News and Current Events

Material linking Obama to Bin Laden removed from Sacramento GOP Web site

By Ed Fletcher
efletcher@sacbee.com
Published: Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008 | Page 12A
http://www.sacbee.com/812/story/1314854.html

Sacramento County Republican leaders Tuesday took down offensive material on their official party Web site that sought to link Sen. Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden and encouraged people to “Waterboard Barack Obama” – material that offended even state GOP leaders.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has pushed the party to try to broaden its appeal, took issue with the site. “In the governor’s view, it’s completely and totally inappropriate,” said Julie Soderlund, a Schwarzenegger spokeswoman.

Hector Barajas, a California Republican Party spokesman, said Democrats have been playing the race card, but that the local party went too far in this instance.

He said the campaign should be about who is ready to be the nation’s commander-in-chief, that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has never questioned Obama’s patriotism, and that he’d ask local leaders to take down the offensive content.

Taking credit for the site (sacramentorepublicans.org) and its content was county party chairman Craig MacGlashan – husband of Sacramento County Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan.

The Bee asked MacGlashan about the content after seeking his reaction to hate-filled graffiti that was spray-painted over an Obama display on a fence at Fair Oaks Boulevard and Garfield Avenue.

In recent weeks, MacGlashan, an attorney, joined local Democratic party officials in condemning vandalism to political displays.

The vandalism to the Obama display appeared to have been done overnight Monday. A racial epithet, profanity, “KKK” and the words “white power” were clearly visible from the roadway. Six of the nine fence panels were defaced.

“What you are describing to me is not free speech, it’s vandalism. We don’t condone it,” MacGlashan said.

But he defended his Web site. “I’m aware of the content,” he said. “Some people find it offensive, others do not. I cannot comment on how people interpret things.”

MacGlashan said he would “consider people’s complaints” before taking any action.

By Tuesday night, much of the questionable material – which ranged from depicting Obama in a turban to attacking Michelle Obama – had been removed, replaced with political cartoons attacking Obama.

The flap comes as tensions in the presidential contest between McCain and Obama have heightened, and as race has been thrust into the forefront of the campaign. If elected, Obama would be the first non-white president.

The Sacramento GOP’s Web site is markedly different in tone from other GOP or Democratic Party sites in the region in its use of illustrations and cartoons attacking the presidential nominee.

Democratic party officials condemned the GOP site. “It’s exactly the kind of vile, repugnant politicking that has relegated the California GOP to an afterthought in California politics,” said Roger Salazar, spokesman for the state Democratic Party. “Even the top of their ticket would be disgusted by this display of dishonesty.”

GOP congressional candidate Rep. Dan Lungren’s photo appeared above the Osama and Obama illustration.

Tim Clark, a Lungren spokesman, said the congressman had no control over the site’s content.

“We think that the party Web site should focus on getting out the vote,” Clark said. “We don’t agree with the tone.”

GOP political consultant Ray McNally said there is plenty of “high and heated passions” on both sides of the aisle, but that both stand to lose when the rhetoric becomes excessive.

“The worst thing in politics is when you overstate something,” McNally said. “If you get too shrill, you turn people off.”

In recent weeks, as McCain, his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, and their surrogates have questioned Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, a ‘60s radical, the campaign has had to admonish supporters who have called Obama a traitor, even making threats.

California State University, Sacramento, professor Stan Oden said the national campaign bears some responsibility for local excesses.

“Palin and McCain have both been very narrow-minded in trying to push these associations – trying to make Obama into a radical bomb-throwing individual,” Oden said. He called the Web site very upsetting.

Kevin Johnson, the dean of the University of California, Davis, law school, said he was taken aback by the Web site’s warning to “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid” of Obama. It was removed later Tuesday.

“Just sad,” Johnson said. “It suggests to me that we haven’t gone as far as we would have liked in putting racism to bed.”

“It’s disappointing that something like this would show up on the Republican Party Web site,” Johnson continued. “Maybe someone hacked into it. That would make me feel better. This is hateful stuff.”

The Choice

The New Yorker, 10/13/08

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors

Acts of rage, hate in McCain corner

Newsday.com, 10/13/08
Les Payne

The upcoming Hofstra debate will measure the two presidential candidates against the challenge of replacing a woefully incompetent commander of this luxury-liner republic that has sprung devastating leaks drawing us all into a titanic struggle to stay afloat.

The Nov. 4 elections are just that critical.

With everything at stake, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain should lay aside trivial pursuits and engage the economic issues of debt, war, credit, and steadying global confidence. While the candidates’ individual purposes may be served by fingering the villains who caused the wreck, the public interest is better served by indicating how this calamitous rupture might be repaired - and soon.

If recent trending of the campaign is a guide, however, the debate will showcase no such regenerative statecraft. If the Arizona senator discusses the economy, one aide said recently, he loses. McCain’s fear of constructive engagement over the economy makes Obama downright giddy. Yet it frustrates his every attempt to debate the issues.

Eating along party lines for Hofstra debate In the clutch of sagging poll numbers, the former POW has submitted himself to the incubus Karl Rove whose disciples have submerged “The Straight Talk Express” deep in the muck where the fish have no eyes. The dirty work has been assigned to Gov. Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate McCain dragged in out of the Alaskan woods as a veritable wolverine in spectacles.

Palin’s bland ferocity lends itself easily to vitriol of the type that inflames half-wits. A bald-pated Florida sheriff, one Mike Scott, got carried away under the swoon last week in Estero, Fla., in introducing Palin. Stressing Obama’s middle name, Sheriff Scott paced the stage, in violation of police rules, while inciting the crowd in his full uniform adorned with colorful patches, stars and medals befitting a grand wizard of some mystic order of white knights.

At Clearwater, Gov. Palin lathered up the crowd herself. “You’re going to have to hang on to your hats,” Palin told the rally, according to The Washington Post, “because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough.” Linking Sen. Obama to a reformed radical of the ‘60s, Palin shrieked her signature smut line, “he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

“Kill him!” a man in the crowd reportedly responded to Palin’s rabble-rousing. Her related attacks on the media had already whipped a frenzy among the crowd of about 3,000. Tempers rose to a boil when she blamed Katie Couric’s questions for tripping her up as a seeming dimwit. The Post wrote, “Palin supporters turned on reporters ... waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. ... One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African-American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”

As with McCain’s fingering of Obama as “that one,” in the last debate, supporters dismiss a white Southerner calling a black man a “boy,” as mere words. Perhaps so, but, given the nation’s sad, racial history, such language still elicits ire.

“Let’s get it on” seems to be Palin’s campaign refrain. “It’s about time the pit bull got loose,” the Post quoted Ken Gow, a 47-year-old police officer who was among the more than 10,000 people at a rally in Carson, Calif.

McCain struck the racial chord in the Nashville debate. When an African-American asked his question, McCain assumed that he was ignorant of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entities the senator blamed for the Wall Street meltdown. “I’ll bet you, you may never even have heard of them before this crisis,” McCain said, telling the questioner, Oliver Clark, that he would “stabilize home values” - not particularly for him and his family, but - so that “Americans, like Allen [Shaffer] can realize the American dream and stay in their home.” Shaffer was the white male who asked the earlier question. Neither had indicated that they owned a home or had a troubled mortgage.

This is the sort of racial profiling routinely spouted and acted upon by influential, white decision-makers far gone in racial denial such as Sen. McCain. With terminal cancers wrecking the body politic - problems we must all address together as Americans - McCain and Palin are lancing the racial boil to distract our attention from other grave problems.

This campaign behavior is curious; it is reckless and it is potentially dangerous.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-oppayn135881497oct13,0,1963776.column

What Right Wingers Mean When They Call Obama A “Socialist”

Prospect.org
Adam Serwer | October 13, 2008



Right-wing attempts to paint Barack Obama as a socialist aren’t just disingenuous. They’re rooted in a history of conservative smears against black leaders. 

On Saturday, Georgia Congressman John Lewis went nuclear on John McCain, releasing a statement that seemed to compare McCain to segregationist George Wallace. “George Wallace never threw a bomb,” Lewis wrote. “He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights.” The civil rights icon continued, “Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Lewis accused McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” He was referring to the angry tone of recent McCain rallies, where cries of “kill him” and “off with his head” have made many people anxious about the potential for violence against the Democratic nominee.

It’s no wonder that the tone at McCain rallies remind Lewis of the bad old days. In recent months, conservatives have sounded increasingly retro with their attempts to paint Obama as a socialist or communist. In some ways, this accusation is typical far-right boilerplate. Obama certainly isn’t the first Democrat running for president to be accused of communist sympathies. And as usual, the accusations are rarely linked to policy specifics. But the difference with Obama is that, in the eyes of the right, it’s not just his political affiliation that implicates him as a socialist. It’s his ethnic background.

The hysterical accusations of socialism from conservatives echo similar accusations leveled at black leaders in the past, as though the quest for racial parity were simply a left-wing plot. Obama may not actually be a socialist or communist, but his election would strike another powerful blow to the informal racial hierarchy that has existed in America since the 1960s, when it ceased being enforced by law. This hierarchy, which holds that whiteness is synonymous with American-ness, is one conservatives are now instinctively trying to preserve. Like black civil-rights activists of the 1960s, Obama symbolizes the destruction of a social order they see as fundamentally American, which is why terms like “socialism” are used to describe the threat.

This phenomenon extends beyond Obama’s candidacy. The conservative explanation for the mortgage crisis falls neatly into this narrative, too; the country is at risk because Democrats allowed minorities to disrupt the natural social order by becoming homeowners. Never mind that this defies all data, logic, and history, the narrative resonates because it allows Obama, a living symbol of black folks rising above “their station,” to become a focus for conservative economic anxieties.

Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to “socialism” and “communism” as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X as written by Alex Haley, Malcolm recalls being confronting by a government agent tailing him in Africa, not long after his pilgrimage to Mecca. The agent was convinced that Malcolm was a communist. Malcolm spent years under surveillance because of such bizarre suspicions. Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover spent years attempting to link Martin Luther King Jr. to the communist cause. King, for his part, welcomed everyone who embraced the cause of black civil rights, regardless of their ideological ties. This included communists and socialists, but the idea that a devout man of God like King saw black rights as a mere step in a worldwide communist revolution was absurd. Malcolm was a conservative. King was a liberal. To their enemies, they were simply communists.

The feeling that black-rights activists were part of a front for communism and socialism was widespread. Jerry Falwell famously criticized “the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.” Falwell charged, “It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.” For the agents of intolerance, things haven’t changed much. On October 9, a McCain supporter told the candidate that he was angry about “socialists taking over our country.” McCain told him he was right to be angry.

The right wing continues to link the fight for black equality with socialism and communism. At the website of conservatism’s flagship publication, National Review, conservatives like Andy McCarthy argue whether Obama is “more Maoist than Stalinist,” and National Review writer Lisa Schiffren explicitly argued this summer that Obama must have communist links based on his interracial background. Schiffren mused, “for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.”

This conclusion is one she shares with Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s, who declared that “amalgamation is ultimately the goal of the Communist element.” (To be fair, these conclusions make a bit of sense: could there be a more perfect vessel for a secret communist takeover of the United States than a biracial one-term senator from Chicago with an Arabic-sounding name? At a Starbucks somewhere, Chairman Mao is leeching WiFi for a quick instant message to William Ayers: “It’s happening exactly how we planned it.")

McCain, a child of privilege who spent the late 1960s in a Vietnamese prison camp, may simply be unaware of the feelings and historical context he has evoked through his campaign’s rhetoric. When Sarah Palin accuses Obama of “palling around with terrorists” and suggests that Obama hates his own country enough to wish it violence, the McCain campaign fuels age-old paranoia built around the conflation of black rights and the radical left. As for McCain himself, his attempts to tamp down the vitriol of his crowds suggest that he is somewhat confused by their response. He wants voters to dislike Obama, but he seems unaware of just what he has unleashed. However, by implicitly invoking the idea that Obama represents a socialist takeover of the United States, McCain is inviting what can only be a rational response from those who would die for their country: violence. What else is a patriot to do when freedom is threatened? Especially when their fears have been validated by no less authoritative a source than the Republican nominee for president of the United States?

John McCain is no George Wallace, and a direct comparison may not be what Lewis intended. Rather, Lewis was expressing concern that the McCain campaign’s rhetoric could lead some of their supporters to conclude that violence is the only rational response to an Obama victory. (This is essentially the position staked out by the Obama campaign, which both rejected the Wallace comparison and remained critical of the “hateful rhetoric” at McCain rallies.) A veteran of the 1968 civil-rights march with Dr. King across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, John Lewis has the kind of credibility on mob violence that John McCain has on torture.

We should listen to him very carefully.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=is_john_lewis_right_after_all

Cindy McCain’s Attack On Obama’s Record Offends Military Spouses

Huffingtonpost.com, 10/12/08
Diane Tucker

At a rally in Bethlehem, Pa. last week, Cindy McCain spoke about having two sons serving on active duty: “I’m proud of my sons, but let me tell you, the day that Senator Obama cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body. I would suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day, and see what it means.”

Never mind how many drinks are needed to erase the mental image of Barack Obama wearing Cindy McCain’s stiletto heels. The fact is—many military spouses support Obama-Biden, and they were deeply offended by Mrs. McCain’s outburst.

Let’s fact-check her remark, shall we?

Cindy McCain was referring to a single 2007 Senate vote: Obama voted for a war-spending bill that included language calling for withdrawing troops from Iraq; but later he voted against a version of the same bill because it no longer included the withdrawal language. “We must fund our troops, but we owe them something more,” Obama said at the time. “We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war.”

In other words, Sen. Obama wanted to fund the troops, he just didn’t support the flawed military strategy this particular bill would enable. (Previously, Obama had voted YES on at least 10 other war funding bills. For a lengthy list of John McCain’s NO votes on military funding, click here.)

“It ruffles our feathers when someone claims that Barack Obama doesn’t support the troops, because the Obamas have gone out of their way to understand the military, its families, and its veterans,” Stephanie Himel-Nelson, deputy director of outreach for Blue Star Families for Obama, told OffTheBus. “In fact, Michelle Obama has adopted military families as one of her causes.”

Would Cindy McCain “Change Shoes” With These Military Wives?

“When millionaires such as Cindy McCain act as if they understand our lives, and the lives of everyday military families and veterans, we get upset,” said Himel-Nelson.

Today the number of service men and women forced to deploy over and over again is unprecedented. Loneliness is leading to frayed marriages. Toddlers are just getting to know their parents when—poof!—mommy and daddy disappear to serve overseas again. Career paths are falling off track. Household budgets are in disarray.

Imagine what parenting must be like when one spouse keeps bouncing in and out of the picture. “It’s a delicate dance,” Heidi Goeman, Beaufort, SC told OffTheBus. “Kids change, rules change, and perspectives change while my husband is away. When he returns home, the lay of the land isn’t the same.” Goeman and her husband have endured four deployments together.

Many children are too young to articulate their response to repeated separations. “Our seven-year-old thought he was at fault for his dad’s going away, despite our best efforts to prepare him,” said Goeman.

Deployments Are Lasting Longer, Coming Closer Together

Casey Spurr’s husband has been deployed three times. “Mostly I find myself saying ‘I wish your daddy was here’ when I really, really need to take a break, or when our son lets out a big belly laugh—he has the best laugh,” said the Virginia Beach, Va. resident. Spurr told OffTheBus, “Obama proposes a Military Family Advisory Board, which I think is long overdue.”

The number of Navy and Air Force vets re-deployed to fill gaps in Army units on a one-off basis—with just a few weeks of combat training—continues to grow. “The Navy is providing manpower because the Army doesn’t have enough troop strength for our front lines,” said Vivian Walker, a Navy veteran and military spouse who is using her GI Bill benefits to earn a Ph.D. in public administration and urban policy.

Walker confesses she forgot her wedding anniversary amid the chaos of managing work and family by herself. “A big paper was due, I was trying to find a Halloween costume for our four-year old, my mother was visiting...the list goes on, but I’m not complaining. The only time I get upset is when I feel I have to defend my patriotism if I vote for Obama. I live this war daily. My support for the troops is all-consuming.”

Maria Arwitz’s husband is a Navy dentist who was onboard the USS Comstock when it delivered a marine corps unit to Afghanistan in 2002. Three years later he was sent to Iceland for 11 months, something that “probably would not have happened if Navy Medicine wasn’t stretched so thin,” Arwitz told OffTheBus. “He deployed right after one of our 10-month-old twins underwent heart surgery. It taught me a lot about how strong a military mom has to be with no family around.”

Arwitz likes that Obama believes all Americans are entitled to quality health care. “The conditions at Walter Reed Hospital really infuriate me. I feel connected to these troops when they return home—I shop with their wives at the commissary, my kids play with their kids on the playground. You wouldn’t believe what some families are going through,” said the Beaufort, SC resident.

The Rub: A Lack Of Honesty From The Bush Administration

Obviously there is a need for some level of military secrecy. But to what degree should families allow themselves to be kept in the dark?

“We want to know that the sacrifices we make are for a reason. That when our family members are in harm’s way, they are protected as much as possible. That the leaders who deploy them will bring them home as soon as possible,” said Bella Harris, Chesapeake, Va. She is married to a nuclear power officer on board the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier based in Japan. Harris told OffTheBus she admires McCain, but is voting for Obama because “he has a better plan for health care reform, and a more experienced running mate.”

Kathy Roth-Douquet, Beaufort, S.C. has lived in six places on three continents since she married a marine corps officer 11 years ago. “Our fourth-grader has attended six schools because of all the moves, but it’s a source of pride that we were asked to do something difficult and found the resources to do it,” she told OffTheBus. Roth-Douquet is the author of AWOL, a book about the unexcused absence of America’s upper classes from military service and how it hurts the country. Recently she co-produced a video featuring military wives for Obama, after co-founding (with Laura Dempsey) a grassroots organization of military families called Blue Star Families for Obama.

All of these women respect McCain for his Vietnam-era service, but they believe Obama has the temperament to safely lead the United States out of the quagmire in the Middle East. “One doesn’t have to join the military to serve their country—nor does serving in the military necessarily qualify one to be president,” said Walker. They trust Obama to use diplomacy, not just military might.

For The Record, Mrs. McCain…

The non-partisan group Disabled American Veterans gives John McCain a 20 percent rating for his voting record on veterans’ issues. (It gives Barack Obama an 80 percent rating.)

The non-partisan group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gives McCain a “D” grade for his voting record on issues such as additional funding for combat body armor, and additional funding for post-traumatic stress disorder and other medical treatment. (Obama earned a B +.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/the-big-chill-cindy-mccai_b_134068.html