Obama's Penn State rally draws 20,000

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer 6 minutes ago

Shivering in blankets of Penn State's colors, some 20,000 people filled a campus lawn Sunday to hear Barack Obama say he can win the Democratic nomination even if rival Hillary Rodham Clinton stays in the race.

Supporters stood in long lines for hours to hear Obama ahead of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.

On a sunny day with temperatures in the low 40's, most bundled up for the type of large-scale rally that has become the candidate's trademark.

"It's been a while, and it's a little cold, but we really like Barack. He's inspiring," said 19-year-old Caitlin McDonnell, wrapped in a blue Nittany Lions blanket.

Pennsylvania's primary is the next contest in the Obama-Clinton fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Keystone State, which will allocate 158 delegates, is the biggest single delegate prize remaining in the Democratic primaries.

Some Democrats, particularly Obama's supporters, have voiced concern that the hard-fought, drawn-out race is already hurting the party's chances to win in November.

The Illinois senator told the crowd not to worry.

"As this primary has gone on a little bit long, there have been people who've been voicing some frustration," Obama said.

"I want everybody to understand that this has been a great contest, great for America. It's engaged and involved people like never before. I think it's terrific that Senator Clinton's supporters have been as passionate as my supporters have been because that makes the people invested and engaged in this process, and I am absolutely confident that when this primary season is over Democrats will be united."

Clinton's husband, the former president, said Sunday that those voicing concern about the duration of the nomination fight should just "chill out" and let the race run its course.

Obama's rally drew an estimated 20,000 to 22,000 people, according to university official Richard DiEugenio — by far the biggest in a weekend of smaller, face-to-face campaign stops since Obama launched a six-day bus tour through the state on Friday.

From Penn State, he traveled to the state capital of Harrisburg, where he delivered the same call for party unity. He also took aim at Republican nominee-to-be John McCain, saying the Arizona senator undercut his own credibility by supporting the lengthening of Bush administration tax cuts he previously opposed.

"The wheels on the Straight Talk Express came off," Obama said, referring to the nickname for McCain's campaign vehicle. "He wants to extend those same tax cuts that he said were irresponsible."

Earlier in the day, he visited a university-run dairy farm and fed a slurping one-month calf, laughing as the calf sucked hard on the nipple of the bottle, eventually draining it. "She chowed that sucker down," Obama said.

His weekend of campaigning also included a comical trip to the lanes at a bowling alley in Altoona, where he was, by his own admission, terrible.

"My economic plan is better than my bowling," Obama told fellow bowlers Saturday evening at the Pleasant Valley Recreation Center.

"It has to be," one man called out.

As he laced up his bowling shoes, Obama let everyone know he hadn't bowled since Jimmy Carter was president.

He shared a lane with Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey Jr., who endorsed him Friday and joined him on the bus tour, and local homemaker Roxanne Hart. As the game went on, several small children bowled with Obama as well.

Obama's first ball flew well off his hand but ended up in the gutter. On his second try, he knocked down four pins.

About five lanes over, a young man in a T-shirt that said "Beer Hunter" fell on his backside while bowling and still recorded a strike.

The crowd of regulars pressed in to take pictures, get autographs and rib him on his poor skills.

Obama did improve, nearly getting a strike in one frame, and in the seventh, picking up a spare, giving him a score of 37. Casey had a score of 71 after getting a strike, and Hart, with one less frame, racked up a score of 82.

"I was terrible," Obama laughed as he shook hands with people in a crowd that gathered outside once word spread he was there.

Asked about his game, Hart sounded like a politician, saying: "He has potential."

The Whitewater Proxy :Hillary Clinton the liar

POTOMAC WATCH
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL



The Whitewater Proxy
March 28, 2008; Page A12

Hillary Clinton's been all the news this week, after she "misspoke" about Whitewater, Travelgate, missing files, suspicious pardons, Johnny Chung and cattle futures. Oh wait, after she "misspoke" about Bosnia. Oh wait, same thing.

That's one way to make sense of the unrelenting, unforgiving, 24/7 news coverage of Mrs. Clinton's fictional telling of Bosnian sniper fire and the subsequent debunking of her every word. In a nasty primary battle that has already featured racial slurs and Chicago slum lords, missing tax documents, and a "monster," you might expect this slip-up to have been yet another blip in the media cycle.
[Hillary Clinton]

But that would have been to deny the press, the pundits, Democrats, and even Barack Obama, the catharsis of finally -- finally! -- getting a chance to confront the Clintons' questionable mores. Hillary's and Bill's scandals have been the elephant in the primary room ever since she first signaled a run. Yet up to now everyone has been too scared, or too loyal, or too weary to touch the ugly past. Her Bosnia misspeak is now serving as proxy for all the truths about the Clintons' non-truths, allowing even liberals to break free from their Clinton dependence.

And how liberating it is! The video of Mrs. Clinton's speech about Bosnian sniper fire, twinned with real footage of calmly strolling down the Tuzla tarmac, has been running on one continuous TV loop. Reporters have dug up every last person who accompanied her on the sedate trip to pour a little more salt in the wound. "The Audacity of Hoax," yelled a blog posting in the liberal Nation magazine, which innocently asked: "What else is she fibbing about?" Bill Burton, Barack Obama's spokesman, gleefully noted that Mrs. Clinton's recent attacks on his candidate were designed to deflect attention away from her "made up" Bosnia story. Heavy emphasis on the "made up" part. No need to mention Vince Foster, Red Bone, Marc Rich or Webster Hubbell. All this will do.

The real beauty of Mrs. Clinton's Tuzla torture is that it's self-inflicted. Up to now, Team Clinton had done a surreal job of keeping the scandal genie in its bottle. Think about it: Most of 1990s politics was defined by the Clinton White House, which in turn was defined by the Clintons' endless ethical firestorms. The American public remembers this, one reason why a majority consistently says in polls that Mrs. Clinton is "untrustworthy." And yet even as the former First Lady has lobbed ethical accusations at Mr. Obama -- slamming him for "plagiarizing" speeches, hitting him for his relationship with "slum landlord" Tony Rezko or the Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- her own past has remained a no-go zone for most of the press and for her rival.

This is hangover from the remarkable job the Clintons did in painting themselves as the victims of the so-called "right-wing attack machine." They, and their devotees, have carried that victim mentality into the present, and have made clear that anyone who revives the issues of billing records or cattle futures is little more than the second coming of Ken Starr. They've done such a remarkable job of portraying any investigation into their undeniable shenanigans as a "partisan" venture that even the press has looked away and whistled.

As for Mr. Obama, the Clintons have boxed him in with his own rhetoric. Mrs. Clinton is working hard to convince all those superdelegates that Mr. Obama would carry too much baggage with him in a general election. That's a debate he'd love to have, as he noted that he could fit his luggage neatly into an overhead compartment while she'd drag along a cargo hold of past scandals.

But this past weekend offered an example of how the Clinton team would fight back. That's when Obama Iowa coordinator, Gordon Fischer, used his blog to take issue with recent Bill Clinton comments about patriotism. "Bill Clinton cannot possibly seriously believe Obama is not a patriot, and cannot possibly be said to be helping -- instead he is hurting -- his own party. B. Clinton should never be forgiven. Period. This is a stain on his legacy, much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress," he wrote.

The blowback from the Clinton camp was tsunami-like. "This attack . . . the disgusting comments . . . a negative message . . . gutter politics," sputtered Clinton advisers on a conference call. "It's important that voters know that at the same time Sen. Obama talks about changing the tenor and tone of our politics," said communications director Howard Wolfson, Mr. Obama's campaign is attacking Sen. Clinton's "personal life." The Obama campaign sensed danger, and within a few hours, Mr. Fischer had donned a hair shirt and replaced his post with this: "I sincerely apologize for a tasteless and gratituous [sic] comment I made here about President Clinton. It was unnecessary and wrong."

No more apologizing. Now comes the euphoria, the liberation, the freedom of . . . Bosnian snipers! Suddenly, liberals all over are remembering that they never really liked the Clintons, even as they defended them in the 1990s. Suddenly, they can sidle into a discussion about Mrs. Clinton's ethics, and all on a subject that (bonus!) is relevant to today's race. Suddenly, they can break free of the Clintons, much as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson did earlier this week, with a look of ecstasy, as he ran toward the daylight and endorsed Mr. Obama.

Which is why it is no surprise that this week also saw the beginning of a tide of Democrats, many of them one-time Clinton defenders, calling on her to abandon her bid, laying out the reasons for why she cannot win this race, and telling her to let go for the good of the party. Mrs. Clinton, being a Clinton, may well ignore them. But what is clear is that questions about her character and honesty are no longer verboten. If she does stay in, answering them will become the new reality of her campaign.

Write to kim@wsj.com

See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

Hillary’s St. Patrick’s Day Massacre

March 30, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

By FRANK RICH

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle “a watershed event” for her campaign because it revives her long history of balancing good works with “ ‘misstatements’ and elisions,” from the health-care task force fiasco onward.

But this event may be a watershed for two other reasons that have implications beyond Mrs. Clinton’s character and candidacy, spilling over into the 2008 campaign as a whole. It reveals both the continued salience of that supposedly receding issue, the Iraq war, and the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment.

What’s been lost in the furor over Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale is that her disastrous last recycling of it, the one that blew up in her face, kicked off her major address on the war, timed to its fifth anniversary. Still unable to escape the stain of the single most damaging stand in her public career, she felt compelled to cloak herself, however fictionally, in an American humanitarian intervention that is not synonymous with quagmire.

Perhaps she thought that by taking the huge gamble of misspeaking one more time about her narrow escape on the tarmac at Tuzla, she could compensate for misvoting on Iraq. Instead, her fictionalized derring-do may have stirred national trace memories of two of the signature propaganda stunts of the war: the Rambo myth the Pentagon concocted for Pvt. Jessica Lynch and President Bush’s flyboy antics on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during “Mission Accomplished.”

That Mrs. Clinton’s campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth two days after The Post exposed it as utter fiction also shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton — though surely knowing her story was false — thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady’s foreign trip — as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night — and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.

The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.

The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.

Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.

But the political power of the Bosnia incident speaks at least as much to the passions aroused by the war as to the media dynamics of the Web. For all the economic anxiety roiling Americans, they have not forgotten Iraq. The anger can rise again in a flash when stoked by events on the ground or politicians at home, as it has throughout the rites surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion and 4,000th American combat death. This will keep happening as it becomes more apparent that the surge is a stalemate, bringing neither lower troop levels nor anything more than a fragile temporary stability to Iraq. John McCain’s apparent obliviousness to this fact remains a boon to the Democrats.

The war is certainly a bigger issue in 2008 than race. Yet it remains a persistent Beltway refrain that race will hinder Mr. Obama at every turn, no matter how often reality contradicts the thesis. Whites wouldn’t vote for a black man in states like Iowa and New Hampshire; whites wouldn’t vote for blacks in South Carolina; blacks wouldn’t vote for a black man who wasn’t black enough. The newest incessantly repeated scenario has it that Mr. Obama’s fate now all depends on a stereotypical white blue-collar male voter in the apotheosized rust belt town of Deer Hunter, Pa.

Well, Mr. Obama isn’t going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama’s support. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, his white support was slightly up. As the pollster Peter Hart put it, this result was “a myth buster.” The noisy race wars have failed to stop Mr. Obama just as immigration hysteria didn’t defeat Senator McCain, the one candidate in his party who refused to pander to the Lou Dobbs brigades.

The myth that’s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech — the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright’s. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you’d think it’s still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed, no matter what the generational turnover, and that the Wright videos will terrorize white folks just as the Willie Horton ads did when the G.O.P. took out Michael Dukakis.

But politically and culturally we’re not in the 1980s — or pre-YouTube 2004 — anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate’s control of a message.

The 2008 campaign is, unsurprisingly enough, mostly of a piece with 2006, when Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. In that year’s signature race, a popular Senate incumbent, George Allen, was defeated by a war opponent in the former Confederate bastion of Virginia after being caught race-baiting in a video posted on the Web. Last week Mrs. Clinton learned the hard way that Iraq, racial gamesmanship and viral video can destroy a Democrat, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/opinion/30rich.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin#

Clinton Risks Credibility Gap Over `Fudged' Claims, Stances

Clinton Risks Credibility Gap Over `Fudged' Claims, Stances

By Indira Lakshmanan

March 28 (Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton, accused of exaggerating her experience and reversing policy positions, risks a widening credibility gap that may undermine her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The New York senator, who this week admitted to misrepresenting the danger she confronted in Bosnia, also has come under fire for allegedly distorting her role in opposing free trade and the war in Iraq, and overstating her involvement in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and health insurance to children.

The debate over these and other statements is fueling distrust among voters, according to analysts and recent polls. A Pew Research survey released yesterday showed 30 percent of white Democrats -- a group Clinton needs in order to win the remaining primaries -- regard her as a ``phony,'' twice as many as those who perceive rival Barack Obama that way. In late February, just 7.8 percent of voters surveyed by Pew described her as ``untrustworthy.''

``She's either fudged her positions or been downright disingenuous,'' said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic strategist who isn't working for any candidate. ``Any one'' episode ``wouldn't hurt her, but the accumulated weight has turned Democratic voters against her.''

Clinton spokesman Jay Carson dismisses questions about her credibility. ``She made a mistake recounting a trip she made as first lady to what was in fact a war zone,'' he said, referring to Bosnia. Voters ``don't ask for perfection, they just want to know that you are working hard for them, and no one works harder than Senator Clinton.''

More to Mine

While Obama, 46, an Illinois senator, has also been accused of padding his resume and taking more credit than he deserves, Clinton's longer record offers more material to mine for contradictions. And some observers say she's held to a tougher standard.

``We pay more attention to her because we know more about her,'' said Hank Sheinkopf, an unaligned Democratic strategist. ``The Clintons have been part of the daily American soap opera for 20 years.'' By contrast, ``Barack Obama doesn't have enough experience in the Senate to `get him' on things,'' he said.

A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted Feb. 21-25 found registered voters thought Senator John McCain, 71, the presumed Republican nominee, ``has more honesty and integrity'' than Clinton by a margin of 45 percent to 31 percent. Obama rated equally with McCain on those qualities.

Sheinkopf said Clinton hasn't done any more ``issue switching'' in the campaign than most candidates. ``What is new is the ability to catch it,'' he said. ``You can go online and check stuff instantly. Nobody gets away with anything.''

Offering Ammunition

Still, Clinton, 60, has provided ammunition to opponents. She has insisted that she supported weapons inspections, not war, in Iraq in 2002, although she gave speeches that year advocating action against Saddam Hussein before voting to authorize the use of force.

Clinton did another turnabout on Jan. 25, 10 days after she won the primary in Michigan, where she was the only major candidate on the ballot. She said both Michigan's and Florida's delegates should count -- even though she had previously agreed they wouldn't because the states had violated party rules.

While she has asserted on the campaign trail that she opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement from the start, Robert Reich, who was secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, said she never expressed to him concern about the labor and environmental issues that she highlights today.

``It was clear her concern about Nafta was about timing,'' Reich said in an interview, adding that she was afraid it might interfere with her universal health-care initiative.

Peacemaking

Clinton has said she helped ``bring peace to Northern Ireland'' and ``create the Children's Health Insurance Program.'' Those are overstatements, according to principals in those events, some of whom say that while she was supportive, she wasn't a main negotiator.

Her Northern Ireland claims are a ``wee bit silly,'' Nobel laureate and former First Minister David Trimble was quoted as saying March 8 in the Telegraph, the British newspaper. ``Being a cheerleader'' is ``different from being a principal player,'' he said. But John Hume, who shared the Nobel Prize with Trimble, credited Clinton with ``playing a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace.''

Last month, she called on Obama to reject support from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan because of anti-Semitic remarks. When a Dallas TV station challenged her to denounce a Hispanic leader who said black politicians had never helped her people, Clinton replied, ``People have every reason to express their opinions. I just don't agree with that'' -- before her campaign rejected the remarks.

Wright Videos

This week, Clinton said if she were Obama, she would have left the church of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his longtime pastor from whom Obama distanced himself only after videos of incendiary remarks circulated. Yet Clinton critics said she embraced Suha Arafat in November 1999 after a speech in which the late Palestinian leader's wife, in Arabic, accused Israel of using toxic gas on Palestinians.

Clinton said the translation she heard was incomplete; hours later, when she received a fuller transcript, she condemned the remarks.

To contact the reporter on this story: Indira Lakshmanan in Washington at ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aN1m3Y9LByD4

Obama Rewriting Rules for Raising Campaign Money Online

Obama Rewriting Rules for Raising Campaign Money Online

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 28, 2008; A06

When Christen Braun decided it was time to learn more about the presidential candidates, the 28-year-old high school teacher from suburban Pittsburgh turned to Google -- right where Sen. Barack Obama's campaign was waiting for her.

Her search triggered an ad for Obama's Web site, which prompted Braun, a Republican, to sign up for the Democratic senator's e-mail list -- and then to make her first political contribution, for $25.

Such transactions help illustrate how Obama has shattered fundraising records and challenged ideas about the way presidential bids are financed. While past campaigns have relied largely on support from small circles of wealthy and well-connected patrons, Obama has received contributions from more than 1 million donors. He raised $91 million in the first two months of 2008 alone, most of it in small amounts over the Internet.

Obama's unprecedented online fundraising success is often depicted as a spontaneous reaction to a charismatic candidate, particularly by young, Internet-savvy supporters. But it is the result of an elaborate marketing effort that has left Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, and Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, struggling to catch up.

Obama aides say their goal has been to "build an online relationship" with supporters who will not only give money but also knock on doors and help register voters for the candidate. To do so, they have spent heavily on Internet ads -- $2.6 million in February alone, more than 10 times as much as Clinton and more than 20 times as much as McCain.

Ads for Obama pop up on political Web sites, such as the left-leaning blog Daily Kos, and on more general ones, such as those of newspapers. Anyone visiting the Dallas Morning News in the weeks before the Texas primary, for instance, was likely to see an Obama appeal stretched along one edge of the screen. The campaign has also attached ads to certain search terms, such as "Iowa caucus locations" or "Ohio primary," on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft search engines.

Obama has targeted unlikely sites, such as the conservative Washington Times, where an ad for the candidate appeared yesterday on the same page as a story about an economic speech he gave that morning. But a click on the ad did not lead to a request for donations; instead, it took users to a page where they could sign up for invitations to campaign events.

This approach -- not directly asking for donations -- has been part of the campaign's strategy of slow-walking its way into supporters' wallets. Newcomers are led to a blog and an online store and are offered a chance to join local Obama groups.

Zack Exley, a campaign consultant who oversaw Internet fundraising for Sen. John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said Obama's e-mails to potential donors stand in stark contrast to those sent by the Clinton campaign.

One recent e-mail, from former president Bill Clinton, was blunt: "Any donation, even as little as $5, can make a difference in this campaign. If you haven't given online yet, now is the time."

Exley said that while the Clinton team has been "really aggressive," the Obama campaign has taken more time to build a rapport with potential donors.

"If you just look at the e-mails and the rhythm -- the Obama campaign has not asked for money every time they could have," Exley said. "They've tried to really show people that they're not just after your money. They're not treating you like an ATM."

Obama's online investment has not come cheap. In January, he spent $768,000 on Web ads, while Clinton spent $171,000 and McCain spent $151,000, campaign finance records show. In February, when Obama spent $2.6 million on ads, Clinton spent $198,000 and McCain spent $111,000.

Obama's take via the Internet in January and February has dwarfed those of his rivals. Clinton raised $37 million online; McCain raised $22 million overall but has not said how much of that came in online.

Political consultants who specialize in online fundraising say Obama has, in two months, rewritten the rules for raising campaign cash.

"Anytime you can reach 1 million donors with the click of a mouse, you redefine the way campaign finance is done in American politics," said Philip A. Musser, a Republican political strategist who serves as a consultant to Google.

The Internet allows a candidate's message to be put in front of virtually any audience. Emily's List, the nation's largest political action committee, spent heavily on Clinton during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses and ran ads that appeared when women in Iowa searched Google for such terms as "recipe," "stocking stuffer" and "post-Thanksgiving sales."

"We really were trying to get to women where they live," said Ramona Oliver, a spokeswoman for the group.

But whether the ads, which largely serve as points of entry, translate into support is not clear.

When one of Obama's ads caught Braun's attention, she clicked. But that was just the beginning. She was met by a welcome screen that presented an obstacle: It asked the visitor to supply an e-mail address to proceed.

At first she hesitated. The schoolteacher described herself as "one of those apathetic people who always felt, 'What does my single vote matter?' " But Braun wanted to learn more about Obama's education programs, so she relented.

Then the e-mails started to arrive.

One told her about the candidate's plan to end the war in Iraq. Another sought her help in registering voters. A video of Obama's "major speech on race" was sent. Of the dozens of e-mails she received, only a handful directly asked for money.

The approach paid off. This year she made four $25 contributions, and she also persuaded her father, a lifelong Republican, to register as a Democrat so he could join her in voting for Obama.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032702968.html?nav=rss_politics

Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough.

Just days after delivering the speech of a generation in Philly, Obama spoke about economics at the Cooper Union here in NYC on Thursday. Here is what Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect had to say about it:

Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough.

First, he connected all the dots -- between the complete dismantling of financial regulation, the declining economic opportunity and security for ordinary people, the current financial meltdown, and the political influence of Wall Street as the driver of these changes. Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief. Those who felt that Obama was capable of real growth that will transcend the campaign's early and somewhat feeble domestic policy proposals should feel vindicated.

The speech also showed real understanding and subtlety in grasping how financial "innovation" had outrun regulation, as well as a historical sense of the abuses of the 1920s repeating themselves. Obama is one of the few mainstream leaders -- Barney Frank is another -- calling for capital requirements to be extended to every category of financial institution that creates credit. This is exactly what's needed to prevent the next meltdown, but if it were put to a vote now, it would be rejected by legislators from both parties because they are still in thrall to market fundamentalism and Wall Street. That's where presidential leadership comes in.

That someone of Kuttner's caliber (just Wiki him, you'll see what I mean) is awed by Obama's grasp of economic issues is in itself telling. He goes on to say this:

The Clinton camp's rejoinder -- that Hillary is proposing to do more for the victims of the housing bust -- is totally unpersuasive. All along, she has treated the housing mess as its own self-contained scandal, rather than connecting it to the larger set of financial bubbles of which it is a part. The Frank-Dodd bill, which Obama is co-sponsoring, is a realistic remedy for purely the housing part of the crisis. If you read Clinton's March 24 speech on the housing crisis and how to fix it -- supposedly more robust than Obama's remedy -- she offers the same Frank-Dodd bill. She does not locate the mortgage crisis in the deeper financial one. And her idea of turning, for wise men, to Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan -- more than anyone the people who gave us this crisis -- is appalling.

My sense is that Obama has a bit more of Edwards in him than you'd ever guess by the latter's stubborn fence-sitting, and that was borne out in the speech as well:

So the speech was courageous, in that it goes well beyond the current Democratic party consensus, and one can only wonder about the reaction of some of Obama's own financial backers. He also took on a couple of other sacred cows, such as electricity and telecom deregulation, proven failures to everyone but industry defenders and their allies in the economics profession.

And lest you think Kuttner is just stumping for Barack, let it be known:

Unlike some of my friends, I have not fallen in love with Obama. I have been at this too long, and you risk getting your heart broken. I actually shared Krugman's critique of Obama's health insurance individual mandate and his proposal to tax the upper middle class to pay for a much exaggerated Social Security shortfall that is more like a rounding error. I simply conclude, based on what I've seen, that Obama is capable of real learning and real transformation, both of himself and of public opinion. Nothing I've seen suggests that's true of Hillary Clinton.

This breakdown of Obama's church

This breakdown of Obama's church is the most awesome thing I've heard in a long time. Kudos (shockingly) to CNN for allowing this gift!

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2008/03/24/intv.hopkins.trinity.church.cnn

Obama for America Daily Talking Points March 28, 2008

Obama for America Daily Talking Points

March 28, 2008

Bob Casey endorses Barack Obama

• Today, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey is endorsing Senator Barack Obama. Working families in Pennsylvania have few stronger advocates than Senator Casey. And that is why they can trust him when he says that Senator Obama is the one candidate who can take on the special interests, and bring Democrats and Republicans together so we can make health care affordable, strengthen our economy, and put the American dream within reach for every American.

Fighting for Main Street, not just Wall Street

• In a major economic address yesterday, Barack Obama outlined a comprehensive plan that makes it clear that he is the best choice to renew the American economy. He is the one candidate who will stop favoring the special interests and deliver the change we need for Americans who are struggling. As President, he will take action to face the foreclosure crisis, set up 21^st century rules of the road to prevent the kind of abuses that led to our current recession, and pursue an agenda of opportunity to reclaim the American Dream for working Americans.

• Back in September, Senator Obama spoke at NASDAQ and his words could not have been more prescient. He made it clear that Wall Street cannot succeed while Main Street is hurting. Our free market has created prosperity that is the envy of the world, but when it's abused for short term gain, we all suffer - sadly, that's become painfully clear throughout the subprime crisis. What was bad for Main Street has become bad for Wall Street. That's why Barack Obama will restore the fundamental truth that is at the heart of America 's success: that each American does better when all Americans do better.

• In his remarks, Senator Obama made it clear that special interests are a big cause of the problems we face. Under Democratic and Republican Administrations, instead of finding the right balance between the role of government and the market, Washington has given special interests the power to put their thumb on the scale. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street , but ends up hurting both.

• John McCain's plan for economy is the same as George Bush's - do nothing to help Americans facing foreclosure, and extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Barack Obama believes that the job of a president is to lead. That's why he'll work to help Americans facing foreclosure keep their homes at rates they can afford. And that's why he has a comprehensive plan to prevent mortgage fraud, close the bankruptcy loophole for mortgage companies, and provide a tax credit for homeowners.

• It's time for 21^st century rules of the road to keep pace with our 21^st century financial industry. If we let special interests set the agenda, we'll never prevent abuses that lead to the cycle of bubble and bust. But while Senator Clinton put off the tough questions and proposed turning to voices from the past, Barack Obama is ready to lead. His pragmatic principles for regulation will protect the American people and American business. If you borrow from government, you should be regulated. If we want to prevent abuses of the public trust, we need more transparency. If we want to protect the American people, we need to regulate dangerous practices like predatory lending that fall through the cracks.

• Barack Obama believes that the bedrock of our economic success is the American Dream. At a time when costs are rising and wages can't keep pace, he'll pursue a comprehensive agenda to advance opportunity for all Americans. Instead of endless tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, he'll give a tax cut to workers and seniors. He'll cut costs to make health care available for all Americans, rebuild our schools, make college affordable, and create millions of new jobs through investments in energy independence and infrastructure.

Barack Obama is the President we need to make our economy work for Wall Street and Main Street . He knows that the only way we're going to make real progress on the challenges we face is by bringing the country together and pushing back against the special interests. That's the change we need in Washington so that we can do what's right for our economy and the American people.

The long shadow cast by Obama's parents

The long shadow cast by Obama's parents

March 28: Barack Obama talks about the impact his upbringing has had on his presidential campaign. NBC's Lee Cowan reports in this latest segment of the continuing Family Ties series.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23846975#23846975

Pa. Sen. Bob Casey endorses Obama

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 14 minutes ago

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey endorsed Democrat Barack Obama on Friday, a move that could help the presidential candidate make inroads with white working-class voters dubbed "Casey Democrats" in the Keystone State.

Appearing on stage beside the Illinois senator, Casey told a boisterous rally, "I believe in my heart that there is one person who's uniquely qualified to lead us in that new direction and that is Barack Obama."

Pennsylvania's April 22 primary will allocate 158 delegates, the biggest single prize left in the drawn-out nomination battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Clinton is leading Obama in the state, by 12 points in one poll this month.

Casey is a first-term senator and the son of a popular former governor of the state. Casey is Catholic and, like his father, is known for his opposition to abortion and support of gun rights. His support could help Obama make inroads among Catholic voters, who have preferred Clinton to Obama in earlier primaries and strongly favor her in Pennsylvania polls.

"I really believe that in a time of danger around the world and in division here at home, Barack Obama can lead us, he can heal us, he can help rebuild America," he said.

Obama told the crowd that he had not pushed Casey hard for an endorsement.

"Bob is such a gracious person and such a thoughtful person that I did not press him on this endorsement," especially since Obama trails Clinton in Pennsylvania polls.

"It would have been easy for Bob just to stay out of it, just to stay neutral, I think everybody would have accepted that," Obama said.

Casey said that he called Clinton Thursday night to tell her of his decision.

"She was very gracious. We know that she's a great senator, she's a great leader," Casey said.

Asked by Casey's endorsement, Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said, "We're proud of the support we have from across Pennsylvania, including Gov. (Ed) Rendell, several members of Congress and mayors from across the state. We look forward to having his support in the general election as Democrats unite to beat John McCain and to turn our country around."

Clinton's backers in the state include Rep. John Murtha, who was an early advocate of withdrawing from Iraq, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is black.

Meantime, a leading Obama backer, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is saying Clinton should abandon her White House run.

"There is no way that Sen. Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination," Leahy told Vermont Public Radio in an interview that aired Thursday.

In a statement issued Friday, Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who endorsed Obama in January, said Casey's endorsement of Obama is the latest sign of how the race is going.

"Sen. Clinton has every right, but not a very good reason, to remain a candidate for as long as she wants to. As far as the delegate count and the interests of a Democratic victory in November go, there is not a very good reason for drawing this out. But as I have said before, that is a decision that only she can make," Leahy said.

The Casey endorsement came as Obama began a six-day campaign swing through Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has an estimated 3.8 million Catholics, or just over 30 percent of the state's population, and the percentage among Democrats is estimated to be slightly higher.

Obama's team hopes that Casey will help narrow Clinton's huge lead among white working-class voters — men in particular. Clinton routed Obama among that demographic in Ohio and Texas on March 4, raising questions about his electability in November. In recent weeks, Obama has stressed economic issues important to the middle class, and he is outspending Clinton on television advertising that features blue-collar imagery.

Clinton and her supporters have been making their own direct appeals: backers Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., last week wrote a letter to Pennsylvania Catholics emphasizing her plans on health care, mortgage foreclosures and fuel costs. Clinton has been endorsed by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, giving her access to his potent political operation.

Obama has lacked a major endorsement by a statewide Pennsylvania politician, and Casey's could help jump-start his Pennsylvania campaign. Casey has close ties to organized labor, which has been divided in Pennsylvania between the two candidates.

Casey had a 62 percent approval rating among Democrats in a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

Casey's move could also be seen as a political jab at the Clintons. Bill Clinton was the Democrats' presidential nominee in 1992 when Casey's father was not given a prime-time speaking position at the party's convention, which outraged many of the state's conservative Democrats.

Casey was to campaign with Obama as he travels across Pennsylvania by bus.

The bus tour will feature "listening sessions," a technique Clinton used in her 2000 Senate campaign to convince skeptical New Yorkers that she was not just a carpetbagger looking for a plum post after leaving the White House.

Obama hopes to prevent Clinton from racking up a large win in the state which could eat away at his delegate advantage and give her new life in the final primaries running to June.

It may be a tough sell for some in the state, which has a sizable elderly population. In the previous primaries, older Democrats have favored Clinton, while younger voters tend toward Obama.

Casey served two four-year terms as state auditor general. He lost a 2002 gubernatorial bid in the Democratic primary to Rendell.

Casey was elected to the Senate in 2006, defeating conservative GOP incumbent Rick Santorum. Obama campaigned for Casey, but so did Clinton and her husband.

___

Associated Press Writer Kimberly Hefling in Washington contributed to this report.

Sam Stein

Pastor Of Clinton's Former Church: Don't Use Wright To Polarize

March 25, 2008, The Huffington Post

On Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton re-stoked the flames of the controversy surrounding Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, saying she would have long ago distanced herself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright if she had attended his church.

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton told a gathering of the campaign press corps, repeating a line she used earlier in the day on a Pittsburgh radio program. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

But the pastor at the church that Clinton did once attend has recently expressed public support for Wright. He's even proclaimed it a "grave injustice" to make a judgment on Wright based off of "two or three sound bites," and criticized those who would "use a few of [Wright's] quotes to polarize."

Last week, Dean Snyder, the senior minister at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C. -- which the Clintons famously attended while in the White House -- released a little noticed statement offering a sympathetic defense of the totality of Wright's work.

"The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times," Snyder wrote. "He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize."

Snyder, it should be noted, was not the pastor at Foundry during the Clinton years. That was the previous minister, J. Philip Wogaman. Moreover, there seems to be confusion as to exactly what church Clinton now attends. Her campaign did not return requests for comment.

However, Foundry was cited on numerous occasions as a steady presence during the first couple's time in the White House. And in January 2001, Bill Clinton gave a farewell speech to the congregation, thanking the church for its work in the city as well as for its "courage" to welcome gay and lesbian Christians.

Snyder, according to the church's website, became senior minister in 2002. "Before his appointment to Foundry, he served as director of communications for the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. His writings on theology, Biblical interpretation, and Christian mission have appeared in dozens of publications."

And in a recent New York Times article, even he acknowledged that some in his congregation were aghast at Wright's remarks.

"During staff meetings this week at his church," the Times reported, "Snyder said he noticed the rising awareness among some African-Americans of white Americans, he said, 'who don't understand the history of black people in this country and the role of the black church as a prophetic voice, and that in church you can say things that you couldn't in larger society.'"

Bosnian Vet Accuses Hillary of Valor Theft

Bosnian Vet Accuses Hillary of Valor Theft

A veteran of Bosnia who was at the event in Tuzla where Hillary Clinton falsely claimed to have landed under sniper fire is accusing the Senator of theft of valor. As General Walter L. Stewart Jr. of the Pennsylvania National Guard said earlier today on a conference call, soldiers who actually have been in war zones and performed under fire deeply despise those who falsely claim such valor. They feel this way because it attempts to cheapen or make less, their real and actual valor.

The General pointed out "this wasn't an emergency resupply mission to the Alamo. If there had been any danger that mission wouldn't have landed."

Common sense tells us the First Lady and Chelsea would never have been put in harms way by our military. Hillary's tale of bravery and valor, because it was false, is finding resentment among those who actually did serve and Tammi K. (nee Jann) Hertherington who was at Tuzla when Senator Clinton landed is one. Here is her story.

Dear Sir,

I feel compelled to write to you in regards to Senator Clinton’s remarks regarding her visit to Bosnia.

I was present at the base in question when the First Lady visited and am intimately familiar with the situation on the ground at the time. It strikes me as beyond misstatement or clarity of memory for Senator Clinton to suggest that this visit in any way compares with the reality of those of us serving in theater experienced or presented a threat to her or her daughter.

As a service person in the US Army, I was deployed to Bosnia immediately after the Peace Accord was signed and served there for eleven months in 1996. I was there at Tuzla Air base when the First Lady visited, and there was no sniper fire or anyone running under cover. I saw both the First Lady and her daughter in our headquarters building (we called it the 'White House'). When I saw them in the lobby of our Headquarters neither her or her daughter had on the "Flak" vests which even we were required to wear at all times when not inside a building.

It was my fortune to be working in the Headquarter building as a Communications Specialist, and while I did go out to the ZOS (Zone of Separation) once and lived under "Full battle rattle" rules, I would never in any way compare my experience with those who daily risked their lives. That was the M.P.'s who went on daily missions trying to round up weapons and militant individuals who opposed the Peace Accord and the contract workers who aided the Multi-National forces in trying to rebuild the infrastructure (bridges, communication, water) that had been blown up. If, as I believe, it is improper for me to compare my involvement with those who took the bulk of the real risks it is even more improper for any visiting dignitary to compare their own for any reason, let alone for personal gain.

I am quite angry that what I and my fellow soldiers worked to achieve should be used as a playing card to build up a political nominee and tear down another. This is not what those of us who actually risked our lives were working for, we were trying to maintain a Peace Keeping mission in a country that had been ravaged by ethnic cleansing. To trivialize the atrocities suffered by the real people I met in that country for political gain is beyond my ability to comprehend. I met mothers who had lost their children and children who had lost their parents. The sheer leap of credibility that the First Lady would have brought her daughter into an active war zone is an insult to the people there who suffered more than real risk, they suffered real loss.

I did have contact with some of the general population on a daily basis. Many came to work for the Military in custodial capacities. Many carried all that they possessed in plastic bags every day. They brought their own food and cooked daily on little burner plates. I was constantly amazed at how upbeat and optimistic some of the people were in spite of things. It still is hard for me to think of Srebenica and all of the women who lost husbands, sons, and fathers because of religion and nationalistic fervor.

My father still works as a Civil Servant at WOMAK on Ft. Bragg, NC and a couple of years ago he met a Bosnian woman and her daughter, who had lived through the worst of it. They got to talking and found out that I had been over there and told him to tell me 'thank you' for what we had done. It still humbles me and chokes me up a little to know that even after all of these years there is appreciation for our past efforts.

I was simply a soldier doing my job in Bosnia and I believe in what we accomplished there. I do not either want to make of my service more than it was nor to denigrate those who served with me and those who lived through more than any of us. It seems to me that if I simply stand by while others “spin” their involvement for their own personal or political ambitions that I would be contributing to the slander of my fellows in arms and the people we were working to help in Bosnia, so I offer you my personal experience of the reality of the situation.

To verify my story I have included a copy of an commendation I received for service in the Bosnian theater during that period. It would be my honor to provide you more of my perspective if it would serve to deliver the truth to the American people.

Best Regards,

Tammi K Hetherington (nee Jann)

(formerly)

SPC

141 Signal Battalion, 22^nd Signal Brigade, 1^st Armored Division, US Army

Task Force Eagle

Hillary Clinton; fibber in chief

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article3634746.ece

From The Times
March 28, 2008

Hillary Clinton; fibber in chief
Her blatant deceit over Bosnia, among other lies, is about the last nail in
her coffinGerard Baker
A good memory is needed once we have lied," observed Pierre Corneille, the
17th-century French tragedian. He was right. The complexities involved in
keeping an untruth plausible and consistent are so tortuous that to be
really good at lying demands exceptional recall of what was said when and
where.

But Corneille was writing before the age of YouTube. Nowadays, no amount of
familiarity with memory's labyrinth will save you when there is downloadable
disproof at the click of a mouse button. So Hillary Clinton discovered this
week, when she was caught out in a prize fib about a trip she made to Bosnia
when she was First Lady 12 years ago.

Dilating on her extensive experience of foreign affairs, the New York
senator told a campaign event last week that she vividly remembered how,
with the Balkans still a cauldron of war, she had flown into an airfield
under sniper fire. She had had to dash, head-down from the aircraft, she
told the spellbound audience, to the safety of waiting cars, and the planned
traditional arrival ceremony had been hastily cancelled in the mêlée.

It sounded thrilling - like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. The problem
was, it probably did come out of a Tom Clancy novel. It was pure fiction.
CBS unearthed some news video of the arrival ceremony and it was promptly
disseminated on YouTube. There was Mrs Clinton, serene and smiling,
strolling with her entourage from the plane, head held high, and in no
evident danger from snipers, terrorists, or even the odd slightly miffed
Serb. Seconds later she was being greeted in what looked very much like a
traditional arrival ceremony on the tarmac where a small girl embraced her
and the two chatted warmly for a while. I've been in more physical danger
coming out of the car park at Heathrow.

Confronted with the incontrovertible evidence Mrs Clinton acknowledged this
week that she "misspoke". Misspeak is an Orwellian term deployed by
politicians to describe what has happened when they have been caught in a
barefaced lie.

The Clintons have a well-formed habit of misspeaking. Bill Clinton, of
course, was always doing it. But his wife has also over the years mastered
the art of misspeaking in what Mark Twain once described as an "experienced,
industrious, ambitious and often quite picturesque" way.

She has misspoken on any number of occasions when the straight truth might
have been very damaging: over her involvement in the various scandals of the
early Clinton years. But alongside these instrumental whoppers, there have
been some befuddlingly pointless little tiddlers too.

For no obvious reason she once claimed her parents named her after Sir
Edmund Hillary, even though she was born more than five years before the
mountaineer's ascent of Everest, when he was known by almost no one outside
New Zealand.

When she ran for New York senator she claimed to have been a lifelong fan of
the New York Yankees even though no one could recall her ever having
expressed the slightest interest in or knowledge of the baseball team.

In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that
it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain
truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about
landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to
dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that
it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.

Someone once noted that the thing about the Clintons is that they will
choose a big lie when a small lie will do, and choose a small lie when the
truth will do. Most of the time they get away with it. But occasionally, an
inconvenient truth, like a blue dress with DNA on it, or some forgotten news
footage, shows up and damns them.

The Bosnia misspeak, unnecessary as it was, revealed much, however. It
helped to expose a much bigger untruth Mrs Clinton has been peddling
throughout the Democratic primary campaign - that her time in the White
House means she has the necessary foreign policy experience to be president.

First Ladies don't acquire real foreign policy experience. We know that Mrs
Clinton did not, as she claimed, play a large role in the Northern Ireland
peace process, that she was not, as she claimed, a key voice in counsels on
the Balkans, and that she did not even have security clearance in the White
House for the most sensitive of conversations about national security.

So the problem with the ripping yarn about the Bosnia snipers is that it
offers hard evidentiary disproof of improbable claims about her role during
the White House years.

With this latest deceit stripped away, there is not much left to Mrs
Clinton's disintegrating campaign for the Democratic nomination. It capped a
bad week for her, a week that might have signalled the end of her hopes.

With a deft speech that was somewhat lacking in complete honesty itself,
Barack Obama last week seemed to have acquitted himself quite well, for now,
of the charge of being an associate of a ranting, anti-American black
preacher. More important, the collapse last week of efforts to schedule a
new vote in Florida and Michigan, two states whose earlier primary votes
have been disqualified, was deadly to Mrs Clinton. It is now virtually
impossible for her to finish ahead of Mr Obama in the delegate count when
the primary season ends in early June.

That really ought to be that. After that final primary in Puerto Rico on
June 1, Mr Obama will have won more states, more delegates and more popular
votes than Mrs Clinton. How in those circumstances can Mrs Clinton claim a
moral case for staying in the race?

Her answer is to persuade the party's super-delegates - top party leaders
and elected officials who will have the casting votes - that she is more
electable than Mr Obama, and that they would be doing the party a favour if
they chose her over the wishes of the tens of millions of people who have
voted in the primaries.

They are unlikely to be taken in. They are more likely to view it as another
example of Senator Clinton's misspeaking.

Time for Clinton to step aside?

Time for Clinton to step aside?

March 27: Talk show host Ed Shultz joins the Morning Joe team to explain why he believes the Clinton campaign should throw in the towel.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23829449#23829449

Obama calls for economic relief

Obama calls for economic relief

March 27: Sen. Barack Obama delivers an economic speech in New York, proposing an additional economic stimulus package and relief for homeowners.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23827413#23827413

Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008

Is Al Gore the Answer?

By Joe Klein

Unlike Barack Obama, Bill Clinton does not believe in "the fierce urgency of now." The former President has an exquisitely languid sense of how political time unfurls. He understands that those moments the political community, especially the media, considers urgent usually aren't. He has seen his own election and re-election—and completing his second term—pronounced "impossible" and lived to tell the tale. He remembers that in spring 1992 he had pretty much won the Democratic nomination but was considered a dead man walking, running third behind Bush the Elder and Ross Perot. He knows that April is the silly season in presidential politics, the moment when candidates involved in a bruising primary battle seem weakest and bloodied, as both Hillary Clinton and Obama do now. It's the moment when pundits demand action—"Drop out, Hillary!"—and propound foolish theories. And so I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I'm slouching toward, well, a theory: if this race continues to slide downhill, the answer to the Democratic Party's dilemma may turn out to be Al Gore.

This April promises to be crueler than most. The two campaigns have started attacking each other with chainsaws, while the Republican John McCain is moving ahead in some national polls. At this point, Clinton can only win the nomination ugly: by superdelegates abandoning Obama and turning to her, in droves—not impossible, but not very likely either. Even if Clinton did overtake Obama, it would be very difficult for her to win the presidency: African Americans would never forgive her for "stealing" the nomination. They would simply stay home in November, as would the Obamista youth. (Although the former President is probably thinking: Yeah, but John McCain is a flagrantly flawed candidate too—I'd accept even a corrupted nomination and take my chances.)

Which is not to say that Clinton's candidacy is entirely without purpose now that she is pursuing a Republican-style race gambit, questioning Obama's 20-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. Democrats will soon learn how damaging that relationship might be in a general election. They'll also see if Obama has the gumption to bounce back, work hard—not just arena rallies for college kids but roundtables for the grizzled and unemployed in American Legion halls—and change the minds that have turned against him. The main reason superdelegates have not yet rallied round Obama is that the party is collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how he performs in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana.

He will probably do well enough to secure the nomination. But what if he tanks? What if he can't buy a white working-class vote? What if he loses all three states badly and continues to lose after that? I'd guess that the Democratic Party would still give him the nomination rather than turn to Clinton. But no one would be very happy—and a year that should have been an easy Democratic victory, given the state of the economy and the unpopularity of the incumbent, might slip away.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. Pish-tosh, you say, and you're probably right. But let's play a little. Let's say the elders of the Democratic Party decide, when the primaries end, that neither Obama nor Clinton is viable. Let's also assume—and this may be a real stretch—that such elders are strong and smart enough to act. All they'd have to do would be to convince a significant fraction of their superdelegate friends, maybe fewer than 100, to announce that they were taking a pass on the first ballot at the Denver convention, which would deny the 2,025 votes necessary to Obama or Clinton. What if they then approached Gore and asked him to be the nominee, for the good of the party—and suggested that he take Obama as his running mate? Of course, Obama would have to be a party to the deal and bring his 1,900 or so delegates along.

I played out that scenario with about a dozen prominent Democrats recently, from various sectors of the party, including both Obama and Clinton partisans. Most said it was extremely unlikely ... and a pretty interesting idea. A prominent fund raiser told me, "Gore-Obama is the ticket a lot of people wanted in the first place." A congressional Democrat told me, "This could be our way out of a mess." Others suggested Gore was painfully aware of his limitations as a candidate. "I don't know that he'd be interested, even if you handed it to him," said a Gore friend. Chances are, no one will hand it to him. The Democratic Party would have to be monumentally desperate come June. And yet ... is this scenario any more preposterous than the one that gave John McCain the Republican nomination? Yes, it's silly season. But this has been an exceptionally "silly" year.

• 
  

• Find this article at:
• http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1725678,00.html

Why Obama was right in not repudiating his pastor.

Standing By His Man Why Obama was right in not repudiating his pastor. Martin Peretz, The New Republic Published: Thursday, March 26, 2008 The power of the preacher is an unmeasured force in American life. Of course, now that it has become an issue in a political campaign, we are focusing on the one minister and the one candidate whose lives at church have been intertwined both in fact and in the public eye. The two men are each charismatic in their own ways, different ways, as anyone who has seen them speak (if even just on television or on syncopated and, thus, distorted YouTube clips) can attest. Barack Obama speaks in a professorial manner in which the logic of his argument, calmly laid out, is the drama of the oration. I have my own analogy. Of course, I never heard Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. speak. But I read into his addresses and opinions the moral and legal ganglion of more than seven decades of our national history, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. And I hear in Obama's cadence not only what makes him attractive to audiences but also something very much like Holmes's disciplined thinking, and it is this that makes this presidential aspirant truly eloquent. In only a decade in public life, he has become the (oh yes, gangling) ganglion of our hopes for a post-racial country. It is ironic--isn't it?--that we should have come so quickly to the dawn of post-racialism while still lumbering clumsily through the miasma of a misnamed multi-culturalism. We are all linked to the places from which we came, though some of us have moved very far from them. My relationship to the different rabbis whose sermons I have not just heard, but heard intently over more than 50 years, would make a very difficult narrative--not quite as difficult as a narrative about my father and me, but up there. I now attend a synagogue in New York with my children and my grandson. I love the synagogue; I do not love the rabbis for I do not really know them personally. More to the point, I do not love their sermons. Two years ago, Yom Kippur, the rabbi parsed a banal speech by Bella Abzug, the old and (if truth be told) faithful red mama, as if it were a sacred text. Feh. One of this congregation's ingenuous innovations to the routine confessional of sins ("We lie. We cheat ...") in the prayer book is the following: "We rush towards war and crawl to peace." This is a lie! Why do I still pray with this assembly? Because, aside from the offending "hip" politics of the rabbis, there is an all-embracing warmth that suffuses the fold. There is beautiful music. The service is almost all in Hebrew. Still, my then-not-quite-four year-old grandson said to me on the way out, "I have never felt closer to God." Dayenu, as we say on Passover: "It is sufficient." Or, as one of the songs of the tradition known to almost every Jew puts it, Hinay ma tov ... : "How good it is for brothers to sit together ...". OK, Barack Obama's predicament is more complicated than mine. Remember he titled one of his books Dreams From My Father. I suspect that most of Obama's operative dreams came from his mother. After all, his father deserted him, the common nightmare of African American youth. (Increasingly also white youth.) That is a thread that connects Obama to his own generation of African Americans and to the next. His father did not inspire him to work hard at school or to become the editor of the Harvard Law Review. The supportive and yearning parent was his mother and, by extension, his maternal grandparents. They are his dreams, and his father is the absent yearning. Obama's life was at once over-determined and under-determined. There are so many boxes he could have checked, and it is not altogether unsurprising that the one he checked most firmly was his father's box. I more than suspect that Pastor Jeremiah Wright is, in Obama's life, also his father's vagrant presence. No one should arrogate to himself counseling anybody to sever ties, even fragile ones, perhaps fragile ones especially, to one's father. Of course, it makes a difference that Obama's father was not an American but a Kenyan, not of a Christian background but a Muslim one. But the psychology of connection and separation is not an easy puzzle, and it does not fit a predictable pattern. Nonetheless, suffice it to say that it exists. The fact is that many of us were astonished by the rhythm of the English language as it is practiced in Wright's church. Forget for the moment the content. Take a look at a service in what is now Otis Moss's church. This is a Christianity that seems to outsiders to have as much to do with break dancing as it does with the New Testament, and the culture of this one church is very much like the culture of thousands all over America. You may puzzle as to how Barack Obama, of the quiet demeanor and the Holmesian logic, can relate to this pattern of religiosity. But, if I may jog your oversensitized memory, there was more of Chicago's Trinity United Church in Martin Luther King's perorations than there was Reinhold Niebuhr. The typical black church service is not a Unitarian prayer meeting or Catholic devotions. It is something "other" that many of us have not experienced and do not know. It is not ours but theirs. And what's wrong with that? You object: You were not caught out by Wright's rhythm or his vestments, by the congregation's hallelujahs or its songs of praise and prayer. What bothered you was his, their words. Mostly his, that is, Pastor Wright's words. You were concerned by the content. And so, at least in part, was I. Wright's content is not intellectually nuanced, and his words are in large measure crude. His content is often foul. Of course, while one can assume that there is something in the style of Trinity's Christianity that attracts Obama, no one has even suggested that Obama agrees with any of Wright's controversial words. In fact, one knows from the senator's own words past and present that his love of country is unsurpassed--and unsurpassed in a way that will attract younger people who had lapsed into an unthinking and unrealistic internationalism. Leaving a church is never a simple transaction. Episcopalians in America (and Anglicans elsewhere) have had all kinds of provocations. A gay bishop in New Hampshire has virtually split the communion. Some are secessionists because of Gene Robinson's elevation. Some want to stay and fight it. Others want to put the oppositionists to the fire. Some on the outs want to put themselves under the discipline of a religiously conservative African diocese. Mostly, they stay and grumble, one way or another. A similar process is underway in England, where suddenly the archbishop of Canterbury wants British Muslims to be permitted to live under Sharia law and forgo the liberties of British law. A church with leaders like that is bound to have troubles. But the church, big and small, national and local, will remain. While pondering Obama's tribulations about his pastor, I also reflected about the far more laden crisis for Roman Catholic politicians who are for a woman's legal right to an abortion. Every so often, church authorities threaten to excommunicate them--a drastic act by a bishop or archbishop in his diocese. But it goes higher than that. On his trip to Latin America last year, for example, Pope Benedict approved a statement pronouncing that "legislative action in favor of abortion is incompatible with participation in the Eucharist," and politicians who vote that way should "exclude themselves from communion." In 2004, Sean O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston, said pro-choice politicians like John Kerry "shouldn't dare come to Communion." In any case, the position of the church is that such politicians have already excommunicated themselves. This is a far more urgent situation than the one in which Obama finds himself. Frankly, I am relieved that the Wright convulsion has not focused on Israel and the Jews. This is not, then, what some non-Jews might think of as a "narrow" matter. But the truth is that Obama has a much clearer grasp of what the Jewish state faces than the common-place statements of support from other "pro-Israel" politicians, an erroneous view that almost ineluctably, in Obama's words, "sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." I trust Obama on this. I already know what strategic concessions Hillary's husband was ready to coerce Israel into giving to Yasir Arafat, who was dumb enough not to take them. But there is a new game in town, and it is finding men and women for Obama to repudiate. I know about political campaigns and how they attract both fossils and novices. A new candidate lures more of both than a veteran. Indeed, if you look at Mrs. Clinton's campaign, you'll find that there are almost no fresh faces--and, thus, no fresh minds--in the coterie; and it is a coterie. It is a closed and nasty circle which learned its bad habits from Bill. That's why they are making one mistake after another. The rule is: Never be gracious if you have the chance to be vicious. The non plus ultra of this style was the still greedy ex-president suggesting that, while his wife loved her country, Obama didn't love his. The other malignant chores can be safely left by the Clintons for the journalistic right to perform. Both The Weekly Standard and Commentary will readily comply. Of course, the fantasy that Zbigniew Brzezinski would return to power or even influence is just that, a fantasy. Zbig is too nostalgic for the old Cold War with Russia for any president to allow him to come close to big power diplomacy. He once confided to me that Saddam Hussein would be to him "what Sadat was to Henry." Oh my. Obama might have thought him smart on Iraq (I do not) and brought him along to a speech on the subject in Iowa. But, frankly, Zbig disqualified himself from influence on the Middle East with all but poor Jimmy Carter, whom he persuaded that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a useful tool against the Soviets. And on Monday, there emerged in The American Spectator the silly sayings of the hardly satanic figure of General Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak who has said (a) that Israel wants peace (something he's not sure about the Palestinians) and (b) that voters in Miami and New York determine American policy in the Arab world. With the latter statement, McPeak goes beyond even Walt and Mearshimer. It is odious. And I fervently hope that his advice is limited to matters of defense, if that. But if conservatives believe that the candidates are vulnerable to the invidious influence of their supporters on Israel policy, let them ponder the sway of James Baker over John McCain, the candidate whom the "fuck the Jews" secretary of state endorsed. My point is not to impugn McCain. I trust him on Israel, admire him hugely and could even envision casting a vote for him. But every candidate has noxious supporters­ and it is simply illogical and unfair to impute the views of these supporters to their favored candidate, especially when the candidate clearly disagrees. And if we're talking about comparing the Middle East policies of the campaigns, let's dwell one last moment on the Clintons and their fortunes. By fortunes, I mean their bank account. The couple doesn't hesitate to take money from the princes and petroleum potentates of the Middle East--for the presidential library, as a fee for speeches. Unfortunately, what we know now about this is what we have deduced. They are keeping the rest secret until the last possible moment. Then we will be aware of the extent to which they are indentured. Martin Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

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