jeff Murray • jdmurray@gannett.com • October 14, 2008
Democratic backer sends message by showing McCain, in KKK robe, chasing Obama
CATHARINE -- Ron Havens has a reputation for provocative Halloween displays that reflect his strong political views.
But even Havens was pretty sure his latest effort was over the top. That didn't stop him from setting it up in plain sight anyway.
Havens, who lives on Schuyler County Route 15 (Ridge Road) just south of Odessa, this week set up a Halloween display featuring mannequins that look like Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain.
But the Obama figure looks like he is running, and the McCain likeness is dressed in the hooded robe of the Ku Klux Klan and is carrying a baseball bat.
Havens is quick to point out he is a liberal and a big supporter of Obama, and that the scene is meant to provoke thought about the way he believes Obama has been unfairly treated by the McCain campaign.
"I figured it would be equally offensive to everyone. It's just for shock value," Havens said. "McCain has been rabble-rousing, calling Obama a terrorist and a Muslim. The McCain campaign has gotten so ugly. That's what the message is. I can see how people could take this the wrong way. I'm not advocating anything. It's sarcasm."
The display is in Havens' front lawn, only a few yards from the highway.
Two years ago, Havens set up a display with a Wizard of Oz theme, with President Bush as the Scarecrow, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as Dorothy, Vice President Dick Cheney as the Tin Man and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld representing the Cowardly Lion.
During the 2004 presidential race between Bush and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Bush took on the persona of Dracula in Havens' front lawn, while Kerry appeared as Frankenstein's monster, complete with neck bolts.
Georgia Verdier, president of the Elmira-Corning Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said she was concerned about the injection of race into the presidential campaign when someone called her to complain about the scene.
After viewing a photograph of Havens' display, Verdier said it seems innocuous enough, but she's still concerned it may send the wrong message.
"It looks friendly but I am concerned not so much about this display, but in general about the fear and hate that have entered the campaign," Verdier said. "This display appears friendly to me. But that's my take. A young lady passed by and had other feelings. We need to be concerned about that. I think we all need to be careful about what messages we send. The message we send is not always the message received."
Havens said he has no plans to take the display down at this time.
NY Times: In Voting Booth, Race May Play a Bigger Role
WASHINGTON — With less than three weeks until Election Day, a big question is looming over the campaign for the White House, and it has nothing to do with the economic crisis or the caustic exchanges between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain over character and credentials.
It is race.
Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain almost never talk directly about it. In some cases, like the condemnation of the Republican ticket issued last weekend by Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat who is a civil rights leader, the topic has come up openly: Mr. Lewis invoked George Wallace, the noted segregationist, in rebuking Mr. McCain as tolerating political rallies marked by crowds yelling insults and threats at Mr. Obama.
But more often, it is found only in sentiments that are whispered, internalized or masked by discussions of culture or religion, and therefore hard to capture fully in polling or even to hear clearly in everyday conversation.
Political strategists once assumed that polls might well overstate support for black candidates, since white voters might be reluctant to admit racially tinged sentiments to a pollster. Newer research has cast doubt on that assumption. Either way, the situation is confounding aides on both sides, who like everyone else are waiting to see what role race will play in the privacy of the voting booth.
Harold Ickes, a Democrat who was the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s senior adviser when he ran for president — and who worked in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in her race against Mr. Obama this year — said that when he looked at polls now, he routinely shaved off a point or two from Mr. Obama’s number to account for hidden racial prejudices. That is no small factor, considering that Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain are separated by very thin margins in many polls in battleground states.
“If he were white, this would be a blowout,” Mr. Ickes said. “I think the country has come a long, long, long way since the 1960s. I think everybody would agree with that. But if you talk to people in certain states, they will say there are impulses that do not benefit Barack Obama because of the color of his skin.”
Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, said he had become accustomed to whispered asides from voters suggesting they would not vote for Mr. Obama because he is black. “We honestly don’t know how big an issue it is,” Mr. Anuzis said. But Representative Artur Davis, an African-American Democrat of Alabama, said race was no longer the automatic barrier to the White House that it once was.
“There is a group of voters who will not vote for people who are opposite their race,” Mr. Davis said. “But I think that number is lower today than it has been at any point in our history. I don’t believe this campaign will be decided by race; there are too many other important issues. Jesse Jackson would not have been elected in 1988. But we’ve changed.”
But it is hard to tell, as Mr. Ickes and Mr. Anuzis said, to what extent voters who are opposing Mr. Obama might seize other issues — his age and level of experience, his positions on the issues, his cultural and ideological background — as a shield.
And if Mr. Obama is losing support simply because he is black, that is not a one-sided equation. A crucial part of Mr. Obama’s theory for winning the election is turning out blacks in places like Florida and North Carolina, a state that Mr. Obama’s advisers view as in play largely because of the significant African-American population.