Imagine turning your back on millions. That may be what Barack Obama’s campaign is doing.
The campaign seems to be giving the brush-off to Sant Singh Chatwal, a wealthy New York hotel magnate who was one of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s biggest fundraisers. Some estimates placed the amount he bundled for her presidential campaign at $5 million.
Chatwal showed up three weeks ago when Clinton called 100 of her top donors to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to urge them to embrace Obama’s candidacy. In some news accounts after the meeting, Chatwal was quoted as saying he would raise $10 million for Obama.
But when Obama appeared in New York last week for a round of fundraising, Chatwal was nowhere to be found, and Obama aides didn’t express any disappointment.
Obama spokesman Ben Labolt said in an e-mail that Obama “greeted Mr. Chatwal very briefly on a rope line” at the Mayflower in Washington, but there was no discussion of the projected $10 million.
What’s more, Labolt’s statement emphasized that Chatwal "does not sit on a fundraising committee, he has not fundraised for the campaign and we do not expect him to."
The back story? While Obama challenged Clinton in the primaries, his campaign planted a private memo to some reporters –- a memo that eventually was intercepted by the Clinton camp and turned into a dust-up that lasted a few days.
The document, headlined "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)’s Personal Financial and Political Ties to India," detailed the connections of Hillary Clinton and President Clinton to India and Indian Americans, one of whom was Chatwal.
Obama distanced himself from the memo at the time and phoned several Indian American activists to express his regret.
Chatwal could not be reached. But Chatwal's spokesman Brandon Reynolds said he was unaware that Obama would not take Chatwal up on the $10-million offer. "I haven’t heard anything," he said.
An interesting and surprising little thing happened Sunday while Barack Obama was speaking (in English) to the National Council of La Raza in San Diego.
It was, according to The Times' Louise Roug, a fairly standard Obama stump speech before the crowd of more than 2,000 members in the Convention Center, where the Republican Party nominated Sen. Bob Dole 12 years ago.
Obama said the gorgeous weather reminded him of his native Hawaii. He criticized the current stand on immigration reform of his Republican opponent, John McCain, who gets his chance to address the group Monday morning when he will stress his economic growth proposals, especially for small businesses, and criticize Obama's plans to raise taxes.
The crowd was very respectful of the Democratic nominee-to-be, who easily leads among Latinos, according to polls. And Obama also talked about giving tax credits to small businesses that provide health insurance for employees.
It was then that the crowd erupted in enthusiastic applause and warm cheers. But not over Obama's policy proposal.
What ignited that outburst was the mere mention by Obama of the name Hillary Clinton, his vanquished party opponent.
She wasn't there, of course. But in absentia the Democratic Party's loser got a noticeably warmer response than the winner, perhaps a reflection of that lingering party unity thing that was taken care of up in Unity.
Or maybe they were just being spontaneously friendly.
On the Fourth of July, our thoughts naturally turn to those words penned by Thomas Jefferson and first read aloud on the square behind Independence Hall in Philadelphia 232 years ago today:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So what would Jefferson, a noted slave-owner, have thought about the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama?
As the first African American to secure a major-party presidential nomination, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama has understandably been the subject of much analysis across the country that focuses on race.
But overlooked is another potential political first: Americans have never sent a Chicagoan to the White House.
And one intriguing question posed by the freshman Illinois senator's candidacy is whether they are ready now.
For all his talk elsewhere about change and his national image as a fervent reformer, Obama on the contrary remains fundamentally a product of a Chicago and Illinois political culture renowned for corruption and filled with curious characters who range from felonious to just outrageous.
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, Obama's political mentor in the state capital of Springfield, is about as old-school as they come. Just last month, the Chicago Democrat publicly ridiculed an attempt to block another pay raise for state legislators by sarcastically declaring: "I've got to get me some food stamps."
Obama's stable of political friends is broadly populated with others like Jones and the recently convicted Tony Rezko. Revealingly, whenever the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has dabbled in Windy City and Cook County politics in recent years, he has frequently failed to come down on the side of political progressives and reformers.
This little-known side of Obama's political life may well surprise many across the country who see in the well-spoken candidate an entirely different person. Bob Secter and John McCormick have the full story at the Swamp.
Maybe you remember his terrified picture here, when he was seized by U.S. federal agents in 2000 to be returned to Cuba as an illegal immigrant during the Clinton administration.
Elian was a Cuban refugee who made the perilous crossing from his homeland to the United States, losing his mother to the ocean in the process.
Attorney General Janet Reno decided in the spring of 2000 that the six-year-old boy must be returned to Cuba and his father.
And with that, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore kissed Florida goodbye in that fall's election, which was decided by -- do you remember how many? -- 537 votes.
Well, Elian -- or his cause -- is back in the news this weekend. As Democratic presidential nominee-to-be Barack Obama spoke to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Miami, dozens of Elian protesters demonstrated nearby.
Obama foreign policy adviser Greg Craig represented Elian's father in the custody dispute that returned the child to the communist island. Eric Holder, a member of Obama's vice-presidential selection team, was deputy U.S. attorney general in Bill Clinton's administration when government agents seized Elian from his relatives' home in Miami's Little Havana.
Our colleague Mark Silva over at the Swamp has the latest chapter in the moving story that still sends shivers of shame down some American spines.
Once presidential candidates were always placed on podiums, above the crowds, on balconies or the backs of trains speaking down to the voters from on high.
In the last few presidential election cycles, however, populism became the theme. It's been the stage fashion to plop the candidate amid adoring throngs. All campaigns now line the back of rally stages with handpicked, politically correct supporters who represent the message of the day -- young college students, old white women, a rainbow array of ethnicities. The president does it too, lots of soldiers behind him, men, women, black, white, Latino.
These are the happy, adoring, enthusiastic supporters who will be on camera with the candidate for presumably millions of Americans to see and identify with. The others in the front audience are there to yell and scream and wave signs.
The candidate's advance team and its volunteers are charged with arranging this human facial bouquet before the event. There are risks, of course. Young children easily get bored and fidgety and sometimes pick their noses on camera.
Others may yawn or fall asleep and provide evil news photographers with an inadvertent comment on the candidate's remarks that will appear all over the country as quickly as you can say, "Hot dog, not another candidate holding a microphone photo!"
Trouble is, apparently a Barack Obama volunteer or two in Detroit on Monday barred two Muslim women from standing behind Obama because they were wearing head-scarves. Everyone knows how hard the Obama forces have fought viral rumors that with the middle name Hussein and a childhood in Indonesia he is really a closet Muslim plotting to subvert the United States of America.
So the volunteer, described as a black woman in a green shirt, barred the women from the stage.
Our colleague over at the Swamp, Katie Fretland, has this version of the embarrassing episode. And the Politico.com has a longer one here.
She explained, according to the women, by citing the political climate and widespread antipathy toward Muslims. It's particularly awkward for the Obama campaign, which talks often about its inclusiveness and the fact that Michigan is a major center of American Arabs.
The campaign apologized. "“This is of course not the policy of the campaign," said Bill Burton. "It is offensive and counter to Obama’s commitment to bring Americans together."
But at least one of the women has indicated that an apology is insufficient. She wants an invitation to stand right behind Obama at another rally.
Watch for that. And watch for Obama then to walk over and personally apologize. Turn a minus into a plus.
The latest national polling in the presidential race is nothing if not consistent -- most of the recent ones, including an ABC News/Washington Post survey released today, show Barack Obama with a four- percentage-point lead over John McCain among registered voters.
That's not great news for the presumptive Democratic nominee, given all the factors seemingly weighing against the Republican Party (most obviously President Bush's in-the-tank approval ratings). But Obama should be heartened by a new poll that focused solely on Latino voters in 21 states.
The survey, conducted by Pacific Market Research and political scientists at the University of Washington, found Obama's level of support approaching what Democratic presidential candidates -- until the 2004 election -- had come to count on.
Obama swamped McCain in the survey, 60% to 23%, with 16% undecided. The poll's margin of error was plus-or-minus 3.5 percentage points.
Hillary Clinton consistently walloped Obama among Latino voters in the prolonged Democratic primary battle. That caused some in the party to wonder about Obama's ability to attract significant support from this bloc in the general election.
But the new results put him within shouting distance of the 67% of the Latino vote that, according to exit polling, Al Gore won in the 2000 election. And Obama's goal, no doubt, will be to come close to the 72% that Bill Clinton won in his 1996 reelection (or, even better, the 76% that Jimmy Carter won in 1976).
Bush raised GOP hopes that the party was making inroads with Latino voters when he captured 43% of Latino votes four years ago, compared with John Kerry's 56%, according to exit polling. But the new figures indicate that the party has not been able to sustain that support.
More about the new survey, including matchups in specific states, can be read here.
The folks over at Details magazine offer a preview of a piece coming out in the August issue (though not due on stands until July 15) on Bobby Jindal, one of the names bandied about as a possible running mate for John McCain. No bombshells in the preview, but it gives a broad look at a guy with intense ambitions, rapid political success -- with the occasional knock-back -- and an evolved sense of his faith and politics.
Jindal was born in the U.S. six months after his parents arrived from India. "Being the son of an immigrant is almost like being a convert to Americanism," the piece quotes Jindal as saying. He's also a convert to Catholicism from Hinduism. He became a Republican after growing up in a nominally Democratic house and has succeeded politically in Louisiana despite being the antithesis of a Louisianan, writes Jonathan Miles.
"He doesn’t care much, for instance, about food. His musical tastes run toward middle-of-the-road FM rock -- Clapton, the Beatles -- though, really, whatever's on the radio will do. He doesn’t drink alcohol -- an anomaly in a state where, as the joke goes, cirrhosis of the liver gets listed on death certificates as 'natural causes' -- or even coffee, Louisiana’s second official liquid. In a state so devoted to hunting and fishing that its license plates read SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE, Jindal’s chosen sport is tennis. But something else sets Jindal apart in this deep-fried southern state: His first name is Piyush, not Robert..."
Jindal has downplayed talk that he might get on the Republican ticket, but as Miles -- and others -- point out that at half McCain's age, Jindal counters the relative youthfulness of Barack Obama, and his ethnic background could help erode that historic distinction for the Democratic ticket, as well.
On this, the first anniversary of our Top of the Ticket blog, we are reminded of the mercurial, unpredictable nature of U.S. politics -- part of what makes what we do so fascinating.
Our goal -- one of us on the East Coast and the other on the far more important or at least less humid West Coast -- was to write about Campaign '08 virtually around the clock.
Our second-ever posting, 12 months ago today, previewed an upcoming L.A. Times/Bloomberg Poll; later in the day, we detailed the results of the nationwide survey. The findings were in line with other polls of the time.
In the Republican presidential race, which then seemed the most likely to last deep into the primary season, Rudy Giuliani was perched in first place. His lead wasn't overwhelming, but it was strong enough that he appeared certain to remain a major contender.
His liberal record on social issues loomed as an obvious liability within his party, but his tough-on-terrorism message was attracting substantial support from moderates and GOP-leaning independents.
His major headache among rivals last June was an as-yet-undeclared candidate who was riding a wave as the great conservative hope -- Fred Thompson. He ran a strong second in the poll.
Lagging far behind were John McCain and Mitt Romney, each barely with double-digit support. In our preview posting, we were especially scornful of McCain, noting sarcastically (and foolishly, as it turned out) that in the poll, he found himself "in heated competition with the 'Don't Know' category."
Meriting no mention from us was Mike Huckabee, one of several back-of-the-pack candidates barely earning any support across the country.
The Democratic race, at that point, seemed so much more cut-and-dried.
San Diego usually is a fine place to be under any circumstances, but for a couple of days this July the political world will flock there for clues about one of the crucial questions in the John McCain-Barack Obama matchup: Whither the Latino vote?
The National Council of La Raza, a leading Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, announced today that both presidential contenders have accepted invitations to speak at its July 12-15 convention in San Diego. No details yet on when each will speak, but their appearances likely will be among the most important they make during the month.
For Obama, the mission is straightforward: Woo an ethnic group that is absolutely essential to his hopes of carrying several key states in November but which heavily supported his rival, Hillary Clinton, during the just-completed Democratic primary season.
Presumably his campaign already will be hard at work on this task before the La Raza get-together, but his speech will offer him a golden opportunity to try to connect with a voting bloc that so far has generally resisted his appeals.
McCain will face more of a balancing act when he takes center stage ...
We're betting Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is like a lot of Hillary Clinton's dedicated supporters: They're doing their best to learn a new song, but it's hard to let go of the music in their hearts.
Asked today by The Times' Joel Rubin for comment about the Democratic presidential race, Villaraigosa stressed that he's ready to put on his traveling shoes for presumptive nominee Barack Obama. But he also still wanted to say good things about Clinton -- and dismiss any notion that he regretted the decision to serve as one of her most ardent advocates.
"I was proud to have supported Sen. Clinton and her effort," the mayor said during a news conference at the LAPD training center. "I have never been involved in a presidential campaign where I've seen anyone with the passion and persistence and intestinal fortitude of Hillary Clinton. I was proud to be associated with that campaign."
He continued: "But now that Sen. Obama is the presumptive nominee, I've said for a long time that I am prepared to work as hard for him as I did for Sen. Clinton."
That would be plenty hard, as we've taken note of before. And it will be worth watching if the Obama campaign takes him up on his offer as part of what has to be a sustained effort on it's part to significantly burnish the candidate's appeal to Latino voters, especially ...
(UPDATE: The speech was delivered. New material is included below including the full speech text.)
In a speech he will deliver this morning, Sen. John McCain manages to take a slap at Barack Obama and Iran at the same time.
McCain, according to excerpts of a prepared address to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, will ridicule the notion of negotiating with Iran's leaders to stop the nation's suspected efforts to develop nuclear weapons. That's his not-very-subtle dig at Obama (McCain also attacks the Democrat by name in the address).
"We hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before.
"Yet it’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another," McCain says in his prepared remarks to the AIPAC Policy Conference.
Instead of negotiating, McCain proposes political and, in particular, financial pressure. He would first urge the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions, but if that failed McCain would have the U.S. and its allies take over. What's more, he urges "a worldwide divestment campaign."
"As more people, businesses, pension funds and financial institutions across the world divest from companies doing business with Iran, the radical elite who run that country will become even more unpopular than they are already.
"Years ago, the moral clarity and conviction of civilized nations came together in a divestment campaign against South Africa, helping to rid that nation of the evil of apartheid. In our day, we must use that same power and moral conviction against the regime in Iran, and help to safeguard the people of Israel and the peace of the world."
For more excerpts full prepared McCain speech, click on the Read More line below.
UPDATE: The Obama campaign just issued what has become an almost Pavlovian response -- John McCain = four more years of Bush polices. To wit, from spokesman Hari Sevugan: "John McCain stubbornly insists on continuing a dangerous and failed foreign policy that has clearly made the United States and Israel less secure."
He details what he says is Iran's progress in expanding its nuclear program, "its influence throughout a vitally important region, plying Hamas and Hezbollah with money and arms. During the Bush administration, Hamas took over Gaza. Most importantly, the war in Iraq that John McCain supported and promises to continue indefinitely has done more to dramatically strengthen and embolden Iran than anything in a generation.
"Confronted with that reality, John McCain promises four more years of the same policies that have strengthened Iran, making the United States and Israel less safe."
Barack Obama today visited a Las Vegas couple with two main objectives in mind: 1) to spotlight the strain they're experiencing making mortgage payments as a larger national problem that he would aggressively confront; 2) to win some positive coverage in a key Western battleground state.
Also, when the Obama campaign set about conceiving the event, the ethnicity of Felicitas Rosel and Francisco Cano surely helped seal their selection as his hosts, given the difficulties he's had attracting the Latino vote in several primaries.
Still, for all the artificiality and political calculation surrounding Obama's kitchen-table chat with the two, the presidential candidate may actually have gotten a life lesson from the encounter.
As the session was coming to a close, Obama praised the Bellagio hotel and casino, where Rosel works as a maid and Cano as a porter (and where Obama campaigned back in the winter, trolling for votes in the Nevada caucuses). Then he added, “The only problem with me is when I come to Las Vegas, I’m not allowed to have fun. Everybody knows me. If I start playing blackjack, I’ll get in trouble."
Pointing to a nearby television crew, he continued, "All these cameras will follow me.”
To which Rosel, who no doubt has heard her share of woe after bad nights at the tables, replied, "You're lucky."
Hillary Clinton may have scored a solid win over Barack Obama in California's presidential primary on Feb. 5 (as she frequently likes to remind folks these days), but a new L.A. Times/KTLA poll finds he would fare better than she in the battle with John McCain for the state in November (a result the Clinton camp won't be touting).
Obama led McCain in the poll, 47-40%; in a Clinton matchup with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, she got 43%, he held steady at 40%.
One reason for pause for Democrats -- the margins for both of their candidates fall within the survey's error margin of plus-or-minus 4 percentage points (though in Obama's case, just barely).
Times reporter Cathleen Decker, in a detailed analysis of the poll, notes that McCain benefits from stronger support from Latinos in California than George W. Bush got in the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
But, as Decker also writes, McCain may be disappointed if he's looking for a boost to his prospects in California from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The new poll, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, found the GOP governor's approval rating among registered voters in the state has taken a big hit over just a few months. It stood at 60% in January; now it's at 43%.
Some background:
The last Republican to win the state in a White House race was George H.W. Bush in 1988; he defeated Michael Dukakis, 51%-48%.
Bill Clinton won it in 1992 with 46%; Bush got 33% and Ross Perot 21%. Clinton triumphed handily again in 1996, with 51% of the vote to Bob Dole's 38%.
In 2000, Al Gore beat George W. Bush, 53%-42%. And four years ago, John Kerry kept the state securely in the Democratic column, getting 54% of the vote to Bush's 44%.
The folks over at Politico have an interesting piece this morning reminding us of California political history as they try to figure out why political polling in this cycle has been so off. One answer is something the pros refer to it as the "Bradley effect," the phenomenon of white poll respondents telling pollsters they'll vote for a black candidate -- but not doing so once they get into the privacy of the polling booth. Some think that was behind the gap between polls and results in former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's loss in the 1982 governor's race (and thus the name of the phenomenon).
Pollsters are trying to sort some of this out during their annual convention in New Orleans this week -- three out of five said they wouldn't get an answer (sorry, couldn't resist). And a study is underway to try to figure out what's gone wrong, looking at such arcana as whether pollsters' samples are not reflective.
Our guess? People have been genuinely undecided, and small events pushed them one way or the other. New Hampshire was the first notable poll flop, and a close look at the numbers could hold a key to the explanation.
All the polls showed Barack Obama with a healthy margin, but Hillary Clinton won by a 2.6% margin. But dig into the polls. The Suffolk/WGBH poll, for instance, found Obama leading but with 8% undecided; 6% of those who had decided were "very likely" to change their minds, and another 18% said they might change their minds. With that much volatility, it's hard to measure the impact of even something so small as a tear.
By the time the Indiana primary rolled around -- polls there gave Clinton an aggregate 5-point lead; she won with a 1.4% margin -- the pollsters had largely stopped asking about the depth of voter commitment. Maybe they ought to add that question back in.
Will Barack Obama's presidential candidacy serve his state and city by finally drawing national attention to the sleazy and corrupt politics of Illinois and Chicago?
It is all about context. The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate's politics were born in Chicago. Yet he is presented to the nation as not truly being of this place, as if he floats just above the political corruption here, uninfected, untouched by the stain of it or by any sin of commission or omission. It is all so very mystical.
Perhaps viewing Obama as a Chicago political creature would conflict with the established national media narrative of Obama as a reformer. Actually, there's no "perhaps" about it.
"I think I have done a good job in rising politically in this environment without being entangled in some of the traditional problems of Chicago politics," Obama told reporters and editors at a Chicago Tribune editorial board meeting several weeks ago.
Yes, an excellent job. Except for his dalliance with his indicted real estate fairy, Tony Rezko, a relationship Obama considers a mistake, the senator has not played the fly to Mayor Richard Daley's spider. Almost, but not quite.
"I know there are those like John Kass who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently, and I'll leave that to his editorial commentary," Obama said.
Not the politics, just the corruption, I said then, wishing....
Today's "Meet the Press" on NBC featured a full hour with Sen. Barack Obama, and it's no surprise that the first third of the interview focused on the inflammatory remarks of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and their effect on Obama's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.
After snippets of some of Wright's more controversial sermons "were looped on cable stations 24 hours a day for about five straight days," Obama said, "I did what I thought was right, which was to denounce the words, not denounce the man."
After all, the Illinois senator noted, he had known Wright as a former Marine and a pillar of the community, and "I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright; I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ."
But last Monday, Obama said, "when [Wright] came out ...
This being L.A., a suburb of Hollywood, we thought it worth nothing that Spike Lee has some opinions of the Clintons, which he'll be discussing tonight on Bloomberg TV's "Night Talk" at 10 p.m. Eastern (and yes, we know Lee is a New Yorker, but still, it's the movies).
Lee, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has slapped the Clintons around before, but the release pushing tonight's interview sounds like it might be worth checking even if just for giggles' sake (also on podcast for you tech-savvy folks).
During the interview Spike talks about why he no longer supports Sen. Clinton in the Presidential campaign, "if you know anything about the Clintons and what they've done in politics, they are gonna knock out some kneecaps." He said Bill Clinton has been "playing his whole thing like he is the great white father." "I think that they thought this thing was going to be over Super Tuesday, and Obama's a nice young guy, but they didn’t see him as a threat, but when things started to play out the way they did, then they saw their whole thing was in jeopardy, and that’s when he isn’t just the nice young little guy anymore ... he's our blood enemy -- and then that's when you start to see the things come out the side of President Clinton's neck, comments he meant in South Carolina."
Well, that should add to the calm and dignified political discourse of the campaign, no?
Did the Pennsylvania primary make no difference at all, or did it change the course of the race for the Democratic nomination?
The answer is in the eye of the spinner.
Aides to Hillary Clinton said this morning that the "tide is turning" because of her win.
"By providing fresh evidence that Hillary is the candidate best positioned to beat John McCain in the fall," campaign spokesman Phil Singer said in a widely circulated memo, "the Pennsylvania primary is a turning point in the nominating contest."
Barack Obama, Singer continued, made an unprecedented investment in television advertising, but he "again failed to win a state that will be vital to a Democratic victory in November and spurred new questions about his ability to beat John McCain."
Over at Camp Obama, though, the results were getting the equivalent of a big, loud yawn, at least in public.
Campaign manager David Plouffe noted that Clinton's win did not substantially change the pledged delegate lead Obama has over her.
"She obviously in these remaining nine contests needs to win with big margins," Plouffe told reporters.
Essentially, he argued, the campaign moves on to the May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana without a shift in relative position.
"We don't believe the structure of the race is going to change fundamentally," Plouffe said.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean there isn't some concern ...
Nora Ephron has posted a rather blunt political column over on Huffington Post that pretty well sums up Tuesday's important Pennsylvania primary.
"This is an election," she writes, "about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men."
Can't lay it out much straighter than that.
Of course, there are economic issues also at play in Tuesday's balloting there. Pennsylvania has been hit hard by tectonic economic shifts that have roiled the Rust Belt for a couple of decades now.
Many communities and their members are still reeling and have yet to find an economic alternative. Hence, in part the blame heaped...
Hillary Clinton's campaign maintains that people who recall her making a pointedly derisive remark about Southern voters many years ago are not remembering it right.
The question was stirred by a column inThe Huffington Post this week, in which Sam Stein wrote about an account of the comment published a few years back by an author:
"In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working-class, white Southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party?'' Stein wrote. "The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.
"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."
"The statement -- which author Benjamin Barber witnessed and wrote about in his book, "The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House" -- was prompted by another speaker raising the difficulties of reaching "Reagan Democrats','' Stein wrote." It stands in stark contrast...
No stuffy studio in Washington for the political coverage team over at XM Satellite Radio's all-politics POTUS 08 channel.
On Tuesday, the day of the next crucial primary vote for Democrats, Pennsylvania's, they're gonna set themselves up at a patio table outside the South Philly institution of Pat's King of Steaks.
From there for most of Tuesday, anchors Joe Mathieu and Rebecca Roberts will be talking with politicians, political observers and just regular folks who stop by for, you guessed, one of Pat's famous Philly cheesesteaks.
The 24-hour political channel has become a must-listen for the nation's political junkies this year. But talking on-the-air about Philly cheesesteaks for the rest of us elsewhere may be carrying temptation a bit too far.
Well, it was hard to see this one coming. A new L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll just released on the website found that 24% of likely Pennsylvania voters thought more highly of Barack Obama after his handling of the Rev. Jeremiah Wrightcontroversy, while 15% said they thought less of him. The vast majority -- 58% -- said it made no difference.
The poll was conducted in the next three states to hold primaries -- Pennsylvania on April 22, and North Carolina and Indiana on May 6. In Indiana, reaction to Obama's handling of the controversy were slightly reversed, with 23% saying they thought less of him and 20% saying they thought more highly. But 56% said it had no effect. In North Carolina, 27% said they thought more highly, 20% said they thought less of Obama and 51% said it didn't matter.
And in what can only be seen as a message to the superdelegates who will likely decide who gets the Democratic nomination, majorities in all three states said they believe the superdelegates should back whichever candidate won the popular vote in the superdelegate's state. So much for the "vote your heart" argument.
There's some other interesting morsels in there too -- such as Obama closing to within five points of Clinton in Pennsylvania, though the poll was conducted April 10-14 while the "bitter" controversy was playing out. Obama also had a five-point lead in Indiana, a Rust Belt state that should be playing to Clinton's strength among working-class voters, and a 13-point lead in North Carolina. The leads in Pennsylvania and Indiana were within the poll's margin of error.
Another surprise: The number of undecideds. In Pennsylvania, 12% said they still didn't know for whom they were voting, a category that jumped to 19% in Indiana and 17% in North Carolina. That means in each state the undecideds exceeded the gap between the two contenders.
Perhaps being shot down over enemy territory, fished out of a lake with two broken arms and a broken knee, and incarcerated for nearly six years as a prisoner of war makes Sen. John McCain less intimidated than other politicians at the thought of speaking to unfriendly audiences.
After all, what's a little heckling after you've endured years of North Vietnamese imprisonment and torture?
That thought came to mind last week as McCain spoke in Memphis to an African-American crowd gathered outside the Lorraine Motel, the site of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr'.s 1968 assassination.
The venue was certainly well beyond the typical suburban comfort zone of many presidential candidates especially Republicans. And especially for Republicans named McCain who voted against the....
Today, Illinois' freshman Sen. Barack Obama and Democratic candidate for president expresses a strongly pro-Israel point of view of Mideast policies, a stance which pleases the many influential Jewish leaders and supporters of Israel that are so crucial politically and financially to any realistic bid for the White House.
But as The Times' Peter Wallsten points out in a revealing story on this website and in Thursday's print editions, there was a time not so long ago when a young state senator named Obama spent considerable time with the local crowd of Arab-Americans in Chicago. He shared many meals and long conversations with them.
So much so, that some Palestinian-American leaders currently believe that Obama shares a much more sympathetic point of view with them than he is willing to state publicly now.
As Wallsten points out, this belief comes not from any official Obama campaign literature or speaking remarks but from his long association with them in previous years, comments he made in private then and his presence at past events where anger at Israel and American Middle Eastern policy was strongly expressed.
At one farewell party for a friend, where Obama also spoke, another speaker compared "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin Laden, claiming that both had been "blinded by ideology."
One friend said Obama had apologized for not addressing the Palestinian cause more but that his continuing primary campaign constrained what he could say publicly.
Read Peter's full story here. To read Obama's Position Paper on Israel from 2000, click on the Read more line below.
Three of the toughest words in politics: "I was wrong." And John McCain uttered them again today in Memphis, conceding that he erred in once opposing a national holiday in honor of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
McCain had made a similar concession in South Carolina after his 2000 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, saying that he believed the Confederate flag should be removed from atop the state Capitol but that he didn't have the guts to say so when it mattered.
Democrat John Edwards also embraced those three words in regretting his 2002 Senate vote authorizing the war in Iraq. That Hillary Clinton hasn't made a similar remark for her identical vote remains one of the simmering issues in this campaign, though voters' attention to the war has been overwhelmed by economic concerns.
"We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King," McCain said today in Memphis. "I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona... We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans. But he knew as well that in the long term, confidence in the reasonability and good heart of America is always well placed."
-- Mark Silva
Mark Silva writes for The Swampof the Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau.
Our international colleagues over on La Plaza have stirred up a hornet's nest with a posting about a vodka company ad running in Mexico that puts the U.S.-Mexican border in an "Absolut World" at about the Washington-Oregon border .
Never mind the impact on the Pac-10 sports schedule -- who would UCLA and USC play, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico? -- what would the impact be on the presidential campaign? You know, just hypothetically speaking, over a glass of vodka on a Friday afternoon.
Well, Hillary Clinton would be out -- the Latino vote in the current Southwest would be voting in Mexico -- so you gotta figure Barack Obama facing off against John McCain in the general (assuming McCain moves from Arizona).
And without all the wild-eyed liberals out here in California voting, that leaves the northern tier, the Midwest, the Deep South and the Northeast. Advantage: McCain?
You know, if it was an Absolut World. But what we're having the most trouble envisioning is that border fence along the Columbia River.
With the remembrance today of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, the mind reels to the 1960s when the nation finally confronted its failure to fulfill the promise of "liberty for all" and, with historic legislation, addressed the inability of black Americans to cast a simple vote in many places. And not until the Sixties did Americans begin, with baby steps, to adequately address the equal rights due to women.
Yet not until the presidential campaign of 2008 has a major political party reached the point of nominating either an African-American or a woman for the presidency. And the rhetorical roughhouse of this campaign has served to remind is of how far the nation has come since the Sixties, and yet how far it still has to go.
For all the talk of polarization in the campaign underway, it was the Sixties when radical meant radical. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his supercharged rhetoric on race and power, Barack Obama has reminded us, are
products of the Sixties. The campaign underway still holds a potential
for electing a woman, Hillary Clinton reminds us.
Clinton herself is a successor and spouse of the first president to
appoint a woman attorney general, Janet Reno, who, after graduation
from Harvard Law School in 1963 could not obtain a job in a downtown
Miami law firm.
And symbols of the Sixties keep flashing on our screens: "Hanoi Jane"
returned this week with the off-the-cuff and probably ...
Let's sit back and get a little less comfortable on a Sunday morning.
Nothing can cause a collective national squirm quite like a little racial tension. All those sentiments that are usually the stuff of private conversation, if spoken at all, are playing out in the harsh light of the campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. That black thing-white thing, thing. We are dealing with race -- again -- whether we want to or not.
It is hard to believe that a mere three months ago, the good and overwhelmingly white people of Iowa started the whole process of the presidential race, delivering a powerful verdict on the Democratic side that Barack Obama's race was no impediment to his pursuit of the White House.
How quaint.
Now we are in the ultimate where-you-stand-depends-on-where-you-sit moment. It's never easy being a first, and perhaps the only surprising thing about the role race is now playing in the Democratic primary is that it took this long to boil. Meanwhile, beneath the same surface, the gender issue simmers.
From the outset, Obama faced questions that no other candidate had to face, ranging from "is he black enough?" to "is he maybe 'too black'?"
Or, as a white colleague pointed out, maybe the real question among whites was whether he was white enough. Who wants to start that conversation?
Then came questions about his faith. Was Barack Hussein Obama really a closet....
The controversy over various incendiary remarks by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has for the most part "not hurt" Democrat Barack Obama's campaign for president, one of the nation's top pollsters says, based on his organization's latest survey.
"Obama’s lead over Hillary Clinton remains as wide as it was in late February,'' says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, and "both Obama and Clinton continue to run slightly ahead of (John) McCain in a general election matchup.''
In the battle for the Democratic presidential nod, Obama was backed by 49% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters surveyed and Clinton by 39% (the error margin for this part of the poll was plus or minus 5.5 percentage points).
Some caveats ...
Other recent polls, including this one for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, have been less positive for Obama, especially in gauging the status of his race with Clinton. Also, the Pew poll was conducted from last Wednesday (3/19) through Saturday -- meaning many were questioned in the immediate afterglow of Obama's generally well-received speech on race relations.
Perhaps most importantly, all the surveys took place before the latest discovery of an intemperate phrase -- this one directed at Italians -- from Wright, Obama's longtime pastor.
As Newsday's Spin Cycle blog puts it, Wright expounds on "a two-millennium grudge against the sons and daughters of Rome" in an article he penned for a magazine for which he is listed as CEO and his daughter, Jeri Wright, serves as publisher. Specifically, the preacher wrote: Jesus' "enemies had their opinion about Him.... The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans."
Last month we had the flap over whether members of the public could use the actual middle name of Barack Hussein Obama openly because the Arabic-sounding, maybe-he-really-is-a-Muslim name his parents gave him can now be used by a malevolent few to impugn the Democratic candidate's patriotism and Americanness in an era of terror over terrorism.
Obama's travails in recent days over his 20-year association with a Chicago Christian church and racial rants of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright there may have pretty well erased the Muslim concern, though creating their own black nationalist worries in the minds of some.
But this morning, as part of the ongoing lengthy discovery process about the vital narratives of our remaining presidential candidates, out comes Newsweek with an intriguing article about the 1980-81 era in Obama's life when he was a California college student at Occidental known as Barry Obama. (With a tip of the hat to the Politico's Mike Allen.)
The magazine cover story describes a gradual personality change in the young man when he actually reversed the assimilation process his Kenyan immigrant father had made upon arriving in 1959 and wanting to fit into the American melting pot. So the father's name of Barack became Barry.
In the early 1980s, with his father long absent and returned to Africa, the would-be politician re-chose Barack, to the consternation of some family members. "It was when I made a conscious decision: I want to grow up," Obama told the magazine.
According to Newsweek's account by Richard Wolffe, Jessica Ramirez and Jeffrey Bartholet, the name change -- or reversal -- became part of the biracial young man's personal discovery that he occupied a potentially unique political position in modern America, as someone who knew intimately both life as a white and an African American.
It's a revealing magazine story and one of the better arguments for what have become 22-month presidential campaigns; they give us more time to learn more about the inner lives of the surviving White House contenders.
In the sound-bite world of political campaigning, three words have the power to overpower a broader and deeper message. So, as Barack Obama attempts to climb out of two weeks of trench-warfare over the most critical social division in America -- race -- he's going to need to refocus his campaign on the things that got him this far.
Obama didn't do himself any favors Thursday in an early-morning call to WIP-610, a sports radio station in Philadelphia, when he was asked about the comment in his Philadelphia speech on race about his grandmother and her racial view of the world.
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, you know, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there is a reaction that has been bred into our experiences that don't go away and sometimes come out in the wrong way... That's the nature of race in our society and we have to break through it. And what makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling a little less like that, and that's pretty powerful stuff.''
Yet the three words linger on the short loop that is cable television news and reverberate on the Internet like some bad political equivalent of the film, "Groundhog Day": "Typical white person.'' And, suddenly, the candidate who delivered what has been called the most powerful speech about racial harmony since the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is lambasted online as racist.
The truth is, virtually every white person and every black person knows ...
A fresh poll from Quinnipiac (doesn't that sound like a character in a Herman Melville novel?) University finds Hillary Clinton adding to her lead over Barack Obama in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary. And you can't help but think some of this stems from the debate over race and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Race does matter, judging by the poll numbers. Overall, Clinton led Obama 53% to 41% among all likely primary voters, a widened gap over the 49% to 43% lead she had Feb. 27. The poll, conducted over six days ending Sunday, has an unusually tight margin of error of 2.7%, which means Obama's slide is within the margin but Clinton's gain exceeds it.
The most interesting stuff, as usual, is in the details. The poll found that the racial gap has widened. White voters preferred Clinton by 61% to 33%, a change from the 56% to 37% lead last month. Similarly, black voters backed Obama 76% to 18% percent, compared with a 69% to 23% earlier finding.
There's a lot of time -- and a lot of campaigning -- to go, but at the moment, the numbers are tracking better for Clinton than for Obama, at least in Quinnipiac's poll. You can browse the rest of the polls here, but pay particular attention to the trend lines on the Real Clear Politics aggregate graph. It shows Obama flat in Pennsylvania, while Clinton climbed. And she was ahead there to begin with.
After he moved to Chicago in the mid-1980s to work as a community organizer, Barack Obama forged close ties with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- joining the pastor’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and using the topic of a Wright sermon, "the audacity of hope," as the title of his most recent best-selling book.
But more than a year ago -- long before some of Wright’s more incendiary sermons became hot-button videos on YouTube, forcing Obama to publicly renounce his pastor last week -- the Obama campaign had a sense that Wright's sharp tongue might spell trouble for the Illinois senator. (For a sermon sample, click on the Read more line below.)
That was the word anyway Sunday from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who acknowledged during a conference call with reporters that Wright was disinvited ...
Barack Obama just took the unusual step of posting a column on Huffington Post to again reject the comments of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The core of Obama's piece:
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach ... or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.
Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.
With Rev. Wright's retirement and the ascension of my new pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, III, Michelle and I look forward to continuing a relationship with a church that has done so much good.
Earlier this week, Geraldine Ferrarolost her spot as a Hillary Clinton fundraiser after offering her unvarnished take on the role race has played in Barack Obama's political rise. The coverage led a reader to direct us to an assessment of race and Obama's election to the U.S. Senate.
The source is what caught our eye. It's a 2005 Chicago Tribune profile. Posted on his Senate website. A key passage:
"We have a certain script in our politics, and one of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people," Obama said in an interview. "And then if he puts a multiracial coalition together, he must somehow be compromising the efforts of the African-American community.
"To use a street term," he added, "we flipped the script."
In winning the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois, Obama drew as many as two white votes for every black one, showing nearly unprecedented crossover appeal for a black candidate in a statewide race.
Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race. If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all?
