The candidate donates his gloves in church

The Rev. Patricia Aurand of the First Congregational United Church of Christ began the Sunday service in Mason City, Iowa, today with a holiday appeal for volunteers to deliver Meals on Wheels to area elderly folks.

She turned to the most famous person in the congregation this morning -- none other than Barack Obama on the fourth day of his six-day bus tour across Iowa campaigning for the Jan. 3 caucus.

"Are you available?" the minister asked. The Illinois senator laughed.

"Well, I'm on wheels all the time," he said.

"And you'll be in the state," Aurand continued.

Afterward, Obama went up to the Christmas tree at the front of the church –- known in the congregation as the "mitten tree" because of a 40-year tradition that involves worshippers throwing their mittens at its branches. It was snowing outside, and Obama had brought his.

"I used to play basketball. I'm confident in my skills," he had joked earlier to The Times' Louise Roug, covering his journey. The first throw was mediocre. But his other glove landed near the top.

A holiday slam-dunk on the trail.

--Andrew Malcolm

Comments

[Ronald Loui]

What Ho? (my best erudite salutation -- Shakespearean?)

A positive puff piece for Obama from AM of the LATimes? Better watch out or your Cali pollster.com numbers will start looking like Iowa's and New Hampshire's.

OK, as a reward for AM, here is my take on the Obama drug thing in high school. As I've mentioned before, I was there as a classmate. It's very much as the Dreams memoir tells it, but the dramatic line, "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed..." has to be taken exactly as it is written: it's where he was headed, IF HE HAD NOT TAKEN CORRECTIVE ACTION. But of course, HE DID CORRECT HIS PATH and decided to buckle down, and join us geeks, poets, and future executives at good mainland schools.

Now a lot of people want to blur this and suggest that for all we know, he might have been a ghetto corner dealer of the kind you might see on COPs. But that won't work, because you won't find another black person in Hawaii in 1979 to stand on a drug corner -- you just don't have blacks who want to assemble in public, don't have ghetto corners, and don't have drug problems following racial lines. Back then, the drug dealers are your white surfers with the hot girlfriends in bikinis. At Punahou School, these surfer dudes would have been children of the highest class, the real estate developers and privileged state representatives. Probably the only reason young Obama ran into this culture was because he was on the basketball team (a Championship team coached by a Hawaii sports legend). Almost all athletes in high school and college were bad boys back then. Until the "body is a temple" idea spread, the "I'm so macho, I can handle it" bravado held sway. This older way of thinking unfortunately survives in many fraternities at big State schools.

One of our tragic graduates, from '78, who probably had the worst drug problem on campus, was Mark Tuinei. He played for the Dallas Cowboys for fifteen years (no one has ever played for Dallas longer), blocking for Aikman and Smith. Troy Aikman still praises Tuinei whenever he can. This is no punk in and out of juvie. This is a Pro Bowler and Super Bowl Champion who is on all the Hawaii Hall of Fame Sports lists. He didn't fix the path he was on, and it turned out that the Dallas Cowboys locker room was a lot worse than the Punahou School gym. He didn't fix his problem and he paid the ultimate price. But the picture, you see, is quite different from what the conservative press, and Mr. Shaheen, would like to paint.

If we had been in the class of '83 instead of '79, the problem might have been steroids, like Roger Clemens and Jose Canseco, instead of prep school substances, like GW Bush. In no case did anyone who actually graduated from Punahou School have a problem as severe as Bush reportedly had. Mostly, Punahou kids are clean as a whistle -- the Asian thing, you know. It's people from Punahou who don't drink alcohol at all who actually turned Harvard's Dean Harry Lewis into a crusader for dry campus parties.

For young Obama, it was a mistake, and it really happened, to be sure. But to suggest Obama was a ghetto druggie is to err as egregiously as to suggest he went to madrassa. It just ain't so.

[Repeat the Big Lie]

Let's see, Senator Obama's a "druggie" who peddles the stuff (Billy Shaheen), no knowledge of the false "Muslin" e-mails (three Clinton Iowa staffers), Bill Clinton (no experience Obama), et al. If someone doesn't see a pattern above and in the departure of Shaheen and others, it is they who are "smoking something".

Kerrey greatly diminished my respect for him yesterday by his patently false allusions about Obama's faith. It's been said ad nauseum, but must be repeated since the Clinton campaign and other hate mongers won't let go. Barack and Michelle Obama are long time members of the United Church of Christ a.k.a. Congregational Church. This church is mainstream Protestant and has a long history of openness, tolerance and does good works both at home and abroad.

We have freedom of religion in this country, or I thought we did. All we're seeing so far is a bunch of nutcases coming out of the woodwork with whispering campaigns against Romney because he is a Mormon, Huckabee because he is a Baptist minister and false claims that Obama is a Muslim. With the country going to "hell in a handbasket" if this is the best public discourse we can have then we're gone as a nation.