Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Hey, look, Matt Drudge did something nice for the entire country: He ended the Democratic primary, even though it was supposed to continue until eternity. See the picture and headline at left, which ran atop Drudge Report tonight. Drudge’s link went to a video of Meet The Press anchor Tim Russert calmly explaining to America that “we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be” and that Hillary Clinton is probably about to quit (she cancelled her TV appearances and everything!). Then David Gergen, the Bill Clinton aide turned talking head, said on CNN the election is over, partly because Chelsea looked sad during Hillary’s last speech. “You could see the anguish on her face,” Gergen said. “I think the Clinton people know the game is almost up.” Remaining voters, politely thank your media overlords for deciding the election on your behalf. Clips of Russert and Gergen, and a bigger pic of the Drudge page, after the jump.
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Yesterday, in preparation for the start of our GOTV weekend, we asked our grassroots phonebankers to sound off and let us know who was committed to making calls to voters over the next two days.
Here are just a few of the people who have pledged to make calls this weekend to help Get Out The Vote in Indiana and North Carolina:
Teresa: I plan to call 1000 people this weekend. I am also canvassing from 1-7 Saturday! I have called about 50 so far, but I am not stopping until 1000!
Makeda: I will commit to make 100 calls to Indiana tomorrow….
Doris: I will promise to make at least 10 calls to Indiana Saturday. I will be calling from Florida. We must be a part of this change.
Sarah: I will make 100 calls this weekend … At least!
Chris: You can count on me to make at least one hundred calls this weekend.
Tracey: I can commit to 25 calls tomorrow, maybe more! It’s our 7 year olds’ birthday party but I’ll do some in the morning.
Max: I’ll be calling all Saturday and Sunday too! Going for at least 250 calls!
Barbara: I plan to make at least 150 calls this weekend. The people I’ve called in Indiana seem to be interested in discussing the issues — some of the longest calls yet. Talking about everything from jobs to unions right to organize to taxes to gay rights. It’s fun and interesting and feels like it’s making a difference. I like seeing the counter click over, knowing that so many others are doing the same thing.
Donna: I’ll be making 25 calls to IN and 25 calls to NC this weekend.
Daniel: At least 10 calls for me
Really Hopeful: I am devoting Saturday and Sunday to calling. I am pledging now to call at least 50 numbers each day.
Jen: I commit to doing 50 calls this weekend. It is easy. Heck getting into the flow of things I might makes 100 before I even know it. How about you?
Cathy: I’ll match 100…who else?
Eric: I’m good for at least 25 calls on Sunday. I’m hoping we’ll be well over 750,000 calls by then. We want change.
And we should also make a special mention for Christine, one of our grassroots supporters who has been an inspiration and a help to countless supporters here on the blog (and all of us at HQ). Yesterday, Christine reached her own personal goal:
I just finished my 1001st call to Indiana . . . But 14 other people have committed to make 500 calls each as part of the Christine O’Bama Indiana Call Challenge. That’s 7,000 calls pledged!
To join the Challenge, click here.
It only takes a minute to get started. The Indiana and North Carolina calling campaigns run from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM Eastern time every day. If you’re willing to commit to making calls this weekend, let us know in the comments below and we’ll add you to the Roll Call.
Tuesday truly is one of the last big milestones of this primary season, and these next two days are our chance to move the polls and make a difference.
For several weeks, the Clinton campaign has been distributing literature and disseminating incendiary notions — which figured significantly in Pennsylvania, and are now central to the candidate’s message in Indiana and North Carolina — assailing Barack Obama for his association with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, the radical, violent organization responsible for bombing several government buildings in the early 1970s.
In their debate in Philadelphia, after moderator George Stephanoplous had raised the question of Obama’s relationship with Ayers, Hillary Clinton elaborated on the subject, seeking to add to its significance:
SEN. CLINTON: …I also believe that Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position. And if I’m not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York, and I would hope to every American, because they were published on 9/11 and he said that he was just sorry they hadn’t done more. And what they did was set bombs and in some instances people died. So it is — you know, I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about.
Whether this is 21st century McCarthyism–as argued by several important commentators not publicly allied with Obama — among them Stanley Fish in the New York Times (who has written several admiring columns about her candidacy) and Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker — is a matter readers will have to decide.
Whatever name it is called, Hillary Clinton, perhaps better than any contemporary political figure of our time, knows the insidious nature of this kind of guilt by association, for she (like Bill Clinton) has been a victim of it herself over a political lifetime.
Precisely because she knows the destructive power of such assertions and how unfair they can be, she has sought for a quarter-century to hide and minimize her own activities, associations, student fascination, and personal history with the radical Left. Those associations — logical, explicable, and (her acolytes have always maintained) even character-building in the context of the times — are far more extensive than any radical past that has come to be known about Barack Obama.
Which raises the question: Is the Clinton campaign’s emphasis on the Ayers-Obama connection significantly different or less spurious than the familiar (McCarthyite?) smears against Hillary, particularly those promulgated and disseminated by the forces she labeled “the vast right-wing conspiracy” in the 1990s?
Like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has (at least so far as this reporter and biographer has been able to determine) consistently rejected the ideological rigidity of the radical Left and — especially — the notion of revolutionary violence as a means of political change in contemporary America, despite claims to the contrary by the VRWC. Like Obama — and John McCain for that matter — she has valued her friendships with individuals who figured in the Left-wing and anti-war movements of the 60s and Vietnam era. And like Obama and McCain, she has never wavered from her belief and faith in establishment politics, within the two-party system.
But her past associations — and her evasions about them — may tell us much about the formation of Hillary Clinton, both as a product of her youthful time — the sixties and seventies, when radical student movements and the anti-war movement were a hugely potent force on campus and in American politics generally — and as a presidential candidate. The facts are fairly simple:
In the 60s, as an undergraduate at Wellesley, she exhibited an academic fascination with the Left and radicalism; rejected more extreme forms of political protest and violence as a student leader (there is no evidence I know that Obama has ever done anything but the same); wrote her senior thesis on the radical Chicago community-organizer Saul Alinsky (whose best-known philosophical mantra was, “Whatever works to get power to the people, use it.”); and then, during the 1992 presidential campaign and White House years, insured that the thesis was locked up in the Wellesley archives and unavailable to reporters.
At Yale law school she embraced some leftist causes she perhaps wishes she hadn’t today (the Black Panthers’ claim that they couldn’t get a fair trial, more about which later); worked in the most important radical law firm of the day — Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, in Oakland, which represented the Communist Party and defended the Panthers in their murder trials; and became associate editor of an alternative law review at Yale which ran stories and pictures depicting policemen as pigs and murderers.
In her 2003 “memoir,” Living History, Hillary mentions not a word about her role in the Panther trial in New Haven–during which she directed Yale law students monitoring the proceedings for evidence of government misconduct in its prosecution of the Panthers accused of murder. “It meant going in and out of the Black Panther headquarters to obtain documentation and other information,” a classmate told Donnie Radcliff of the Washington Post, quoted in Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady For Our Time. “Hillary’s job was to organize shifts for her classmates and make certain no proceeding went unmonitored…[for] civil rights abuses…”
As for her summer at the law firm, Hillary’s one-sentence mention of it in Living History gives the impression that Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein might as well been handling postal rate increases, rather than defending the Panthers, members of the communist party, and accepting cases that mainstream lawfirms were afraid to take — particularly civil liberties cases — in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. “I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland California, and he soon said he would like to go to California with me.”
That is the total verbiage expended on so formative an experience, and the lasting — but distant friendship — she maintained for the next twenty-some years with Bob Treuhaft and his wife, the muckraking journalist (and, like her husband) former communist party member Jessica Mitford.
“The reason she came to us,” Treuhaft told me [the quotation is in my biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge] “the only reason I could think of, because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called “Movement law firm at the time. There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale” to intern at the firm. “She certainly… was in sympathy with all the Left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at the time. We still weren’t very far out of the McCarthy era.”
And might not still be, to judge from the 2008 presidential campaign.
In the 1980s, Jessica Mitford visited the Clintons at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. She and Treuhaft had left the communist party in 1958, years after the revelation of Stalin’s murderous crimes, but — Jessica Mitford wrote in her memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, she quit “not primarily over some issue of high principle, but because it had become dull….boring. Rather like London’s debutante circuit.”
When Jessica Mitford died in 1996, Hillary Clinton wrote Bob Treuhaft a lovely condolence letter from the White House, characteristically filled with the kind of heart-felt personal touches that the senator’s friends have always remarked upon.
Which, of course, no more raises the question “Is Hillary Clinton a Stalinist?,” or a communist sympathizer, than “Is Barack Obama a Weatherman?” or a weatherman sympathizer, because of his association with Bill Ayers.
Aside from the candidate herself, her prime-most abettor in pushing the Bill Ayers-Weatherman-Obama line is, inevitably, Sidney Blumenthal, who has also been distributing many other questionable allegations about Obama he has plucked from and disseminated to, at times, of all places–organs of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
As in the Clinton White House, where he was the archivist of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s plots, Blumenthal is no independent operator. He maintains an ongoing personal and strategic dialogue with his patrons, Hillary and Bill Clinton.
– –
One of Hillary Clinton’s most winning attributes — and Bill Clinton’s too — has always been their understanding of the complexity of American politics, and the danger of ideological demagoguery (witness their fight against the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and excesses). The resort by Hillary and her campaign to guilt-by-association–of which the Bill Ayers allegations are but one example: see Louis Farrakhan, or a comparatively-obscure African-American writer and perhaps — communist party member named Frank Marshal Dixon, whom Obama knew in high school in Hawaii — is, even for some of her most steadfast advocates, particularly dismaying. Like Gov. Bill Richardson and Senator Christopher Dodd, among others who have abandoned the Clintons, many old Clinton hands had hoped, judging from Hillary’s triumphant and collegial senate years, that she — and Bill — had left behind such tactics when the Clinton Presidency ended in 2001 and the Right-wing threat to the Clintons’ tenure in the White House had abated.
“The sad irony,” noted Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, “is that these are the same [guilt-by-association] attacks used against her husband in the elections of the 1990s. The GOP tried to destroy Bill Clinton for his relationships (much closer than Obama’s tangential connections) with Arkansas crooks, sleazy fund-raisers and unsavory women. But ‘The Man From Hope,’ while seen as less honest than Bush or Bob Dole, bet that issues and uplift were more important to voters than his character. He won….”
– –
“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” said Hillary Clinton in Ohio, asserting that the Obama campaign had misrepresented her health-care plan.
Shame indeed.
ABC News’ Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller report: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., made an economic heavy closing argument to the voters of Indianapolis, Ind., summoning up a historical reminder of the last time the state’s primary was so closely watched.
“It was 40 years ago this May that Robert Kennedy took his unlikely campaign to create a new kind of politics to Indiana,” Obama said, just three days before the Indiana primary, where he’s seen his poll numbers slowly dropping.
Obama painted a picture that the American dream is slipping away and it takes more than tinkering around the edges in Washington to bring back prosperity to American working families. As he has in many campaign events leading up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Obama used his opposition to the gas tax holiday to demonstrate this problem — highlighting his dissention from his two opponents, who support the plan.
“There’s not an expert out there that believes that this is going to work. There’s not an editorial out there that has said this is actually the answer to high gas prices,” Obama said of the gas tax holiday plan. “In fact, my understanding is, today, Sen. Clinton had to send out a surrogate to speak on behalf of this plan, and all she could find was, get this, a lobbyist for Shell Oil to explain how this is going to be good for consumers. It’s a shell game, literally.”
Obama was referencing Steve Elmendorf, a Clinton supporter, who told CNN that Clinton’s gas tax holiday plan was a good proposal. Elmendorf is also a lobbyist from Shell Oil.
“We can’t afford to settle for a Washington where our energy policy, and our health care policy, and our tax policy is sold to the highest-bidding lobbyist,” Obama said, and criticized Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., for a plan that he said would do nothing to solve the gas price problem. “This is what passes for leadership in Washington — phony ideas, calculated to win elections instead of actually solving problems.”
Part of Obama’s closing argument to voters is to flesh out his background, one that has been called into question in the wake of the incendiary comments made by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The senator has been retelling the biography of his family, with an emphasis on his and his wife’s humble roots, and asking people to move past controversies that have dominated the news cycle recently.
“The only way a black guy named Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, and started his career on the streets of Chicago, is standing here before you today — and that’s the only way we can win this race — is if you decide that you’ve had enough of the way things are,” Obama said, and brought recent controversies into the fold.
“If you decide that this election is bigger than flag pins or sniper fire and the comments of a former pastor –- bigger than the differences between what we look like or where we come from or what party we belong to.”
Joining Obama on the campaign trail today are his wife Michelle and two daughters, Malia and Sasha, who rarely make an appearance with their father at events. The family have a pot luck dinner tonight in Kempton, Ind., at a home with some of his Kansas family roots: Obama’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th great-grandfathers owned the land, and Obama’s great-uncle built the home.
Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia share a dorm room at
Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. But they say there’s no funny
business going on. Really. They mean it.
Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia surf the internet in their room at Wesleyan University.
They have set up their beds side-by-side like Lucy and Ricky in “I Love
Lucy” and avert their eyes when one of them is changing clothes.
“People are shocked to hear that it’s happening and even that it’s
possible,” said Youngdahl, a 20-year-old sophomore. But “once you
actually live in it, it doesn’t actually turn into a big deal.”
In the prim 1950s, college dorms were off-limits to members of the
opposite sex. Then came the 1970s, when male and female students
started crossing paths in coed dormitories. Now, to the astonishment of
some baby boomer parents, a growing number of colleges are going even
further: coed rooms.
At least two dozen schools, including Brown
University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, Clark
University and the California Institute of Technology, allow some or
all students to share a room with anyone they choose, including someone
of the opposite sex. This spring, as students sign up for next year’s
room, more schools are following suit, including Stanford University.
As shocking as it sounds to some parents, some students and schools say it’s not about sex.
Instead, they say the demand is mostly from heterosexual students who
want to live with close friends who happen to be of the opposite sex.
Some gay students who feel more comfortable rooming with someone of the
opposite sex are also taking advantage of the option.
“It
ultimately comes down to finding someone that you feel is compatible
with you,” said Jeffrey Chang, a junior at Clark in Worcester,
Massachusetts, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind
Campaign, a group that is pushing for gender-neutral housing. “Students
aren’t doing this to make a point. They’re not doing this to upset
their parents. It’s really for practical reasons.”
Couples do
sometimes room together, an arrangement known at some schools as
“roomcest.” Brown explicitly discourages couples from living together
on campus, be they gay or straight. But the University of California,
Riverside has never had a problem with a roommate couple breaking up
midyear, said James C. Smith, assistant director for residence life.
Most schools introduced the couples option in the past three or four
years. So far, relatively few students are taking part. At the
University of Pennsylvania, which began offering coed rooms in 2005,
about 120 out of 10,400 students took advantage of the option this year.
At UC Riverside, which has approximately 6,000 students in campus
housing, about 50 have roommates of the opposite sex. The school has
had the option since 2005.
Garcia and Youngdahl live in a house
for students with an interest in Russian studies. They said they were
already friendly and didn’t think they would be compatible with some of
the other people in the house.
“I had just roomed with a boy. I
was under the impression at the time that girls were a little bit
neater and more quiet,” Youngdahl said. “As it turns out, I don’t see
much of a difference from one sex to the other.”
Garcia, 19, admitted: “I’m incredibly messy.”
Parents aren’t necessarily thrilled with boy-girl housing.
Debbie Feldman’s 20-year-old daughter, Samantha, is a sophomore at
Oberlin in Ohio and plans to room with her platonic friend Grey Caspro,
a straight guy, next year. Feldman said she was shocked when her
daughter told her.
“When you have a male and female sharing such
close quarters, I think it’s somewhat delusional to think there won’t
be sexual tension,” 52-year-old Feldman said. “Maybe this generation
feels more comfortable walking around in their underwear. I’m not sure
that’s a good thing.”
Still, Feldman said her daughter is partly
in college to learn life lessons, and it’s her decision. Samantha said
she assured her mom that she thinks of Caspro as a brother.
“I’m
really close to him, and I consider him one of my really good friends,”
she said. “I really trust him. That trust makes it work.”
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