Mark on the Right

Lame Demagogue Session

2010-12-02T08:30:00.002-05:00

Democrats have not reacted well to the “shellacking” voters administered to the party at the polls earlier this month. Far from doing any soul searching or introspection of any kind, Democrats embarked on a campaign to vindicate their leaders, reelecting Nancy Pelosi to head their now minority House caucus and Harry Reid to lead a reduced Senate contingent.

The leadership brooked no second-guessing of Democrats’ electoral strategy, either, declaring that the message was good and only the party’s delivery was flawed. They consoled themselves in the voters’ inability to understand just how wonderful four years of Democratic control of Congress had been, and rued their failure…no, their incomplete explanation of the benefits of another two years with Pelosi as speaker.

Democrats’ refusal to spend any time in the wilderness, indeed in their refusal to acknowledge the existence of a wilderness, has not served them well as they struggle to gain a foothold from which to spring back to power. The lame-duck session of Congress thus far has resulted in no legislative accomplishments: no deal on extending the Bush tax cuts, no talk of spending cuts, no incentives to create jobs, nothing to acknowledge the voters’ anger and frustration at the way Democrats have run the government.

Instead, the Democrats have wasted time dreaming of bills that will not pass and would enrage most of the country if they did. These bills include the aptly named Dream Act, which would create a backdoor amnesty for young illegal immigrants; an omnibus spending bill, no doubt festooned like a Christmas tree with pork-barrel spending projects; and a new START arms reduction treaty with Russia – that nobody outside the White House seems to want or think is important – which will certainly not create jobs.

On the political side, Democrats have not fared much better. In their first post-election coordinated assault, Democrats and their union hangers-on have taken to haranguing Republican opponents of Obamacare – the passage of which is likely the single biggest reason Democrats will find themselves in the minority next year. New York Representative Joseph Crowley and 60 Democrats sent a letter to the GOP leadership in both houses preemptively calling any member that opposed or campaigned against the government takeover of health care a hypocrite if that member signs up for the Congressional health care plan.

“If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk,” Crowley wrote. “You cannot enroll in the very kind of coverage that you want for yourselves, and then turn around and deny it to Americans who don't happen to be Members of Congress.”

This argument is exactly the kind of rank demagoguery that Americans turned out in droves to vote against on November 2nd. It has the added benefit of being completely inane. It is rooted in the fundamental belief that voters are too stupid to know the difference between government run health care and government provided health insurance.

The federal government, as an employer, pays a premium to third-party providers for health care plans to cover members of Congress. The government does not provide the actual care, or make the decisions about coverage. It buys a market-based product, and makes it available to its employees and their families. What’s more, Congressmen pay up to twenty-five percent of the premium for the coverage they choose.

Acceptance of this job benefit by Republican legislators is no more an acceptance of the principle of government run health care than is acceptance of government censorship by people who check books out from government run libraries. Would AFSCME, which joined Democrats in this ridiculous line of attack, demand that its members renounce their employer-based coverage if they voted Republican? Should supporters of First Amendment rights turn in their library cards? Nonsense.

Of course, Republicans’ votes against Obamacare were actually votes in favor of retaining employer-based health care coverage. Democrats know this. Republicans are entirely consistent in signing their families up for whichever health insurance plan they wish. Rather, as is often the case, it is the Democrats who are tainted with the hypocrisy with which they accuse their opponents. If single-payer, government run health care is so much better, Democrat congressmen that support it should show some leadership themselves and renounce their coverage under the federal health benefits plan.

But by far the worst feature of this new Democratic push is that it isn’t even new. Factcheck.org debunked this particular attack in 2009. Democrats might have known this too, if instead of rushing headlong to prop up the leaders who had brought them electoral disaster they had taken a short walk in the wilderness.

Cross posted at Human Events.

Acting Stupidly

2009-07-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

If you want to figure out what a politician is up to, pay attention to what he accuses his opponents of doing. Chances are, the accuser is probably doing it himself.

It is with that thought in mind that we take a look at President Barack Obama’s now infamous determination from afar that the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “acted stupidly,” in arresting Harvard Professor, and Obama friend, Henry Louis Gates. The president has since re-calibrated that remark, offering in his pre-eminent law enforcement opinion that Gates should not have been arrested for verbally assaulting Sgt. James Crowley and causing a public scene in front of his home in protest of the police coming to protect him and his property from potential vandals.

But the “acting stupidly” comment still hangs over the incident and over the White House like a dark cloud. Obama put it there with his inability to restrain himself from commenting on the Gates affair at last week’s White House press conference. And in so eagerly labeling the Cambridge Police, Obama has unwittingly provided the lens through which to view his first six months as president. For the Obama Administration has been acting stupidly almost since the very first day of his presidency.

President Obama came into office with perhaps more political capital than any president in recent history. Following an administration and a president that had become widely – if unfairly – unpopular, Obama took the office after a campaign based on broad themes of hope and change. Americans of all ideologies earnestly hoped that the country would thrive under his leadership, even if like Rush Limbaugh they wished his more liberal policy initiatives to fail. Supported by a press corps heavily invested in his election and his Administration’s success, and coupled with enlarged Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a Republican minority looking for areas in which to cooperate with the popular new president, the young Administration had everything going for it.

Until it was time to govern.

The trouble began even before the inauguration with a series embarrassing tax problems for Administration nominees. Nominee after nominee was withdrawn for their failure to fully and completely pay their fair share, some might say their patriotic share, of income taxes. The most famous of these is former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Others, like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, survived their tax woes, with the support of the president. The entire episode, however, would have been avoidable were it not for a stupid oversight of the vetting committee. Just days after the inauguration, Obama was forced to admit, “I screwed up.”

On policy, the Obama Administration has acted no less stupidly than it did on personnel. President Obama’s guiding principle of his first 100 days in office can be summed up in this: If George W. Bush did it, it must be bad. Therefore I must undo it. There doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that. From reversing the ban on funding of family planning groups that counsel and conduct abortions overseas to ordering the closing of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the first weeks of the Administration were characterized by a reflexive rejection of any and every policy instituted by the Bush administration.

Particularly in the case of Guantanamo Bay, the Administration has come to regret those heady days of its youth, when all Obama had to do was be the anti-Bush to win plaudits from his sycophantic press corps. Guantanamo has turned out to be thorny issue, on which Obama has had to eat his words. Not long after declaring that the prison would close within a year, Obama has had to admit that some of the detainees would have to remain incarcerated indefinitely, without charge or trial. It was unquestionably stupid of Obama to issue a definitive proclamation on the fate of the prison without considering the real world consequences of that decision, and he has been burned for it.

Legislatively, Obama has not fared much better, either. On his signature program to date, the economic stimulus bill, President Obama allowed the appropriators in Congress to write the bill with little guidance from the White House. The predictable result was a bill so laden with such obviously wasteful spending items, that Republicans were able to coalesce almost unanimously against it. But the real stupidity on the part of the Administration came when Obama invited Congressional Republicans to the White House for negotiations on the package. Instead of paying lip service to Republican concerns and perhaps throwing them a bone or two, in the spirit of bipartisanship, Obama stupidly and arrogantly dismissed Republicans with a curt “I won.”

The insult galvanized opposition to the bill and resulted in not one single Republican member of the House voting for it. Similarly, only three liberal Senate Republicans sided with the Administration on passage of the measure, and one of those is now a Democrat. Now that the stimulus bill is not working as advertised and the economy has gotten worse not better, there are only Democrats and the Administration to blame. Republicans have been so emboldened by their successful opposition that some are openly speculating that the GOP can take back the House in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Now comes the health care debate, and President Obama is displaying the hallmark of truly stupid behavior: the refusal to learn from one’s mistakes. Obama has once again allowed Congress to write the legislation with little guidance and the resulting bills have been disasters. Republicans are once again united in opposition while Democrats are fractured along ideological lines. As with the stimulus, the Administration has rejected all Republican initiatives on health care reform, to the point of claiming that Republicans have not offered a plan of their own.

As public support for the plan has cratered, the Obama Administration has panicked, insisting on an August recess deadline for passage of a plan and exposing the legislation’s Achilles Heel. Republicans have been successful at forcing Democrats to miss that deadline, and are on the precipice of killing the plan outright.

Meanwhile, Obama has only made things worse, holding his disastrous prime-time press conference at which he stupidly decided to weigh in on a minor law enforcement matter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Incredibly, unable to admit his mistake, Obama first doubled down on his remarks, then invited Crowley and Gates to the White House for a beer, thereby guaranteeing another week of bad press from the incident.

There are more examples - the much-hyped lobbyist ban that the White House broke the very next day after the president signed it comes to mind – but the point is clear. Any of these stumbles on their own might be chalked up to the growing pains that accompany a transition of power. But all of them taken together, and in such a relatively short time, could be said to constitute stupidity in governance. The next time President Obama is tempted to label a public servant’s actions as stupid, he would do better to look a little closer to home.

Sotomayor's Discriminating Defense

2009-07-05T16:15:00.000-04:00

President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, has been deservedly criticized for her stated belief that minority judges make better decisions than “white males” because of their race, gender, ethnicity, and life experiences. The remark, repeated by Sotomayor in near identical form in speech after speech, has raised questions about her ability to be fair and impartial on the bench.

Surprisingly less criticized has been Sotomayor’s defense of her membership in an exclusive women’s club, The Belizean Grove. A little over two weeks ago, Sotomayor responded to questions from Senators about the group with an answer that made even her champions at the New York Times blush. Sotomayor said that her membership in the all-female group was appropriate because the group did not “invidiously discriminate” against men.

“I am a member of the Belizean Grove, a private organization of female professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors. The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Men are involved in its activities — they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions — but to the best of my knowledge, a man has never asked to be considered for membership.”

The Times pointed out that the group’s own website does not agree with Sotomayor’s characterization, describing the group as a, “constellation of influential women,” and seemingly containing no mention of any roles for men. Like her explanation of her racial comments, Sotomayor’s defense of her membership raises more questions than answers.

Those questions could be fertile ground for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to plow at Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, which begin July 13. According to the group, The Belizean Grove’s members strive to form “mutually-beneficial relationships.” Republicans should pursue the notion that a sitting federal judge has no business belonging to such a group.

Senators might ask the nominee just how, if at all, members of the group could have expected to benefit from her membership. Did Sotomayor perform any favors for her sister members in her professional capacity as a supposedly impartial judge? Did she hear cases in which members of the group, their businesses, or their employers had an interest? Did she recuse herself from any case in which a member of the group had an interest? Why or why not?

Sotomayor’s membership in the group, even if it resulted in no tangible benefit to her fellow members, is a shocking case of poor professional judgment. The fact that, her interpretation notwithstanding, the group clearly discriminates on the basis of sex is bad enough. But for a federal judge to give the appearance that she is seeking to benefit from her position should be disqualifying. To paraphrase a famous alleged federal office broker, it is as if Judge Sotomayor believed that a federal judgeship is a valuable thing, and she was determined to make the most of it.

The Sotomayor nomination has largely fallen off the radar screen for the mainstream press. Even the Supreme Court’s reversal of her decision in Ricci v. DeStefano this week received only passing mentions and not very much detailed analysis of her original decision. The lull in coverage has served Sotomayor’s interest, as the public has not been exposed to a daily drumbeat of criticism of her nomination. It will be up to Republicans then to give her a thorough examination at her conformation hearings. Sotomayor’s Belizean Grove membership, her inability to recognize the discriminatory nature of the group’s membership policy, and the potential for conflict between her membership and her professional duties should all be explored in detail.

NY State Senate Follies Continue

2009-06-23T19:00:00.001-04:00

The standoff in Albany j4b7dq8wmp between State Senate Republicans and Democrats continues, as Democrats refuse to acknowledge the new reality that they are no longer in control of the chamber after two of their members voted with Republicans to oust Malcolm Smith as majority leader. The latest act to appear in the center ring of this circus is New York Governor David Paterson. After alternately vowing to not let the Senate takeover stand and admitting that there is really nothing he can do about it, Paterson said Sunday that he will call the Senate into special session.

At his press conference, Paterson chided the Senate, saying that the impasse has "inconvenienced the lives of every New Yorker."

"Over the last couple of weeks, the senators' conduct has been laughable, but what's going on around here these days is no joke and I don't find it funny. There will be no excuses and there will be no tolerance for noncompliance with this order. And as they have inconvenienced all New Yorkers for the past few weeks, maybe we'll see how they like feeling the same way."

For all his bluster, however, Paterson has no authority to force the Senate to debate bills or take votes. He can only make them sit in the chamber. And as for his assertion that the standoff has "inconvenienced" New Yorkers, there is no evidence of this. Despite the great tragedy of the New York State Senate holding no official sessions for a couple of weeks, all the traffic lights still work, and all the government offices are still open. How exactly has even one New Yorker been directly affected by the Senate standoff?

Quite the contrary, New York has been better off without a legislature to meddle in their daily lives. Consider the agenda that the governor is so eager to have the Senate consider.

The governor's 55-bill agenda includes legislation to extend the law granting the mayor control over the school system and a bill authorizing the city to hike its 4% local sales tax by another 0.5%.

[Paterson] said once those issues are dealt with, he will call another special session to deal with more controversial matters, like the legalization of same-sex marriage.

And those are just the highlights. Higher taxes and redefining marriage. Goodness knows what else the governor has in store for the state if he only had a Senate to act. Surely the good people of New York City can go another summer without an extra half a percent on top of the already sky high 8.75% sales tax. Recognizing same-sex marriages is not a high-priority concern for the vast majority of New Yorkers, one suspects. With the exception of mayoral control of the schools, this is not the "people's business," as the governor so high-and-mightily put it. It is the politicians' business, the special interests' business.

The New York State GOP, and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skellos in particular, should be commended for giving the nation a glimpse of the consequences when a state legislature fails to act: nothing. There's a lesson in this for state parties and the national Republican Party. If government would stop doing the "people's business," and just let the people go about their business, everything will be just fine. More state legislatures should try it. Maybe even Congress. So for now, let the circus continue in Albany. It will be resolved in its own good time, the governor's frustrations notwithstanding. The people can wait.

Not So Wise

2009-06-09T18:30:00.001-04:00

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has come under fire for the following controversial comment that she made in prepared remarks at the University of California-Berkeley.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Both the Obama Administration and the nominee herself have said that the comments would have been better “restated.” If by “restated” the Administration meant “repeated,” then the revelation that Sotomayor made nearly the exact same remark twice before and twice after the 2001 Berkeley speech would not be a surprise. As it is, however, Sotomayor’s views on the role of gender and ethnicity in her judicial decision making process has never been in more doubt.

More trouble for Sotomayor has come to light recently as a result of her filing an incomplete Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. The White House boasted that Sotomayor turned in her questionnaire, “faster than any nominee in modern history,” just nine days since her nomination. She may have wanted to hold onto it a bit longer.

Sotomayor did not mention a memorandum she signed as a member of a Puerto Rico Legal Defense Fund task force on the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York State in 1981. In the memo, the group argues that the death penalty, “…is associated with evident racism in our society.” Sotomayor, signature on the document is another indication of her apparently incessant and ingrained tendency to see race and ethnicity first, and facts second.

Both the additional speeches and the omission of the memo underscore the decidedly unwise manner in which the Obama Administration, and Sotomayor herself, have handled the nomination, the nominee’s characterization of herself notwithstanding. Whether the Administration did not anticipate the level of scrutiny that would be visited on its first Supreme Court nomination, or whether it is simply trying to rush the nomination through before all the facts can be ascertained is not known. But questions about what the Administration knew and when about the speeches and the memo are now bound to be a feature of her confirmation hearing. As are other as yet undiscovered controversies in Sotomayor’s professional career.

With 59 Senators and a high personal approval rating, President Obama should have been able to drive Sotomayor’s nomination through the Senate with little or no question. However, the Administration’s ham-handed attempts at crisis management, and it’s juvenile pursuit of some superfluous record has brought greater scrutiny on Sotomayor than otherwise may have been expected. This has provided Republicans with an opportunity to define Sotomayor and President Obama at the confirmation hearings. They should take full advantage of the Obama Administration’s missteps, and Sotomayor’s omission, to give her a thorough examination.

A Question of National Character

2009-06-07T14:30:00.000-04:00

This piece originally appeared in the American Spectator. Thanks to Jim Antle and Caleb Howe.

Speaking to a French reporter while on his Middle East trip, President Obama said that the United States would be “one of the largest Muslim countries,” if its Muslim population was the measure. Jake Tapper fact checked that claim and reports that the White House used the CIA World Fact Book as a source for Obama’s erroneous statistic that there are seven million Muslims in the U.S. The actual size of the Muslim population in America, according to the CIA, is 0.6% of the total, or just under 2 million.

Tapper points out that the president did not say, and does not believe, that the United States is a Muslim nation, as some have lamented. As evidence for this, he recalls Obama’s speech of April 6, in Turkey, in which the president said that America, “does not consider itself a Christian nation, a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation.” While Tapper may be correct on the literal meaning of the president’s words, the rationale behind them is utter nonsense.
The idea that America would be one of the largest Muslim nations is silly not just because the president’s figures were grossly over-inflated. It is silly because population size is not what makes a nation inherently Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. Culture does.

Take India as an example. India has the second largest population in the world at just under 1.2 billion people. Of them, the CIA says that 13.5% are Muslim. That gives India a Muslim population of over 162 million. Compare that to the largest Muslim nation of Indonesia, which has 200 million. Yet no one would think to claim that India is a Muslim nation, or that it is even, “one of the largest Muslim countries,” based on that number alone. India’s culture is as unique as it is ancient. In modern times, India’s culture and society may have been shaped by Muslims, but they are undoubtedly rooted in a history that long predates the introduction of Islam.

Similarly, America has a history rooted in Western European civilization, which is undeniably Christian. The Founders were Christian men who, guided by their Christian faith, stitched together a nation. Although they had the restraint to forbid the government from sponsoring a particular religion, to say that the United States is not a Christian nation is to deny both its history and the present reality. Indeed, with roughly one tenth of the worldwide Christian population, by the president’s own logic the United States would be one of the world’s biggest Christian nations, if not the biggest.

One aspect of the United States’ Christian culture is its acceptance of other religions. This is simply not the case in many Muslim nations, where Christians and Jews are shunned, discriminated against, and even driven out. A powerful example is the systematic marginalization of the minority Coptic Christian community in the president’s host nation, Egypt.
It is understandable that President Obama wants better relations with the Muslim world. It has been, after all, the source of many of America’s problems for the past 30 years. But to deny the very nature of the county in that effort is not outreach, it is obsequiousness. America’s relationship to Muslims should be predicated on mutual respect, understanding, and tolerance of one another. That means Muslims must understand and accept that America is at its root a Christian nation, just as they must realize that America’s actions in the world are not guided by that fact. The president does his cause no favors by pretending otherwise.

Obama Met Secretly with Jeremiah Wright During Campaign

2009-06-03T07:00:00.004-04:00

Last May, in the heat of the Democratic primary and coming off of a disastrous showing in the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama reversed course and publicly denounced his controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after refusing to do so the month before. In his now famous Philadelphia speech on race relations, Obama said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community. Wright then made an appearance at the National Press Club on April 28th, one week after the Pennsylvania primary, in which he refused to recant his controversial sermons, the revelation of which had brought pressure on the Obama campaign. Soon after, Obama would disown him, using the pretext of Wright's affirmation of his sermons as the reason for his change of mind.

Wright disappeared from the campaign after that, disproving speculation that he was out to destroy Obama's campaign out of anger at his former charge's repudiation. At the time, I questioned whether it was all a set up. Did Obama and Wright conspire together to get Wright and the controversy surrounding Obama's 20-year attendance at his Trinity United Church out of the news in advance of the crucial North Carolina and Indiana primaries? Now, there may be proof.

This is what I speculated on May 2nd, three days after Obama denounced his former pastor:

Here’s how the theory goes. When Wright’s controversial sermons...were made public, the Obama campaign took the occasion to have the candidate make a big speech on race relations. The speech was delivered in Philadelphia, the better to help Obama calm the fears of rural, white, working-class Democrats, to whom he now looked a little more like a sixties radical than an agent of a new kind of politics. It was expected that Obama would distance himself from his firebrand pastor. But he didn’t...Far from distancing himself, Obama drew closer to Wright. [...]

Obama lost Pennsylvania by 10 points on April 22nd...Faced with the sudden realization that his campaign was foundering among rural whites, and with four heavily rural states next to vote, Obama needed a way to reach out to that crucial Democratic demographic.

But for the post-partisan Obama to suddenly turn on his pastor, mentor, and friend of more than 20 years would have seemed too opportunistic, too old politics. He needed to find a way to denounce Wright without having it be seen as politically motivated. [...]

Less cynical observers say that the new Wright controversy is too damaging for Obama’s campaign to be a political ploy...But it has been three days since Obama’s dismissal of Wright, and there has been no word from the Reverend. If Wright remains silent through Monday, consider it a certainty that he is executing a plan designed to give Obama the political cover to opportunistically deny him. There may never be proof of coordination, but there seems to be a lot of winking and nodding going on.

In his forthcoming book on the 2008 campaign, Richard Wolfe reports that Obama and Wright met between the Pennsylvania and North Carolina primaries at Wright's home in suburban Chicago. The Obama campaign set up the meeting with the express goal of getting Wright to end his public appearances. The meeting was not reported in the press.

Wolfe's account of the discussion between the besieged pastor and the beleaguered candidate leaves plenty of questions. Wolfe says Obama, "adopt[ed] the tone of a concerned friend giving advice," and tried to, "nudge [Wright] in the right direction by making him aware of what was about to happen." The account is silent about whether the two men discussed the campaign. But coming off a loss in a heavily rural state, and heading into two more contests in heavily rural battleground states, is it really much of a stretch to surmise that Obama asked Wright to get out of the way?

The proof, of course, is that Wright did exactly that. He made no more public appearances after his National Press Club speech. There was no attempt to destroy Obama's campaign. And thanks to Republican John McCain's decision not to make Wright an issue, Obama did not have to face serious questions about his former pastor again during the campaign.

Complicit in this deception is the mainstream media, which clearly was not paying close enough attention to Obama to know of the meeting. Considering the intensity of the Wright story and the Democratic primary, the meeting would have been blockbuster news. Somehow, Obama was able to meet with the most controversial figure in the campaign, at his home, on the cusp of two critically important primaries, and not one media outlet reported on it.

All of this calls into question whether Obama was telling the truth in his embrace of Wright in Philadelphia, or in his denunciation of him the following month; and whether Wright's National Press Club appearance and Obama's subsequent distancing from him was part of a quid pro quo designed to allow Obama to appear more moderate without explicitly denying his radical preacher. Had news of the meeting been reported, that question may have been explored, at least in the conservative blogosphere. Instead, the public was deprived of the context necessary to make a true judgment about Obama's relationship to Wright. But perhaps a clue to Obama's motivations in both speeches can be found in the words of Wright himself.

"Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls...He does what politicians do."

Sotomayor Obfuscates on "Wise Latina" Comment

2009-06-02T21:00:00.003-04:00

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor made the rounds on Capitol Hill today, meeting with Senators of both parties. According to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT), Sotomayor addressed her controversial "wise Latina" remarks from 2001 during their meeting. Leahy would not say whether the nominee acknowledged that she misspoke when she made the comments, but her attempt to explain them only adds more confusion.

Here is what Sotomayor said in a prepared speech to a University of California Berkeley audience:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Last week, the White House said that Sotomayor chose her words poorly when making the speech, adding that the judge was, "making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging." President Obama endorsed that line, saying that the controversy over the remarks was "nonsense." Still, the nominee spouted a completely different explanation in her meetings with Senators today.

"Sotomayor told Leahy that what she meant is that people have different backgrounds but 'there is only one law,' and 'ultimately and completely' she would follow the law.

Leahy didn't clarify whether Sotomayor acknowledged misspeaking, as even President Barack Obama has. Leahy said Sotomayor talked about her judicial philosophy, which can be guided by experiences but at the end of the day it comes down to rule of law." [emphasis added]

To clarify, Sotomayor now says that when she said life experiences matter to the process of judging, she was really saying that life experiences don't matter to the process of judging.

The "ultimately and completely" formulation came up again in a meeting with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, in what is clearly a White House supplied line to try and put the "nonsense" controversy behind the nominee. But rather than clear things up, Sotomayor's and the Administration's denial of the clear meaning of her words only creates more questions about what she meant when she made the speech.

Sotomayor, Obama, and the Felon Vote

2009-06-02T18:45:00.000-04:00

Welcome American Spectator readers. Thanks to Quin Hillyer for the kind words and the link. -MI

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an advocate of allowing felons to vote. "Advocate" is a loaded word when referring to a judge, and with good reason. Judges are not supposed to allow their personal preferences to influence their interpretation of the law and the facts at issue in a given case. But their really is no other way to describe Sotomayor's dissenting opinion in Hayden v. Pataki, a case brought by inmates in New York State under the federal Voting Rights Act.

The inmates were suing the State of New York for the right to vote, alleging New York's prohibition of felon voting was discriminatory based on race and ethnicity. Sotomayor sided with the inmates in a four-paragraph long opinion, holding that the Voting Rights Act prohibited states from disenfranchising felons because the majority are black, Hispanic, and other minorities.

The Washington Times excoriates Sotomayor for her shoddy legal reasoning pointing out that the Constitution grants states the right to deny felons the vote in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Times rightly characterizes her opinion in the case as a product of her inability to see past race and ethnicity and apply the law as written.

"Ms. Sotomayor is thus in the position of asserting that Congress can prohibit New York from doing something the Constitution itself specifically endorses. It's as if she thinks that black and Hispanic felons are convicted in order to deny them the vote, rather than being denied the vote as a result of being duly convicted. Her position ignores the fact that it is these convicts' own actions, their crimes – not any state-based racial discrimination – that make them ineligible to vote.

[Sotomayor's] dissenting opinion in Hayden v. Pataki is another example of her taking racial grievance mongering to absurd new depths. They are depths unbecoming a Supreme Court justice."

Unsurprisingly, as a Senator, President Obama was a co-sponsor of the Count Every Vote Act, a bill which would have restored the right to vote to all ex-felons nationwide, according to a description of the legislation the president provided during the campaign on an NAACP questionnaire. It's not likely that he was pandering. But what about as a Constitutional law professor? Does the president endorse the position Sotomayor expressed in her brief dissent on felon voting rights? How about Sotomayor's interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment?

This is a question on which it seems that Sotomayor is very vulnerable. First, her legal reasoning – that Congress can trump the Constitution by statute – if that's what we must call it, is highly uninformed. Second, Sotomayor only took four paragraphs to elucidate her opinion. That leaves precious little room for justifications grounded in past precedent or legal analysis. It smacks more of an, "I like it, therefore it must be," approach to judging, at least in this case. Worse, the apparent lack of effort Sotomayor put into the decision suggests a lack of respect for the process that will not serve the country well were she to be confirmed. Justices must bring more heft than a curt, "Because I said so!" when ruling on matters of national impact.

Republicans should press Sotomayor hard on this case, and others, in private and at her confirmation hearings. They should also demand that the White House answer for nominating a judge who could not be bothered to explain her extra-Constitutional reasoning in Hayden v. Pataki, and who refuses to be bound by the Constitution or the law in attempting to implement her, and the president's, favored outcomes.

Obama Silent on First Terror Attack Since 9/11

2009-06-02T08:30:00.000-04:00

Those wondering how long it would take for the first act of terrorism to be perpetrated on American soil under President Barack Obama did not have to wait long. The murder of a U.S. military recruiter by a Muslim convert in Arkansas yesterday marks the return of the war on terror to America after just four months of the new Administration's systematic dismantling of the policies and programs that kept the nation safe for over seven years under the Bush Administration.

Some may take issue with that characterization, noting the slaying of abortionist George Tiller by an apparently militant domestic terrorist on Sunday. President Obama certainly was quick to condemn that killing; and his Administration quick to take action to protect other abortion providers. Tiller's murderer, though a cold-blooded killer, is not a terrorist of the kind that the United States has been fighting since the September 11th attacks. If every murderer were a terrorist, the United States would have to invade most liberal-run cities to put down the violence.

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, is, however, exactly the kind of terrorist that has been prevented from carrying out acts of violence against Americans, until now. Still, the president has not made a statement about the killing. He has not expressed "shock and outrage" as he did at Tiller's murder; has not offered condolences to Pvt. William A. Long's family or Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, the other soldier injured in the attack; and has not expressed the nation's resolve - to say nothing of his Administration's - to continue to fight radical Islamic terrorists wherever they may be found.

To Obama, the Arkansas shootings were an isolated incident carried out by a deranged individual, not part of a worldwide effort to kill Americans with the aim of bringing the country to it's knees. Indeed, it cannot allow the attack to be viewed as such – even though we know Muhammad was radicalized in prison, trained in Yemen, and was upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – lest Obama bear some responsibility for watering down the programs that could have prevented it.

Gibbs Walks Sotomayor Back into a Corner

2009-05-29T23:15:00.000-04:00

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today began the Obama Administration's walkback of controversial comments made by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. At today's press briefing, the perpetually over matched Gibbs attempted to explain away Sotomayor's comment that a "wise Latina" would necessarily make better judicial decisions than a "white male" judge because of her gender, ethnicity, and life experience. But Gibbs never learned the first rule of being in a hole, and his explanation raises more uncomfortable questions for the nominee.

"I think she’d say her word choice in 2001 was poor. She was simply making the point that experiences are relevant to the process of judging. Your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts and certain cases, that your experiences impact your understanding."

The only facts that a judge has any business considering, of course, are the facts at issue in the case before the court. Gibbs' assertion is an admission that the Administration wants judges who will decide cases not based upon the facts and the law, but on their personal preferences.

But Gibbs wasn't done digging, and used a quote from Justice Samuel Alito to try and bolster his position.

"When a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant...I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position…. I do say to myself, ‘You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.’…When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account."

The obvious differences between Alito's quote and Sotomayor's, however, is that Alito did not assert that he was a better judge because of his family's experiences. Alito did not allege that because of his family's story that he would reach more just conclusions than a Latina woman. And Alito did not say that say that his decisions were based in part on his personal history. Sotomayor did all those things in her remarks.

President Obama also defended Sotomayor today, calling the criticism of her remarks, "nonsense." But the fact that the White House is talking about this, and trying to explain it away, proves that the controversy is anything bu nonsense. The Administration knows it could have a real problem with Sotomayor's nomination if it does not move to stem the growing backlash against her for those statements. Gibbs' botched defense is the first crack in the White House's management of Sotomayor's nomination.

Sotomayor a Perfect Liberal Activist Judge

2009-05-29T20:00:00.000-04:00

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been deservedly criticized for two of her public statements: one in which she labels herself a "wise Latina" and declares that her judgement is necessarily better than a "white male" judge because of her gender, ethnicity, and life experience; and another in which she says that "policy" is made in the courts. As shocking as the first sentiment is, at least it is honest. Likely, Judge Sotomayor really believes that her ability to judge cases is better than a man's. Her entry in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary says that lawyers who have worked with and argued before believe Sotomayor has an "inflated opinion of herself."

Most of the criticism of her second statement has focused on the notion that courts should not make policy, as the nominee believes. But it is what Sotomayor said immediately after that reveals her to be a perfect liberal activist judge. Worse, she displays a willingness to be dishonest about what she believes a justice's role in the system should be for the sake of protecting her judicial future.

Sotomayor made the remarks at a Duke University Law School forum in response to a question about the difference between the federal district and appeals courts. Sotomayor said that the difference was that, "Court of Appeals is where policy is made." Immediately realizing her gaffe, Sotomayor attempted to walk back her remarks. But in so doing, she did not retract her statement. Rather, she merely tried to cover up the truth she just exposed; even acknowledging the radical nature of her beliefs with an awareness that they could come back to haunt her.

"Court of Appeals is where policy is made. And, I know, and I know that this is on tape and I should never say that. Because we don't 'make law,' I know. Okay, I know. I know. I'm not promoting it, and I'm not advocating it. I'm, you know."

What we know is that Sotomayor realized immediately that her words could jeopardize her chances at a Supreme Court nomination sometime in the future, so she does her best to restore the veil of secrecy she just tore down. But her tone of voice and gestures make clear that Sotomayor does not believe a word of what she is saying. The audience's laughter proves that the message was sent loud and clear. Every student at that forum walked out secure in the knowledge that Sotomayor believes courts should make policy, but that they should never talk about that publicly.

If Sotomayor really believes that her role as an unelected justice on the Supreme Court should be to decide policy questions, then that should be a topic of discussion in her confirmation hearings. But as her half-hearted cover-up shows, Sotomayor does not want to be as honest about her view of the Court's role as she does about how gender and ethnicity influence judicial ability. Like all liberal activists, Sotomayor wants to hide her true intentions behind politically correct rhetoric. In short, she is willing to lie to gain power, after which she will do as she pleases.

Democrats and Sotomayor Have a Bolton Problem

2009-05-28T19:00:00.002-04:00

Jeffrey Rosen, writing in The New Republic, highlights President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's entry in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which lists federal judges and rates them based upon the reviews of lawyers that have argued before or worked with each judge. Sotomayor, it seems, has a bad judicial temperament.

"Sotomayor can be tough on lawyers, according to those interviewed. "She is a terror on the bench." "She is very outspoken." "She can be difficult." "She is temperamental and excitable. She seems angry." "She is overly aggressive--not very judicial. She does not have a very good temperament." "She abuses lawyers." "She really lacks judicial temperament. She behaves in an out of control manner. She makes inappropriate outbursts." "She is nasty to lawyers. She doesn't understand their role in the system--as adversaries who have to argue one side or the other. She will attack lawyers for making an argument she does not like." [emphasis added]

Rosen had earlier reported on conversations he had with lawyers, clerks, and former judges on Sotomayor's Second Circuit, most of whom raised similar concerns about her fitness for the bench based on her "domineering" temperament and her "inflated opinion of herself." The almanac's entry confirms those observations.

The criticisms of Sotomayor by those who worked with her bear resemblance to those levelled at former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton during his confirmation hearings. Bolton was assailed by Senate Foreign Relations committee Democrats over allegations that he was a "bully" who routinely abused those in subordinate positions. The question of temperament was a key rationale used by Senate Democrats, and some Republican defectors, to deny the impeccably qualified Bolton confirmation.

Most legal scholars would agree that judicial temperament should be one of the most important factors in considering a nominee's fitness for the bench, along with experience and legal ability. Sotomayor's experience is not in doubt, although some have cast aspersions on her legal reasoning. Her temperament, on the other hand, falls well short of the standard expected in a Supreme Court Justice.

All judges must hear arguments dispassionately, and without regard to personal beliefs. That is especially true of the Supreme Court, where the weightiest of legal issues are decided with consequences for the entire nation. A justice cannot "attack" lawyers' arguments personally, must "understand their role" as adversaries advancing the interests of their clients, and cannot be "angry" and "excitable" on the bench. Based on the reviews of those who know best how she works, Sotomayor has not lived up to these standards.

Senate Democrats who voted against John Bolton for the U.N. ambassadorship based on concerns about his temperament cannot now justify their votes for Sotomayor, whose temperament has also been questioned. Her apparent lack of proper courtroom demeanor in deciding legal issues will certainly impact Americans more than any alleged lack of decorum exhibited by Bolton on the diplomatic front. When Democrats vote for her, they will be saying that Americans do not deserve a fair and dispassionate justice as much as foreign governments deserve a demure representative of U.S. national interests.

Obama's Supreme Distraction

2009-05-26T12:00:00.003-04:00

President Barack Obama nominated Second Circuit appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor, when she is confirmed, will become only the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on the Court, replacing the retiring Justice David Souter. No word yet on the reaction from Pyongyang.

Pyongyang? Yes, Pyongyang. North Korea test fired not one, not two, not even three, but five new missiles yesterday and today in response to the United Nations Security Council's condemnation of its recent nuclear test. The two moves have sparked a new international nuclear crisis that has implications for Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. This is North Korea week in capitals around the globe from Tokyo, to Beijing, to Seoul, to London, Moscow, and even Tehran. But not in Washington. The Obama Administration's response is essentially to change the subject and distract media and public attention from the subject it does not want to talk about, foreign policy.

Justice Souter announced his impending retirement on May 1st. President Obama said at the time that he wanted to have a replacement seated by the opening of the new Court term in October. Given the pressing events on the Korean peninsula, and the cooperation he is sure to get from the Democratic Senate, Obama could have waited a week to make this announcement and still made his time line for having a new justice seated. But he chose to make the announcement now, thereby guaranteeing that neither he nor his Administration will be pressed on their response to the North Korean missile crisis.

On North Korea, the president has said very little, making the following statement from the White House yesterday.

"By acting in blatant defiance of the United Nations Security Council, North Korea is directly and recklessly challenging the international community. North Korea's behavior increases tensions and undermines stability in Northeast Asia. Such provocations will only serve to deepen North Korea's isolation."

President Obama said noting about what measures, if any, the United States will take to enforce that isolation. There has been no public word from the Administration about what steps it will take to convince China and Russia, North Korea's international protectors, to go along with potential new sanctions. It has not even said whether the United States will seek to restart the Six-Party talks with regional players to address the crisis. The president's, "What, me worry?" approach to the crisis shows weakness that other adversaries of the United States will not mistake.

During the presidential campaign, then vice presidential nominee Joe Biden told a gathering of Democratic find raisers that Obama would be tested by an international crisis in the first six months of his presidency. Biden implored the gathering to stick behind the new administration in its response to the crisis because, "it's not gonna be apparent initially that we're right."

Now that international crisis is here. It's 3 AM and the phone in the White House is ringing. But rather than answer, President Obama is pulling the covers over his head by announcing this Supreme Court nomination at this time. The message sent to the international community could not be clearer. The United States, under this president, is not going to take a leading role in dealing with international incidents, leaving that to the ineffectual and corrupt bureaucracy at the United Nations. Domestically, the Administration is seeking to keep the American people focused on areas where the president can look good and sustain his high personal approval ratings. It is a cynical governing strategy with potentially serious implications on the world stage employed by a decidedly un-serious Administration.

New York Terror Cell Radicalized in Prison

2009-05-23T22:30:00.000-04:00

Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders -- namely, highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety.

President Barack Obama, May 21, 2009

Authorities in New York have discovered that the four alleged terrorists arrested last week while planning to blow up a synagogue and shoot down a U.S. military plane were all converted to Islam while in prison. The four were attendees at a Newburgh, NY, mosque, where Imam Salahuddin Muhammad is the spiritual leader. Muhammad also serves as a Muslim prison chaplain.

The revelation comes just two days after President Obama uttered the words above, announcing his plan to bring some of the terrorist detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay into the United States to be held in the U.S. prison system. The president assures that no one has ever escaped from one of the federal Supermax prisons. But as the case of the New York terror cell demonstrates, escape is not the only issue.

President Obama wants to close Guantanamo to appease America's allies, indeed to appease America's enemies, who see the prison as a blot on the human rights record of the United States. The president believes that Guantanamo has served as a recruiting tool for terrorists around the world, "likely creating more terrorists than it ever detained," he said. But if his unprovable assertion is taken at its word, one convenient fact about those new terrorist recruits is that they are not here.

Bringing high-value terrorists into the United States would definitely serve as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, whatever the circumstances of their detention. Even at Supermax, where communication with the outside world is almost certainly very closely monitored if it is even allowed at all, a diabolical terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad would serve as a symbol for terrorists around the world - a living martyr - inspiring them to acts of vengeance and bloodshed against Americans. He would also serve as a powerful example for other radicalizing Imams and inmates in the general prison population, potentially turning out a new crop of terrorist wannabes like those four in New York.

The followers of another high-profile terrorist in U.S. custody, the leader of the first World Trade Center bombing conspiracy, Omar Abdel Rahman, routinely make threats against the United States for his continued captivity, and in the event that he dies in custody. These threats have been idle ones. But how much harder will al-Qaeda plot and plan aganst America once it has the "justification" of having one of its top lieutenants held on American soil?

If President Obama really believes that committed terrorists like those held at Guantanamo can be brought to the United States at no cost to the overall security of the nation, he is either hopelessly naive or dangerously ignorant. The New York terror cell was formed in American jails, led by an American Muslim cleric, and, through the leniency of the American justice system, released onto American streets. It is simply not worth the risk that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and others held at Guantanamo would be given the chance to radicalize more Muslims in the U.S. prison population, to say nothing of terrorists abroad. President Obama's play for adulation from elitists and foes alike could help create the next homegrown terrorist cell. Maybe next time, it won't be caught.

Big Speech, Small Man

2009-05-22T19:45:00.000-04:00

It is fitting that President Barack Obama’s much-hyped and anticipated speech on his plan for the detainees currently held at Gunatanamo Bay was delivered in the rotunda of the National Archives building. Throughout his speech, the arguments of a petulant child stubbornly refusing to accept any responsibility for his actions could be heard echoing around the marble hall. The president’s speech was not courageous, uplifting, or forward looking. It was a small speech, especially in comparison to former vice president Dick Cheney’s address immediately after, and revealed the true stature of the man giving it.

President Obama is the master of the political trick of decrying a given act while engaging in it. Throughout this speech, Obama made overtures to looking ahead all the while dwelling on the past. He said he did not want to engage in re-fighting the battles of the last eight years over enhanced interrogations and Guantanamo Bay, then proceeded to do just that, explicitly and implicitly criticizing decisions of the Bush Administration as misguided, illegitimate, and “hasty.”

Of his own decisions to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo, the president offered no substantive defense, choosing instead to speak in platitudes and point fingers. His refusal to accept responsibility for his decision, and thus the consequences that may flow from it, was complete, and is best summarized by this passage.

“Indeed, the legal challenges that have sparked so much debate here in Washington in recent weeks would be taking place whether or not I decided to close Guantanamo. For example, the court order to release 17 Uighars – 17 Uighar detainees, took place last fall when George Bush was president. The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican presidents – not wild-eyed liberals. In other words, the problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place.“

President Obama offered no rationale for his decision other than the unprovable assertions that Guantanamo has served as a recruiting tool for terrorist groups, likely “creating more terrorists than it ever detained,” and that the facility’s existence has made the United States less, not more, safe. This is the presidential equivalent of pointing at another kid and yelling, “He made me do it!” when the teacher comes. It is not the act of a statesman, nor the argument of a man of stature. It is a dodge, a misdirection, a plea for avoiding the consequences of one’s actions.

At other points in the speech, President Obama presented half-truths and self-serving descriptions designed not to justify the closing of Guantanamo, but to cloud the issue enough in an effort to avoid responsibility for his decision. He took pains to detail the number of detainees released from Guantanamo versus the number convicted, but he did not allude to the reason for the relatively low conviction rate. Part of it certainly has to do with the efforts of “civil liberties” and “human rights” groups to tie the detentions of terrorists at the facility up in court. These are efforts that the president presumably would have supported, given his belief that the detentions were against American law. The effect is to paint a picture of a dysfunctional process for trying detainees, “a mess,” as he so eloquently called it, that only closing the facility can clean up. In truth, however, the mess is as much if not more a creation of the hysterical and unfounded claims and charges leveled against the Bush Administration’s plan for trying the detainees by some of President Obama’s biggest supporters.

In another willful distortion, President Obama insisted that the federal Supermax prisons can handle the detention of hardened terrorists, pointing out that no one has ever escaped from one of the maximum security facilities. But escape is not the issue. Security is. Bringing terrorists who were not already in America to America necessarily makes the country less safe. Housing terrorist detainees in the US makes the locality in which they are housed a terrorist target. This argument of Obama’s, which seeks to deny the reality of his decision, is like a child insisting he did not take the cookies, even as his face and hands are covered in chocolate. It is not accountable and it is not transparent.

President Obama’s address, like most of the rest of his speeches, was long on rhetorical flourish and short on actual details. It was internally contradictory – as when he said that the Bush Administration’s decision on indefinite detentions was wrong, only to announce that his own Administration would be adopting the same practice – self-serving, and petty. And that tells the listener something about the man who delivered it. President Obama showed in this address, more than he ever has, that he is a man of beautiful prose and little substance. Perhaps with more time in office, President Obama will acquire the knowledge and self-confidence that allowed Dick Cheney to deliver the statesman-like address that followed. Our president still has a lot of growing up to do.

Does Barack Obama Want Nancy Pelosi to Fail?

2009-05-18T22:00:00.001-04:00

As the scandal over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's and other top Congressional Democrats' bald-faced lies to the American people about what and when they knew of enhanced interrogation techniques enters its second week, questions are beginning to be raised about the Obama Administration's role in the release of information contradicting Pelosi's account of briefings she received. Specifically, inquiring minds are wondering whether the White House signed off on CIA Director Leon Panetta's internal agency memo responding to Pelosi's accusation that the CIA had misled Congress in its briefings on the techniques.

That question has been answered. The White House knew about the memo, and alerted Pelosi that it was going public.

"The Central Intelligence Agency gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., advanced warning before CIA Chief Leon Panetta sent a memo to employees at the spy agency that countered Pelosi's claim that the agency lied to Congress about waterboarding.

A CIA official, but not Panetta, made the call to Pelosi. [...]

The aide said Pelosi protested Panetta's memo on the call to no avail."

Now, new questions are raised. Pelosi must surely be wondering why a president of her own party is allowing the release of information that will make her look bad in the press; why he is remaining silent on the issue; and why he is taking no action to try and stem the feeding frenzy surrounding her.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked today whether President Obama had confidence in Pelosi as speaker. "He does," Gibbs answered, which could not have inspired much confidence in Pelosi since Obama has shown time and again that his confidence, like his promises, come with an expiration date. Usually that day comes sooner rather than later.

More than words, however, there are actions Obama could be taking to relieve some of the media pressure on Pelosi, who has gone into full backtrack and bunker mode after last week's torturous press conference. There are at least two guaranteed ways Obama could change the news cycle tomorrow, knocking Prevarigate™ off the evening news and relegating it to the inside pages of the newspapers: he could name a Supreme Court nominee to replace David Souter; and he could reverse himself and release the pictures showing the alleged abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody.

In the case of the Supreme Court, announcing a nominee would instantly change the news cycle to one of analysis of the president's pick, and the drama that is sure to surround his confirmation. The pictures would not change the news cycle. However, they would refocus the press on allegations of mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. soldiers under the Bush Administration. The Pelosi story - which let's be honest the press doesn't really want to report anyway - would pale in comparison to either of these and would give the Speaker the breathing room she is desperately seeking.

So why would the Obama Administration want to see Pelosi twist in the wind? To be sure, bare knuckles politics plays a role. There is no doubt a little of the White House showing Pelosi and Congress who is boss. But there is someone close to the president who may have a personal motive to see Nancy Pelosi laid low: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel gave up his safe Congressional seat and a place in the leadership in the House to become White House Chief of Staff. But he has not given up on his dream of becoming Speaker. Furthermore, Pelosi, Emanuel's former boss, pulled a power play on him when he took the new position, reportedly letting Emanuel know in no uncertain terms that she was running the show on the hill and would have no input from him or the White House. Now it appears that the high-heel is on the other foot, and Emanuel may be advising President Obama to send an equally strong message up Pennsylvania Avenue.

No doubt, all is not sweetness and light for Speaker Nancy Pelosi right now. Some Republicans are beginning to call for her resignation as Speaker, although the leaderhship has not joined them, yet. The Obama Administration, led by the president himself, is not helping. Worse, the White House appears to be feeding the media frenzy by word and lack of action. Pelosi's fate may hang on how badly President Obama believes he needs her to shepherd his agenda through Congress, and whether she is willing to swallow her pride and give Rahm Emanuel a foot in the door of the House.

The Permanent Campaign Gets Creepy

2009-03-21T16:00:00.001-04:00

Imagine that the President of the United States is sending personal representatives to the homes of private citizens and asking them to sign a "pledge of support" for his Administration's policies. Imagine that those representatives are asking citizens for their names and e-mail addresses so that the "post-election" organization set up by the president can follow up with them; perhaps taking the addresses of those who refuse to sign. Imagine what the reaction of the online left would be to such activity. Cries of "Fascism!" "Police state!" and "Voter intimidation!" would ring out from the online left in opposition to the Republican Administration's tactic.

Now imagine that the president doing this is not a Republican, but is President Barack Obama.

President Obama's appearance on "The Tonight Show"...was only a small part of the president's so-called permanent campaign. A bigger move comes Saturday, when Obama will ask 13 million people on his campaign e-mail list to go door-to-door to raise support for his agenda.

The Pledge Project Canvass is an unprecedented effort by a president to reach beyond Congress and tap grassroots supporters for help. Volunteers recruited online by Obama's Organizing for America, a post-election group, will ask citizens to sign a pledge in support of the president's policies on energy, health care and education.

Those who pledge will be asked for their e-mail addresses so the Obama-ites can keep in touch.

"This is just the beginning for us," said Jeremy Bird, deputy national director of Organizing for America, in an online video to Obama supporters this week.

During the 2004 campaign, attendees at Bush/Cheney events were asked to sign a form endorsing President Bush for reelection. The forms were an attempt by the Republican Party to keep Democratic operatives from infiltrating campaign events and disrupting the campaign's message. Democrats and the Kerry/Edwards campaign derided Republicans for requiring the forms, saying that it was an effort to shield the president from difficult questions.

But the Bush/Cheney election campaign's actions were positively mild compared to this effort by the sitting Obama Administration. Privacy advocates should be screaming from the rafters about the prospect of a quasi-official representative of the government asking citizens to sign a pledge of support. Voting rights groups should be fretting about government intimidation of the electorate. But no. Instead, we get election experts marveling at the community organizing skills of the new Big Brother president.

"What Obama is doing is a very new approach," said Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.

That approach began during the campaign, when Obama tapped into an array of social networking tools on sites such as Facebook and Twitter to rally voters and raise funds. This weekend's effort is the next logical step, Bird said in an interview.

"This is taking that online social networking and moving it to offline social networking," he said.

And where is the left blogosphere on this? Surely, they did not approve of President Bush's endorsement entry requirement from 2004. Do they now align themselves with the idea of a sitting administration asking citizens to pledge their loyalty to one man's policies? Do they approve of jack-booted, clipboard-wielding, presidentially-authorized canvassers fanning out across the country collecting signatures and taking names? Markos? Josh? Arianna? Anybody?

The linked article tries to compare President Obama's efforts to those of other presidents to drum up support for their initiatives. Those efforts have all involved the president himself embarking on a publicity tour. Obama has done that, too. But no president has ever launched a signature pledge drive utilizing an army of volunteers tied to his official campaign organization outside of a reelection campaign.

However shrewd and revolutionary it may be from an organizing standpoint, the government is not, and ought not be a community organizing group. It's creepy. Campainging is what Obama does best, however. We are likely to see many more pledge drives like this one, and equally likely to hear absolutely nothing about it from the media and the left.

Farewell to Bush: A Decent Man

2009-01-18T14:15:00.001-05:00

It is perhaps ironic that the left wing has settled on the characterization of President George W. Bush as a megalomaniac, obsessed with power and willing to trample on anyone or anything to achieve his evil aims. Ironic because it is President Bush's refusal to even forcefully counter his critics, let alone trample on their right to criticize him, that has allowed the left to build its portrayal. George W. Bush is a man obsessed not with power, but with duty – the old fashioned notion that leaders have a responsibility to lead, whatever the consequences to them personally. It is a testament to the deep seated nature of this belief in him that in eight years as president he has garnered so many enemies on the left, and disappointed so many allies on the right.

George Bush came to Washington pledging to change the tone, to unite not divide. He arrived, however, after a bitter and bruising election contest in which liberals and Democrats concocted myriad ways to try and steal the election from under him, in broad daylight and with the consent of the courts. Foiled in their efforts by the Supreme Court, the left vowed that Bush was not their president, and set out from day one to illegitimize him. But if he could not change the tone in Washington, President Bush did not let the tone change him. Displaying more class and grace than his adversaries combined, Bush never engaged in the hyper-partisan bickering, much to his supporters chagrin. That is not to say that he did not engage in the political process. He did, and many times outmaneuvered and defeated Democratic opposition both when it was in the minority and the majority. He did it with a smile, not a snarl. And they hated him all the more for it.

Of all the decisions that President Bush made, the most consequential will forever be those made in the prosecution of the War on Terror – chief among them the decision to invade Iraq. Forged by the September 11th attacks, Bush acted in what he believed to be the best interest of the nation. He relied upon intelligence that previous presidents had relied upon in determining that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and he concluded that his duty as president required him to act to prevent those weapons from being handed over to the people who had murdered 3,000 Americans on home soil. The failure to find significant stockpiles of weapons was a surprise to everyone but those critics on the left, who despite citing the existence of those weapons in their speeches before voting to support the war, were sure that Bush had known all along that they weren't there. "Bush lied, people died!" was their war cry, even as Bush's was "Bring em on!" "Dead or alive." and "Let's roll!"

There can be no doubt that there were mistakes in the planning and execution of the Iraq War strategy. There are in every war. For a time there seemed to be a real chance that the United States might be driven from Iraq in defeat and disgrace. But rather than yield to political expediency, Bush doubled down on Iraq, and unleashed a new strategy, commanded by a brilliant new general, that has won the victory in Iraq that validates the original decision. President Bush would be due a little bragging. But that is not his way. He has celebrated his vindication quietly, meeting in secret with the families of hundreds of the fallen, and personally contacting the family of every single one of the more than 4,000 brave men and women who served him, and the mission he gave them, to the last.

He was reelected by a majority in 2004, but still the left would not accept him. Democrats complained of a stolen election in Ohio, and lamented a swing of 50,000 votes that would have made John Kerry president. President Bush took his election victory and immediately set out on an effort to fix an increasingly strained and slowly going bankrupt Social Security system. Democrats refused to acknowledge the problem and obstructed the proposed solution, demagoguing all the way that Bush wanted to privatize the program. Abandoned even by members of his own party, which still controlled the Congress, President Bush had to accept the only major defeat of his presidency at the hands of the Democrats.

Like the first year of his first term, the first year of President Bush's second term was marked by a national tragedy, only this one was a natural disaster. The winds of Hurricane Katrina had scarcely stopped blowing when radical environmentalists began to blame the wind and rain on Bush, citing his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocols. When the tragic pictures of New Orleans flooded and news of the pitiful conditions trapped residents were enduring got out, the media in its haste to blame someone, anyone, turned to its favorite target, President Bush. The federal response to Katrina could have been more robust; but the failure of the city and state governments to make adequate preparations for the storm, or even to evacuate the citizenry, was never fully explored. Likewise, one of the greatest rescue efforts in history, the rescue of some 30,000 New Orleanians from rooftops and attics, conducted largely by federal assets, was never applauded.

More than any other president in American history, President Bush was the subject of media scorn and derision for most of his term. The mainstream press exposed his secret programs, gave voice to his most shrill critics, amplified questions about his motives, and even publicized forged documents to try and prevent his reelection. Here, Bush was willing to push back from time to time. But he never sustained any of those efforts long enough or loudly enough to overcome the sheer volume of false, misleading, and uncharitable material published against him. But he attended all their dinners, and made the appropriately self-deprecating jokes. Because, ultimately, it did not matter to him what they wrote about him. What mattered was his duty.

No one who was alive on September 11th, 2001, would have thought that the United States would not be attacked again in the next seven and a half years. That it has come to be is all to President Bush's credit, and it will be his enduring legacy. The terrorist surveillance program, aggressive interrogations, Guantanamo Bay, enemy combatants, the PATRIOT Act. All are decisions that Bush made in order to protect the country from further attacks, and all have been derided by civil liberties activists and Democrats as illegal invasions of privacy, shredding the Constitution, and the establishment of a police state. They have all have been unqualified successes. President Bush vowed that another September 11th would never happen on his watch, and he made sure of it.

A true dispassionate history of the Bush Administration will not be written for a generation. Time must pass to let emotion settle out of the mixture. When it is written, it will almost certainly judge George W. Bush to have been a fundamentally decent man who strived to do his duty and did not shirk the responsibilities of leadership, often at great political cost. He will be remembered as a president who prevented another terrorist attack against great odds, while freeing 50 million Muslims from oppression. And he will be remembered for having received no credit for any of it while he was in office. There will come a moment, much sooner than anyone now believes, when the country will collectively miss George W. Bush – when an old fashioned leader is required. On that day, Mr. President, you will finally have earned a measure of the respect that you were denied in your years in the White House. Thank you, sir, for a job well and faithfully done.

Originally posted at The Political Machine.

DNC Day Three: Obama Sighted

2008-08-28T08:00:00.002-04:00

The Democratic Convention has finally gotten around to discussing the nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. Tonight was a good one for Democrats in general, although the performance of the Vice-Presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden, left much to be desired.

Credit the Democrats, they managed to turn the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama nomination controversy into a positive. The roll call of the states provided the backdrop. Sen. Hillary Clinton strode onto the floor of the arena to move that the convention nominate Obama by acclamation. It was good political theater, timed to occur during the evening news broadcasts. The roll call would not have been carried by the networks, so the stagecraft allowed Democrats to get Obama's historic nomination covered. Political junkies appreciate that kind of strategy.

Soon after came the speakers. Bill Clinton wowed the crowd like only he can at a Democratic convention. But the other main speakers of the night once again disappointed. So the nominee himself showed up in the arena to brighten things up, and take the focus off of his running mate.

President Clinton was introduced to raucous applause from the arena. He asked the crowd to "sit down" at least five times before beginning his speech. It was an excellent convention speech. None other than Karl Rove would later say that President Clinton "made the best case for Obama that has been given at this convention." Clinton declared Obama ready to be president, something Sen. Clinton could not or would not do last night. There was a lot of exaggeration and omission in Clinton's address. No mention of 9/11, for example. But his purpose was to drop the sword on the shoulders of Obama, and he accomplished that very well. Unfortunately, that was the end of the politically competent portion of the program for the Democrats; and for the second straight night, the speaker most talked about the day after will be a Clinton.

Sen. John Kerry spoke not long after Clinton and gave one of his characteristic downer speeches. His was an extremely bitter address, chock full of references to the 2004 election, which Kerry clearly has not gotten over. It must be a hard thing to lose the presidency, but it does not have to drive one to madness. Kerry has clearly chosen the latter. Of his great friend John McCain, who Kerry practically begged to run with him on the Democratic ticket four years ago, he had this to say.

"I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day now I learn something new about candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say, let's compare Senator McCain to candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain's own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you're against it."

That may have felt good for a little while, but the quick rebuke Kerry drew from Liz Mair, Online Communications Director for the Republican National Committee, is going to leave a mark.

"John Kerry devolved into self-parody tonight, when he explained that he was actually for John McCain before he was against him. At some point bitterness becomes a sickness."

Kerry questioned McCain's judgment on national security issues, claiming that Barack Obama was right on, of all things, the war in Iraq, and John McCain was wrong. That is the kind of boomerang political attack that only John Kerry can deliver. Anyone who is paying any attention knows that the troop surge John McCain advocated for a full year before it was implemented, and which Sen. Obama opposed and said would fail, has practically won the war in Iraq. But then, no one ever accused John Kerry of paying attention.

Kerry's performance was surpassed by Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Biden, but only barely. Biden was warmly and touchingly introduced by his son Beau, the Attorney General of Delaware. He may have been better off though, if he had come out, waved to the crowd, said thank you, and walked off. His speech was halting, replete with stumbles, and mined with dud applause lines. The audience never connected with him. To say that his description of America was not hopeful is an understatement.

Almost every night, I take the train home to Wilmington, sometimes very late. As I look out the window at the homes we pass, I can almost hear what they're talking about at the kitchen table after they put the kids to bed.

Like millions of Americans, they're asking questions as profound as they are ordinary. Questions they never thought they would have to ask:

Should mom move in with us now that dad is gone?

Fifty, sixty, seventy dollars to fill up the car?

Winter's coming. How we gonna pay the heating bills?

Another year and no raise?

Did you hear the company may be cutting our health care?

Now, we owe more on the house than it's worth. How are we going to send the kids to college?

How are we gonna be able to retire?

That's the America that George Bush has left us, and that's the future John McCain will give us. These are not isolated discussions among families down on their luck. These are common stories among middle-class people who worked hard and played by the rules on the promise that their tomorrows would be better than their yesterdays.

Nothing like a positive uplifting vision to win over votes.

Biden's attacks on McCain were not sharp. They were the same recycled accusations that McCain represents a third Bush term. The Democrats may have settled on that as their message coming out of this convention, but voters know John McCain as an independent minded politician who has bucked his party time and again. This attack dog VP nominee just won't hunt.

After the speech, Sen. Obama staged a walk-in to the arena, stepping on his running mate's time in the spotlight. He told the crowd that the convention had gone "pretty well so far" and informed them that the festivities would be moving to "Mile High Stadium," which was demolished in January 2002. At least Obama knew to come to Denver for the convention. Tomorrow is his acceptance speech. After two less than stellar days at the Pepsi Center, and an average Joe performance by his VP choice, the change of venue might be just what the Obama ordered.

DNC Day Two: Hillary's Convention

2008-08-27T08:00:00.001-04:00

The second night of the Democratic National Convention prior to Sen. Hillary Clinton's speech was nearly as unmemorable as day one. And an interesting pattern has emerged in all of the main speakers' remarks. Barack Obama is an accessory, an add-on, a superfluous reference tucked in on the end of a litany of the speaker's accomplishments and beliefs. There is almost no discussion of the nominee as a man separate and distinct from the speaker. Rather, he is a concept, an ethereal being, an abstraction. It is almost as if the speakers are deliberately trying to distance themselves from Obama, at his own convention.

Hillary Clinton was the star of the evening in a big way. So much so that she appears to have taken the convention by force, and will hold it for at least one more day.

Sen. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania got things started with a thoroughgoing and dull speech in which he mostly talked about his father. Casey gets credit for mentioning his disagreement with Obama on abortion; and he at least tried to rile up the crowd with some decent attacks on the Bush Administration and John McCain. But the crowd wasn't entirely into it. They were anticipating greater things to come. Two hours in, David Gergen was once again on CNN, lamenting the lack of anything memorable happening in Denver.

Former Virginia Governor and likely its next Senator Mark Warner was the keynoter and he was dreadfully awful. It is actually hard to put into words just how bad, boring, and trivial his speech was. Warner must think he is a Senator already as his speech was full of incredible nothingness. He prattled on about how this was an election about the future, which he said is more important than a presidential election. He talked about his tenure as governor, praised his management of the state, bragged on his success in business, and just for good measure tossed in an Obama every couple of paragraphs or so. There was no energy in the arena during his address. Many view Warner as the 2012 front runner in the event of an Obama loss in November. Viewed in that light, this speech was his 2012 concession.

With Warner finished, anticipation in the hall began to grow for Sen. Clinton, the real headliner of the night. Before she took the stage, however, there was a speech from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who demonstrated completely why she is not Barack Obama's running mate. There was also a surprise keynote from Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. His was an energy packed speech about energy policy. He was animated, connected with the crowd, and genuinely fun to watch. It was not the keynote listed in the schedule, but it was far and above a better one that Warner managed to deliver.

Then it was Hillary's turn. Clinton delivered a real stemwinder of an address, recounting her primary campaign, and pointedly not conceding. She delivered the requisite declarations of support for Sen. Obama. But in a twenty minute plus speech, Clinton only managed to mention him by name 10 times. Like the rest of the speakers, the mentions of Obama came not in the context of anything he would actually do as president, but in a "him too" kind of way. The typical formulation can be seen in this passage from the prepared text.

I ran for President to renew the promise of America. To rebuild the middle class and sustain the American Dream, to provide the opportunity to work hard and have that work rewarded, to save for college, a home and retirement, to afford the gas and groceries and still have a little left over each month...

Most of all, I ran to stand up for all those who have been invisible to their government for eight long years.

Those are the reasons I ran for President. Those are the reasons I support Barack Obama. And those are the reasons you should too.

Except that when she delivered it, she left out the last line. Sen. Clinton's speech was about her campaign, not the coming one. When it was over, Bill Kristol called it a "shockingly minimal endorsement of Barack Obama."

Barack Obama has no presence at this convention. He is not physically there, and he is not oft discussed. His name is used like a drug to placate the seething masses of delegates, administered in small enough doses to keep them wanting for more. But it never comes. Clinton stepped into this atmosphere, and took over. The convention is now about her. She is who everyone is talking about; and she will continue to be the topic after tomorrow night, with the roll call of the states and former President Bill Clinton's speech. Tonight, Clinton laid down a marker on 2012 and a gauntlet for Thursday night, when Obama will have to equal her performance. He had better be good or he will leave Denver with the nomination, but without the mantle of leader of the Democratic Party.

DNC Day One: Where was Barack Obama?

2008-08-26T08:00:00.002-04:00

The first night of the Democratic National Convention is (mercifully) over, and even for a political junkie, this was difficult to watch. The after show reviews are coming in and a consensus appears to be building that this was a wasted night. CNN's David Gergen was the first to remark on this around 9 PM Eastern.

"We're two hours into this and so far, nothing of substance, nothing memorable."

That came after the tribute to Jimmy Carter and a brief appearance on the podium from the man from Plains. Carter did not speak. Earlier, Nancy Pelosi gaveled the convention to order with a speech that she must have deliberately written to take all the air out of the room. Unbelievably, her delivery was worse than her words, and it was all down hill from there.

The night was supposed to showcase a unified party rallying around the theme "One America." It was also supposed to belong to Michelle Obama, who addressed the convention in the prime speaking slot. But one man who was curiously absent from the festivities, even from his wife's speech, was the man for whom all of this grand production is supposed to have been planned: the actual nominee, Barack Obama.

Soon after Gergen's lament, Caroline Kennedy appeared to introduce a video tribute to Sen. Edward Kennedy. Her speech and the video were not much to write home about. But Sen. Kennedy wowed the assembled delegates when he came out and gave a very good, classic Kennedy speech full of vim and vigor. He pledged to the delegates that he would be in the Senate in January when President [McCain] is sworn in. Kennedy would become the star of the night.

Between Kennedy and Michelle Obama, however, the convention was turned over to a parade of dullards. Former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) gave a very long, very boring speech on the great societal debates in American history. Somehow, the Civil War, the New Deal, the nuclear age, and the Reagan revolution have all combined to bring us to Barack Obama. Sen. Claire McCaskill's three very nice looking children came out to introduce their mother. The two girls flanked their brother, who did all the talking. So much for women's lib. McCaskill herself kept talking about the view from Missouri and gave an otherwise uninspired speech. She mentioned, oddly, that Barack Obama has "fought for equal pay for women," forgetting that the women on his own Senate staff are paid less than their male counterparts.

Last to speak was Michelle Obama. After a brief video introduction, and a short spoken one from her brother, Obama came out to thunderous applause and proceeded to begin talking about: herself, her family, her mother, her father, her kids, her job, her leaving her job, her hopes for the future, her policy proposals, her love for the country, her, her, her. Sen. Obama, the nominee, was almost nowhere present in this speech, except for when his wife was making it quite clear that he has a lot to live up to in her dad, or when she was dragging him along for the ride on her litany of beliefs. There were a lot of "I's" and not nearly enough "he's."

Halfway through the speech, one wondered just who is running for president, Michelle or Barack. Her line, "I love this country," received the greatest applause, a fact that should give Democrats pause. If you get a rousing standing ovation simply for declaring your love of country, something must be wrong. When she finished, Sen. Obama finally appeared, by video from Kansas City, although Carl Cameron later noted that at first he said he was in St. Louis.

At the end, the critics were left largely unimpressed. Juan Williams was overcome by the symbolism of it all. A female African-American on stage giving that speech, and the model black family that appeared afterwards drove him almost to tears. Bill Kristol remarked that Michelle Obama did not do a good job of introducing America to her husband. Nina Easton said the speech as too liberal. Fred Barnes, however, said that she was there to sell herself, not her husband, and she certainly accomplished that. Chris Wallace declared the first night "wasted." James Carville and David Gergen agreed. Karl Rove called it "a missed opportunity." He said that Michelle Obama gave a stump speech, and not a particularly good one. He correctly pointed out that viewers are not interested in Michelle Obama's favored policy positions. She isn't on the ticket. She was supposed to humanize her husband in the way only a wife can, and she failed to do that. Rove said that no one learned anything new about Barack Obama from his wife's speech, and that there was no feeling of warmth between the two of them that came through. That was her primary job, and she didn't deliver.

The next two nights of the convention do not promise much more exposure for Obama. Hillary Clinton speaks tomorrow, and Bill Clinton speaks on Wednesday. The Clinton's are not exactly known for their proclivity to share the spotlight. With tonight's performance leaving even Barack Obama himself wondering just where he was, Obama may have to get to Denver early just to get a little face time from his own convention.

Obama Playing Defense with Biden

2008-08-24T09:00:00.001-04:00

Geography enthusiasts who watched the big Obama-Biden rally in Springfield, Illinois, yesterday were probably a bit curious to hear the town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, mentioned so often in relation to a man from Delaware. Together, Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden mentioned the town five times.

Joe Biden has roots in Scranton. He was born there in 1942. But Joe Biden hasn't lived in Scranton since 1953, 55 years ago. Joe Biden lives in Wilmington, Delaware, and has represented his home state in the Senate for 35 years. He grew up there, went to school there, raised his family there, and has become a fixture there in Wilmington-two and a half hours, 142 miles from Scranton.

So why is the Obama campaign trying to pass off a man from Wilmington, Delaware, as a Scrantonian? The answer may be Hillary Clinton.

Back in the Democratic primaries, Obama had a six-week layoff between the Texas and Ohio primaries and the Pennsylvania contest. He had six weeks to make the case to Pennsylvania Democrats that he was the best candidate for the nomination. Prior to losing Ohio and Texas, Obama had won eleven contests in a row and had Sen. Clinton reeling. But Clinton was able to resurrect her campaign in the working class and Midwestern towns of Ohio and Texas and looked to continue the comeback in Pennsylvania.

In the intervening six weeks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story broke which Obama addressed in his now famous speech on race relations. That address was delivered in Philadelphia. A second major gaffe came to light before the primary when Obama was quoted as telling a San Francisco fund-raiser audience that small-town people were "bitter" and "cling to "religion and guns and antipathy to people who aren't like them."

Obama lost Pennsylvania by 10 points on April 22nd. But more revealing was the way he lost. In every rural county in the state, Clinton bested Obama by at least 60-40. He lost whites in every age category, he lost churchgoers of every denomination and frequency of attendance, he lost every age group over 40, and he lost Catholics by as much as 50 points. The trend begun in Ohio and Texas carried through Pennsylvania to West Virginia and Kentucky. Obama was and remains very weak with working class whites.

That weakness is why the Obama campaign literally-to borrow a favorite Bidenism-tried to change the geographic map in its rollout of Joe Biden. The emphasis on Biden's Scranton birth, rather than his Wilmington life, are meant to give Biden the working-class street cred he will need to help Obama hold Pennsylvania. Obama performed very poorly in the Pennsylvania primary among voters that Democrats need to win in November. Joe Biden needs to win them back.

But as with many things in the Obama campaign, the campaign got it all wrong. Biden is the wrong messenger to send to the union halls of Scranton, Akron, Wheeling, and Flint. There is another prominent Democrat who hails from Scranton. One who has the qualities and connections with working-class whites and high school educated blue collar workers. One who has demonstrated an ability to draw those voters in large numbers, even after the ultimate result of the primaries was all but assured. That Democrat is Hillary Clinton. But Obama didn't, couldn't choose her for his running mate. That would have been too big an admission that he has no earthly idea how to connect with the lunch pail crowd. Better to try and redraw the map.

The Obama campaign is worried about Pennsylvania. The state went for Gore in 2000 by four points, and for Kerry in 2004 by 2.5. The Real Clear Politics average shows Obama leading by just under six points. But the last three polls put the race in the state under 5 points with the most recent showing a three point Obama lead. Obama is playing defense in Pennsylvania by picking Biden and trying to play him as a native.

Obama's Song of Himself

2008-08-14T10:00:00.001-04:00

Ever since then Governor Bill Clinton answered the "boxers or briefs" question, presidential campaigns have from time to time become pre-occupied with pop-culture questions designed to demonstrate the candidate's hipness. Generally, they are harmless curiosities, even if they may actually provide some small subset of voters a reason to support or oppose a particular candidate.

But sometimes a candidate's answer to the iPod playlist question or the favorite book question can reinforce a narrative against him. And that is exactly what Barack Obama did when he submitted a list of his ten favorite songs to Blender magazine.

Obama used this to great effect during the primaries, when he chastised Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards for their self-serving answers to a debate question.

Obama poked fun at John Edwards and Hillary Clinton for their response to the "what is your weakness" question at the MSNBC debate. Obama said that he answered the question as an "ordinary person."

"Folks, they don't tell you what they mean!" exclaimed Obama.

"I thought that they meant 'what’s your biggest weakness?!' So I said 'well you know I don’t handle paper that well, you know, my desk is a mess, I need somebody to help me file and stuff all the time.'"

"So the other two they say well my biggest weakness is 'I'm just too passionate about helping poor people.' I am just too impatient to bring about change in America.'"

Obama joked, "If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. I could have said 'well you know I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don’t want to be helped. It’s terrible.'"

The exchange helped Obama reinforce the narrative that Clinton and Edwards were typical Washington politicians, unable to answer a simple question without trying to gain some political advantage.

But now that he is the nominee, Obama has fallen into the same trap. The list of Obama's favorite songs is mostly unremarkable, until you reach the last entry. Here's the list:

1. Ready or Not Fugees
2. What's Going On Marvin Gaye
3. I'm On Fire Bruce Spingsteen
4. Gimme Shelter Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman Nina Simone
6. Touch the Sky Kanye West
7. You'd Be So Easy to Love Frank Sinatra
8. Think Aretha Franklin
9. City of Blinding Lights U2
10. Yes We Can will.i.am

Obama actually listed a song written about himself and his campaign as one of his favorites.

Maybe Obama doesn't know 10 songs, and threw in the ode to the Senator from H.O.P.E.™ just to fill out the list. Maybe some staffer got a little carried away filling out the questionnaire. Or maybe the explanation is a bit more telling: namley, that Obama is quite arrogant. That observation was made by Blender's own resident political analyst, Girl Talk.

Weirdest pick?

Girl Talk: I couldn’t tell if it was cool or creepy for Obama
to have "Yes We Can." Maybe he’s in love with himself and wants to hear his
speeches over and over as collaged by will.i.am.

You go, Girl Talk!

Nothing against Girl Talk. He is probalby a pretty smart guy. But if he can notice that Obama couldn't help but express his enormously overinflated opinion of himself and his comparatively minor accomplishments, average voters can certainly notice as well. And that helps to set the emerging narrative on Obama.

The public does not really have a good handle on who Obama is despite the media coverage of his campaign. Voters will look to any little snippet of information they can find about Obama to try and get a handle on just what makes him tick. This little list, should it get some play, will have an impact. Voters will read that list and begin to wonder just what Obama has done that makes him so full of himself. And that will be a much tougher question for Obama to answer.

Barack Obama's Three and a Half Day Cure

2008-08-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

The media coverage of yesterday's energy speech by Sen. Barack Obama has focused mainly on Obama's flip-flop on opening up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But that is really a dog-bites-man story. Hardly a day goes by anymore that Obama does not abandon one or another of his "consistently" held positions. Looking a little closer at the proposal, anathema to the press, reveals that Obama's plan to release 70 million barrels from the reserve is as insulting as it is cynical.

During the primaries, Sen. Clinton and Sen. McCain joined forces to call for a suspension of the 18.4 cent federal gasoline tax for the summer. Obama, the big populist, derided that proposal.

“We're arguing over a gimmick that would save you half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer so that everyone in Washington can pat themselves on the back and say they did something.” [...]

“Well, let me tell you, this isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer, it's designed to get them through an election.”

Now, however, with his own election prospects dimming, Obama has made a proposal every bit as shallow and meaningless as he claimed the gas tax holiday was.

Let's run the numbers.

According to the Energy Information Agency, the United States uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Obama called for 70 million barrels of oil to be released from the SPR to help lower prices. Furthermore, he dressed up his proposal by specifically calling for light crude to be released, on the theory that it could be more easily refined into gasoline and thus have the greatest impact on prices. 70 million divided by 20 million is 3.5. So, Obama's answer to high gasoline prices is to release three and a half days worth of oil from the nation's emergency reserves.

But looking deeper, it gets worse. The helpful people at the EIA say that one barrel of oil makes about 20 gallons of gasoline. 70 million times 20 gallons equals 1.4 billion gallons of gasoline that would be added to the market by Sen. Obama's proposal. The Federal Highway Administration says that there were 199 million licensed drivers in the United States in 2004. That number went up by about 4 million drivers a year in the 1990s and 2000s, so we can safely assume that the actual number this year is at least 210 million. 1.4 billion divided by 210 million is 6.67. That is how much gasoline per driver that Sen. Obama would create by releasing 70 million barrels of oil from the SPR.

The average gas tank holds about 16 gallons of gas. Therefore Sen. Obama's proposal would provide each licensed driver with about 40% of a tank of gas. If Sen. McCain's gas tax holiday was worthless because it would only save consumers about "half a tank of gas over the course of the entire summer," how much worse is Obama's plan to give drivers less than half a tank once, and for only three and a half days? Moreover, the average price of a gallon of gasoline, according to the EIA, is about $3.90. That means that Obama's plan would save the average driver about $26. That is less than the $30 that Obama said the gas-tax holiday would save the average driver.

Sen. Obama would have been better off not flipping on the issue of releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The numbers don't lie. By his own standards, Sen. Obama's proposal is less than insignificant, worse than cynical, and dishonest in the extreme. Obama told the American people that releasing oil from the reserve would have an impact on gas prices in about two weeks. But that claim counts upon the ignorance of the audience. Like most liberal giveaways, Obama's largess is calculated to be just enough to make him look good, but not nearly enough to solve the problem.

David Axelrod Admits it's All About Race [UPDATED]

2008-08-01T10:00:00.008-04:00

Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist David Axelrod went on Good Morning America this morning to address McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' asertion that Obama is playing the race card. Interviewer Chris Cuomo played Obama's comments from yesterday in reaction to McCain's brilliant "Celeb" ad in which Obama's readiness to lead the country is brought into question. Obama said, "What they're [Bush and McCain] going to do is try to scare you about me. He's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." Cuomo asked Axelrod what Obama meant by that.

But Axelrod's answer (1:35) contained a little more truth than he may have liked to admit. Axelrod was trying to explain that Obama was not saying McCain would use his race against him. Instead, he admitted that Obama himself has been using his race as a justification for his candidacy all along.

CUOMO: "What does that mean if it's not a suggesiton that his race is going to be used against him?"

AXELROD: "Well...look he's said...and by the way he's said this repeatedly as you've mentioned all across the country, he's not from central casting when it comes to candidates for President of the United States...he's young, he's new to Washington, yes he's African-American, and...uh so this is nothing new."

Those are the three justifications for Obama's candidacy, according to its chief architect, David Axelrod. Obama should be elected president because he's young, he's inexperienced, and, "yes he's African-American." Just don't call Obama on it. That would be using his race against him.

UPDATE 16:30: The Obama campaign now admits Obama was talking about race when he accused McCain and Republicans of trying to scare voters.

Obama's camp initially denied the remark was a reference to Obama's race. [...]

"He was referring to the fact that he didn't come into the race with the history of others," Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday. "It is not about race."

But Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, acknowledged on "Good Morning America" Friday that the candidate was referring, at least in part, to his ethnic background. When pressed to explain the comment, Axelrod told "GMA" it meant, "He's not from central casting when it comes to candidates for president of the United States. He's new to Washington. Yes, he's African-American."
That seemingly obvious reference sparked the first real fireworks between the two camps as backers of both candidates accused the other of trying to subtly inject race into the presidential contest.

Obama Finds No Facts on Foreign Trip

2008-07-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

Sen. Barack Obama must be very glad to have returned to the United States. After a hero's welcome in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least from the mainstream press, the last few days of his journey have not exactly earned the Senator much praise and may in fact have done damage to his campaign. First, there was the speech in Berlin, in which Obama didn't really say anything of consequence; a fact that did not go unnoticed in the German press even if the American media was too starry-eyed to notice. Then there was Obama's now infamous decision to skip out on a meeting with wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan at the U.S. bases at Landstuhl and Ramstein, Germany. That was followed by the shifting explanations for the cancellation, which the campaign ultimately tried to blame on the Pentagon. And just for good measure, Obama hinted on his last day abroad that he may be about to make the mother of all flip-flops and change his position du jour on troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Foreign travel can be so...troublesome.

Better for Obama to come home. It's not like he was learning anything, anyhow. That's according to the Senator himself. It seems that Sen. Obama told Fox News that he mostly had his views on foreign policy "confirmed" by what he saw overseas.

"There was a lot of confirmation of my strategies -- that we need to get more troops into Afghanistan, and that the Iraqis are willing to take more responsibility ... that Iran is a grave threat."

Now we know why Sen. Obama never held a hearing on the situation in Afghanistan. He had all the answers all along.

Sen. Obama went all the way to Afghanistan and Iraq to accomplish nothing more than he could have by looking in his bathroom mirror. That helps explain the stumbles of the second leg of his tour. Obama was bored. It's becoming clear that the Senator from H.O.P.E.™ has an inflated opinion of himself and his abilities. But to come right out and admit in broad daylight that his much hyped foreign mission was a gigantic waste of time for him speaks of a conceit that borders on pathological.

Obama's Judgment Means Longer Wars

2008-07-19T10:00:00.002-04:00

The McCain Campaign has been showing signs of life lately. There is one issue that motivates McCain to go on the offensive, and that is national security in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Barack Obama is set to travel to Iraq to view firsthand the success of the troop surge that he opposed. And the McCain campaign isn't about to let him try to share in the credit.

The campaign released a statement yesterday, reacting to the news that the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government have come to an agreement on a "general time horizon" for the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. To some on the left, the announcement is vindication for Obama's plan to remove troops from Iraq quickly. For some on the right, the announcement pulls the rug out from under John McCain, who has steadfastly argued that the duration of the U.S. troop presence should be determined by conditions, not politics. Both are evidence of shallow thinking.

Rather than a defeat for McCain, and evidence of the prescience of the Senator from H.O.P.E., the announcement is a vindication of McCain's call for a surge of troops to begin with. It is evidence of the correctness of Republican and Administration policies on the war and should be celebrated as such. It also shows the dangerous irony of Obama's and liberals' timidity in matters of war. In their zeal to end hostilities and prevent casualties, Democratic policies lead to longer wars and more bloodshed.

McCain's statement hits all those themes and more.

"Progress between the United States and Iraq on a time horizon for American troop presence is further evidence that the surge has succeeded. Most of the U.S. forces in the surge have already been withdrawn. When a further conditions-based withdrawal of U.S. forces is possible, it will be because we and our Iraqi partners built on the success of the surge strategy, which Senator Obama opposed, predicted would fail, voted against, and campaigned against in the primary. When we withdraw, we will withdraw with honor and victory. An honorable and victorious withdrawal would not be possible if Senator Obama's views had prevailed. An artificial timetable based on political expediency would have led to disaster and could still turn success into defeat. If we had followed Senator Obama's policy, Iraq would have descended into chaos, American casualties would be far higher, and the region would be destabilized."

Exactly right.

The whole point of the Iraq War was to stand up a functioning democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The point of the surge was to bring down violence so that the Iraqi government could grow. That it has done so and is looking for the earliest possible date for U.S. withdrawal is the plan working as it was intended. It is not evidence of some kind of defeat for the Administration or McCain. Nor is it a chance for Obama to jump on the bandwagon of the strategy that he didn't have the judgment to recognize would succeed. McCain is correct to hail this development as a defeat for Obama, who sided with those who said Iraq was a hopeless disaster 18 months ago.

Good for Sen. McCain for issuing this statement. Now he should make it into a television commercial, and run it in every battleground state.

Obama Sells His Soul for a Party

2008-07-15T16:00:00.002-04:00

The New York Times has a profile of the man behind the fundraising effort for the Democratic National Convention in Denver next month. His name is Steven Farber, and he just happens to be the head of the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which the Times describes as, "one of the fastest-growing lobbying shops in Washington and one of the most powerful firms in the West." Now ordinarily this would not be news, a lobbyist raising money for a politician, political party, or political event. But as is the case with almost everything about the Democratic Party these days, and about its presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, it is not quite as simple as it appears.

Obama has made quite a show of his claim to be running a campaign free from special interest money. He claims to take no contributions from lobbyists and hits Sen. John McCain at every opportunity for his alleged ties to lobbyists. Now, as Sen. Obama's fundraising prowess is coming back to Earth a bit, and as the host committee for the Denver convention has fallen $11 million short of its fundraising goals, Sen. Obama prepares to accept the nomination of his party at an event bought and paid for by powerful special interests.

How bad is this turn of events for Obama? Consider that when the New York Times notices that the would-be Democratic president has no clothes, and says so, he must not only be naked, but standing behind a magnifying glass.

Mr. Farber’s vast contact list could prove crucial in raising the millions of dollars needed by the Denver host committee to showcase Senator Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in August in Denver. But Mr. Farber’s activities are a public display of how corporate connections fuel politics — exactly the type of special influence that Mr. Obama had pledged to expunge from politics when he said he would not accept donations from lobbyists. [...]

"Steve Farber is involved with a lot of high-level candidates and ones who have won," said Floyd Ciruli, head of Ciruli Associates, a Denver political consulting firm. "He’s famous for hiring ex-politicians, their children and ex-judges. He’s very good at making connections with people who have access to politicians."

One of those people with "access to politicians" who have worked for Farber's high-powered lobbying firm turns out to be Judy Black. If that name sounds familiar, it's because she is the wife of McCain campaign senior adviser and fundraiser, Charlie Black. Black made news recently with some...inartful comments he made about the potential effect on the election of another terrorist attack on the United States. But Obama has periodically called on McCain to drop Black and has made McCain's alleged ties to lobbyists a feature of his stump speech. How ironic then that Farber, the man who is raising the money to make Obama's coronation and ~~torchlight parade~~ rally possible, has helped put food on the table of a guy Obama considers to be reprehensible. Now which one is the pot and which is the kettle, Senator?

Farber isn't shy about his ability to tap into big special interest money on Obama's behalf. He knows what he is selling, and who he is selling it to, even if he is a bit shy about admitting who benefits from his connections.

"I have my list of companies, not only my client list, but companies throughout Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region," Mr. Farber said in a telephone interview. "We’ve got offices in Las Vegas and California, so I have clients that we can contact, and I have friends of clients that I intend to contact. And if they have given to the convention already, I try to get them to double their contribution." [...]

"The money to the convention doesn’t go to the candidates or the Democratic National Committee, but to the host committee to pay for the cost of the convention," Mr. Farber said. "So what [Obama] has said [about lobbyist connections] doesn’t inhibit it." [...]

"What I am now selling is Senator Obama and the excitement he has created in his candidacy," he added.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, Mr. Farber.

Of course, it's plain that what Farber is selling is access to Obama, wherever the check goes. And its similarly clear that Obama is willing to be sold. That isn't the new kind of politics Obama speaks of, it's the old kind and worse. It's the kind that brazenly and unashamedly lies to the voters for personal gain and the pursuit of power.

So, you go, Sen. Obama. Have that coronation party in Denver. Just know that when you sell your soul to the Devil, you never really get what you expect. And the Devil has a long memory.

Obama Will Sell Anything

2008-07-08T09:30:00.001-04:00

The Obama campaign officially announced yesterday that Sen. Obama will accept the Democratic presidential nomination in an open air event expected to draw 75,000 people. The campaign takes pains to point out that free tickets will be available for the ~~torchlight rally~~ acceptance speech, but...

If you make a donation of $5 or more between now and midnight on July 31st, you could be one of 10 supporters chosen to fly to Denver and spend two days and nights at the convention, meet Barack backstage, and watch his acceptance speech in person. Each of the ten supporters who are selected will be able to bring one guest to join them.

This guy will sell anything. So much for the new politics. Obama's campaign is more motivated by money and fundraising than any campaign in recent memory. One wonders if this will continue into an Obama presidency.

"For a donation of $25 dollars or more, you could be one of 10 lucky people to be flown to Washington D.C. to sit in on an exciting intelligence briefing in the White House Situation Room. Afterwards, you'll be given an exclusive tour of the Oval Office and get to listen in on a secure phone call between President Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Your whirlwind day will conclude with a special de-briefing by the president and the opportunity to personally sign one letter of President Obama's signature to the official roll back of the Bush Tax Cuts."

Apparently "fixing a broken public finance system" means "sell anything that isn't nailed down including my dignity and the dignity of the office in order to out raise my opponents" in Obama's language.

The Baracklaration of Obamdependence

2008-07-07T08:00:00.007-04:00

Sen. Barack Obama spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July changing just about every campaign position he has taken to date. As the nation prepared to celebrate its independence from tyranny, Sen. Obama was declaring his independence from another kind of oppression-the oppression of principle and intellectual honesty. Sen. Obama, therefore, may find much to agree with in the following, with apologies to Mr. Jefferson and the Founders.

FROM CHICAGO, JULY 4, 2008

The unanimous Declaration of the democratic candidate for president of the united States of America

When in the Course of a presidential campaign it becomes necessary for one candidate to dissolve the political bands which have connected him with his previous positions and to assume for the electorate, the separate and equal station of general election candidate to which the Laws of Electoral Campaigning and Campaign Managers entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of average voters is unnecessary, lest that require that he should declare the causes which impel them to hold to principle.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all political positions are created equal, that they are endowed by their Holder with certain unalienable Principles, that among these are Votes, Control and the pursuit of Power. — That to secure said principles, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the will of the governors, — That whenever any Political Opponent becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Candidate to alter or to abolish his positions, and to institute new Policies, laying their foundation on such principles and organizing them in such form, as to him shall seem most likely to effect his Image and Election. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Principles long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to be fooled, while fools are sufferable than to bother themselves by taking account of the positions to which they have been accustomed. But when a long train of mistakes and untenable positions, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to prevent his election, it is his right, it is his duty, to throw off such Policies, and to provide new Beliefs for his electoral security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of my Campaign; and such is now the necessity which constrains me to alter my former Systems of Belief. The history of the present Campaign is a history of repeated missteps and misjudgments, all having in direct object the establishment of a McCain presidency over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

I have declared my intention to redefine my Assent to the War In Iraq, the most wholesome and necessary for my public image.

I have adjusted my beliefs with respect to abortion, to secure votes among the less nuanced masses of the general public concerned with such trivialities.

I have made plain my embrace of the right to bear arms, except in my home city, and except under such circumstances as to make it practical for the public to avail itself of said right.

I have announced my intent to enshrine the policy of George W. Bush to eavesdrop on those terrorists and criminals of an international character in law, so that the public might see me as its protector.

I have sought to take credit for welfare reform, which I oppose, but nonetheless support the implementation of the same in any locale in which it may gain me votes.

I have reversed my abhorrence of capital punishment and endorsed the free exercise thereof in any case as the States may see fit, such that I may properly claim to be a man of the people in all matters of life and death, except in such cases as abortion, which I both oppose and support conditional on that issue's ability to win me favor in the press.

I have established a new precedent of funding my campaign from private donations and tributes, so as not to allocate such public monies as may be necessary to gain high office for myself and my associates.

I have steadfastly avoided any opportunity to present myself for debate with my opponent, obstructing the electorate from exposing my principles and positions, on any given day, to scrutiny.

I have affirmed my fidelity and brotherhood with innumerable campaign associates and employees, who being solely concerned with my election, have made inartful statements or been proved to have been in inconvenient connections, and have disowned same as the time and occasion required.

I, therefore, the Democratic candidate for president of the united States of America, in Chicago and Denver, Affirmed, appealing to the general election voter for the rectitude of my intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party, solemnly publish and declare, That this Campaign is, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent, that the candidate is Absolved from all Allegiance to Principle, and that all political connection between him and any previously stated Position, on any issue as he may see fit, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent Campaign, shall have full Power to Vacillate, Equivocate, Prevaricate, establish New Principles, and to do all other Acts and Things which Politicians may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of the Mainstream Press, I pledge to each voter my Lies, your Fortunes, and my sacred Office.

Barack Obama, Illinois

A New Kind of Sleaze

2008-07-01T14:00:00.002-04:00

The Obama campaign officially says that Gen. Wesley Clark was not officially speaking for Obama when on CBS's Face the Nation this past Sunday, he denigrated Sen. John McCain's military experience. "I don't think that riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president, " Clark sniffed. Besides hinting that McCain was a substandard pilot-good ones do not get shot down-that remark necessarily discounts everything that came afterwards, McCain's five and a half years of voluntary confinement. Voluntary because the North Vietnamese, after learning that McCain was the son of a top U.S. Admiral, offered him early release, ahead of others who had been captured before McCain. McCain refused, not wanting to hand his captors a propaganda victory and undermine the morale of his co-prisoners. McCain never had to endure the debilitating torture, the beatings, the psychological torment, and the spirit-breaking confinement. He did it out of love of country and dedication to duty.

This is not to try and make McCain into a Christ-like figure, willingly suffering for the nation's sins. But it does illuminate just how egregious and despicable Clark's comments were. To boil McCain's entire military record down to the singular event of the loss of his plane while flying bombing missions over Hanoi, the most dangerous duty for an aviator in the Vietnam War, is so callous and dismissive that it had to have been intentional. Clark's defenders, and Clark himself, have said that he was merely responding to a question from host Bob Schieffer. But this only underscores the point that Clark was deliberately taking a shot at McCain's military experience. Schieffer's question pointed to the fact the Obama has no military or comparable executive experience that approaches McCain's. Clark had to diminish McCain in order to build up Obama.

But Clark was not the first, nor will he be the last, Obama surrogate to question McCain's military service. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have both made comments questioning McCain's service, the latter going so far as to say that McCain does not understand the human cost of war because he was a pilot that dropped bombs on targets from high above. In each instance, the Obama campaign has refused to denounce the smears against McCain. In Clark's case, Sen. Obama made an oblique reference to the comments in his grand speech on patriotism, but did not denounce Clark by name.

This is not the "new kind of politics" that Sen. Obama plans to bring to America, it is the new kind of sleaze: send out surrogates to make baseless and despicable charges against your opponent all the while keeping the candidate above the fray by refusing to address or acknowledge the statements made on the campaign's behalf. Trouble is for Sen. Obama, as with almost everything else about him, this isn't really new. It is easily recognizable by the American people as the same kind of partisan politics that has so turned them off to politicians. Whatever short-term gain Obama may think he is getting from taking McCain's experience and qualifications for office down a notch will be more than outweighed by the disappointment many will come to feel when they realize that Obama isn't a new kind of politician after all.

Obama Might Just Blow It

2008-06-20T12:00:00.003-04:00

The biggest danger to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign comes not from his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, nor from his former rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton, but from Barack Obama himself. Obama has sold himself as a new kind of politician, even an anti-politician, a practitioner of a new kind of politics. The Achilles heel of this strategy is that Obama is not really that different from other politicians; and if he can be shown to be just like every other candidate, save for his eloquence, voters who invested in him on a personal level may begin to feel like they have been had.

The past week provided Obama with a few opportunities to show that he really is a different kind of candidate, indeed a different kind of Democrat, than the standard variety. But in each instance, he espoused the typical liberal position. The Supreme Court's wrongheaded decision in Boumediene, for the first time granting habeas corpus rights to terrorist detainees, was embraced by the "different" Obama as an important step in preserving civil liberties for American citizens. But the decision has nothing to do with Americans. It grants the rights of Americans to non-Americans who want to harm American citizens, but it does not one thing to advance any American's civil liberties. Obama's embrace of the decision may just as well have come from the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or any other far left liberal watchdog group. Obama missed an opportunity to take a "new politics" position on terrorists, in favor of a garden variety liberal one.

Obama then compounded his error by holding out the example of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a model for how an Obama Administration would deal with terrorists and terrorist acts. He assessed the trial and conviction of the terrorists in that first Islamic terrorist attack on American shores as having been a success. "They are in U.S. prisons, incapacitated," he boasted of the terrorists responsible. He did not address how, if the trial and conviction of those terrorists was so successful, the September 11th attacks took place. Clearly, the trial did nothing to prevent further acts of terrorism on America at home or abroad. Obama missed a chance to take a post-September 11th position on terrorists, a more robust one than federal prosecutors can implement, in favor of a tired old liberal worldview.

But Obama was not finished. He capped off the week by suggesting that if Osama bin Laden himself were captured alive during an Obama Administration, the mastermind of the murder of more Americans than any other person in history would not be subjected to the death penalty. Obama said that the U.S. should deal with a captured bin Laden in a way that does, "not make him a martyr." That may be a popular position in the liberal salons of Cambridge and New Haven, but it is not one that will resonate with an overwhelming majority of Americans. Even those personally opposed to capital punishment will have a hard time finding any sympathy for bin Laden's soul. Obama could have easily said that bin Laden deserved "ultimate justice" for his crimes, or some other suitable euphemism for execution, and he would have been praised as a "new" kind of Democrat, tough on terrorism. But instead he went out of his way to take the liberal position, even for the worst of America's enemies.

Since securing the nomination, Obama has been trying to tack back to the center, walking back pledges to meet personally and unconditionally with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. But there's nothing new about that strategy either. Presidential candidates since time immemorial have campaigned to the fringes in the primary and to the center in the general election. What is new about Obama, however, is the length to which he has gone to convince voters that his greasy fast food served on fine china is really nouveau cuisine. It's not. If Obama doesn't start to come up with some genuinely new positions and fresh ideas, he will lose in November, and become just another bitter liberal former nominee.

Ignore the Court

2008-06-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling in the consolidated cases of Boumediene v. Bush and Al-Odah v. United States for the first time grants foreign-born enemy combatants of the United States, captured on the battlefield in the process of planning or participating in attacks against U.S. targets, the right to challenge the circumstances of their detention in federal court. It is difficult to overestimate the impact that this ruling will have on the prosecution of the war on terror and, indeed, all future armed conflicts. The specter of American troops Mirandizing enemy combatants on the battlefield, or being called back from the front to testify in civilian court about the manner that a prisoner was captured, and the practical impossibility each of those outcomes would present to the U.S. military, should trouble every American who is concerned about the nation’s safety.

President Bush, reacting almost immediately to the Court’s decision, said that his Administration, “would abide,” with the ruling, adding, “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.” He spoke too soon, and did not go far enough. For the reasons cited above, and others, he should ignore this decision of the Court, and continue to apply the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as duly passed into law by Congress.

The unpleasant fact overlooked by Justice Anthony Kennedy and the four justices who signed on to his majority opinion, is that in ruling the military tribunals set up by the Military Commissions Act to be unconstitutional, the Court itself committed an unconstitutional act. Congress, acting under its Article III power to regulate the judicial branch, stripped the Supreme Court of the jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees in the custody of the United States when it passed and the president signed the Military Commissions Act. The act specifically states:

No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination. (2) Except as provided in paragraphs (2) and (3) of section 1005(e) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

The Detainee Treatment Act vests the authority to hear habeas petitions in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, not the Supreme Court. The very act of taking the cases constitutes a usurpation of Congress’s Constitutional powers, as well as a violation of U.S. law, by the Supreme Court. The ruling itself, of course, is a gross attempt to regulate the conduct of the Executive Branch in wartime by the Judiciary and has no basis in the Constitution.

Not since the Civil War has a president defied a ruling of the Supreme Court, when President Abraham Lincoln ignored a ruling that his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. Lincoln continued to hold persons deemed to be enemies of the Union. Like the Supreme Court, the Executive and Legislative Branches of government have a responsibility to interpret the Constitution. Lincoln, exercising his interpretation both of the needs of the war effort and the law, concluded that preserving the Union necessitated the temporary suspension of the writ. President Bush can and should make the same determination.

Should the president make such a decision, he would not be going nearly as far as Lincoln did. The president would be refusing to apply habeas rights to foreign-born enemy combatants, whereas Lincoln jailed American citizens. The president would be on firm legal ground in making this determination. He has inherent Article II powers to direct the military as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and he would be upholding a duly passed law against a rogue Court overstepping its authority. Furthermore, since Congress expressly authorized the D.C. Circuit to rule on the status of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that court ruled that the tribunals were indeed legal, President Bush can argue that he is upholding the decision of the highest court authorized to rule on the matter.

Americans understand that the proper role of the judiciary is to interpret the laws, not make them. They also understand that in this war on terrorism, every effort must be taken to prevent those who would do America harm from realizing their plans. The president has been handed an opportunity with this wrongheaded and unconstitutional decision of the Supreme Court to act on both principles. The Administration can strike a blow against terrorists and a rogue federal judiciary by simply refusing to submit to the will of nine justices in black robes.

Obama's Electoral Map Shrinks by One State

2008-06-11T14:39:00.007-04:00

Sen. Barack Obama has an uphill battle to win the presidency. Don't think so? Take a look at the Electoral College map. Despite having a slim lead in national polls over Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama has a lower ceiling in Electoral College votes than McCain, and must breakthrough to take a red state in order to win the presidency, no matter how many points he may beat McCain by in the national popular vote. In other words, if McCain is able to hold all of the states that voted Republican in 2004, he will win.

Obama must not only wrest a state or states from McCain, he must put together the right combination to reach the magic Electoral College number of 270 votes. For example, looking at the 2004 Electoral College map above, if Obama were to take Iowa and New Mexico from McCain this November, two fairly good possibilities, that would still leave him seven electoral votes shy of the mark. Obama needs to win a big McCain state to win the White House.

It would come as a disappointment, then that Ohio Governor Ted Strickland recently ruled out the possibility that he would serve as Sen. Obama's running mate. Strickland is the popular governor of a swing state from the last two presidential elections who was swept into power in 2006 in a paroxysm of voter anger over Republican mismanagement and scandal. Strickland's presence on the ticket would conceivably help Obama with rural working-class whites, a demographic he struggled with in the primaries and perhaps tip the state and its 20 electors into his column.

But Strickland was not only dismissive of a potential Vice-Presidential selection, he was dismissive of Sen. Obama's chances to win Ohio in November regardless of who he picks for the ticket.

"Absolutely not. If drafted I will not run, nominated I will not accept and if elected I will not serve.

So, I don’t know how more crystal clear I can be." [...]

When asked to rank the degree of difficulty of Obama carrying Ohio, Strickland says: "I would say somewhere around 5 in a scale of 1 to 10. I think it’s, I just think it’s a challenge because of the nature of our state."

Ohioans just aren't that into Obama, according to the governor. So Sen. Obama will have to look elsewhwere for the 19 Electoral College votes he needs to make it to 270.

Federal Jobs Illegal Immigrants Can’t Do

2008-06-10T11:36:00.001-04:00

President Bush modified an Executive Order from the Clinton Administration yesterday to effectively bar illegal immigrants from working jobs on the Federal dole. All Federal contractors will now have to register for the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program and check the status of all their workers and subcontractors’ workers before starting work on Federal contracts.

The E-Verify program is the bane of civil liberties and open borders groups because it uses the Social Security Administration’s database to actually cross check the often times fraudulent or stolen numbers provided by illegal immigrants on their employment applications. A Federal Court in San Francisco, natch, blocked part of Homeland Security’s program in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the San Francisco Labor Council, and the strange political bedfellows of the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That ruling, issued by Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer’s brother Judge Charles Breyer, has prevented the Social Security Administration from sending out over 140,000 “no match” letters to employers. The letters would have required employers to take steps to verify their employees’ identities within 90 days or else fire the workers.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at the time that the ruling did not amount to a “holiday from law enforcement,” and that the Administration would do, “as much administratively as we can, within the boundaries of existing law,” to continue to crackdown on illegal immigration. The president rightfully took a lot of criticism from the right for his backing of the Senate’s disastrous “comprehensive” immigration bill, and many have been skeptical of the Administration’s stepped up enforcement of illegal immigration laws in the wake of that compromise’s failure in Congress. Sen. McCain, too, a champion of the Senate bill, professes to have seen the light on illegal immigration and now calls for securing the border before taking up any immigration bill. Yesterday’s move to secure federally contracted jobs for American workers is evidence that the Administration does get it, and is another huge victory for opponents of illegal immigration. McCain can show that he gets it too by pledging not to alter or rescind the order if elected.

Senator, You're No Jack Kennedy

2008-06-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

With the endorsement of Sen. Ted Kennedy, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s daughter Caroline Kennedy serving on his Vice-Presidential selection committee, the references to Sen. Barack Obama as a throwback to the days of Camelot and the heir apparent to the legacy of Robert Kennedy have become common in the media. It is not hard to see the parallels. Obama is young and energetic, with a telegenic family including two young children. He speaks in grand themes and has an oratorical style that inspires confidence. Both Kennedys were possessed of these gifts.

But Kennedy was not a liberal in the modern sense of the word, the way Obama is. Kennedy believed in a strong national defense, he believed in intervening in foreign countries’ affairs in service of U.S. national security interests, and he advocated tax cuts as a means of stimulating the economy. All three of these are anathema to today’s liberals.

Obama wants to withdraw completely from Iraq, regardless of the consequences for the United States and the region. Kennedy understood that projecting U.S. military power abroad was an essential part of both the ideological struggle between America and her adversaries and keeping the homeland safe. Obama wants to negotiate with America’s enemies, instead of confronting them on the global stage. Kennedy met with Kruschev, yes. But he understood that the Soviet Union was engaged in a struggle for supremacy with the West that envisioned Soviet dominance in Europe and the strategic defeat of the United States. He didn't just talk either. Kennedy took action, blockading Cuba, an act of war, and airlifting supplies to Berlin when Soviet aggression spilled out of the negotiating room. Lastly, Obama wants to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts, including the cut in capital gains tax rates. That tax that hits a large percentage of Americans who own investments and is not adjusted for income. Kennedy understood that reducing tax rates on businesses and individuals was a sure fire way to jump start economic growth. Kennedy knew that the pie was not fixed in size, like today's liberals and Obama do. Kennedy understood that growth would benefit everyone, without government control.

Kennedy would be a moderate Republican today. Obama is a standard issue liberal, the most liberal member of the Senate. Like everything else with Obama, the comparison with Kennedy is only on the surface. Once one takes a closer look, a very different picture is revealed.

It's All History Now

2008-06-05T23:34:00.003-04:00

It has been two days since Sen. Barack Obama's clinching win in the Democratic primary race. Oh, wait! I forgot to mention that his win was historic. Forgive me. The media has been busy reminding viewers and readers every thirty to forty words or so that Obama is the first African-American to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. Aside from the fact that it is true, a fact which bears mentioning...once; this incessant harping on history has another, higher purpose. Namely, to set the narrative for the general election campaign. A vote for Obama is a vote for "history;" while a vote for the Republican, and erstwhile media darling Sen. John McCain, is a vote not just against Obama, but is anti-historic. In other words, if you don't vote for Obama, you don't want history to be made, you are against progress, and you are preventing America from becoming all that it can be.

Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo provided that last helpful bit of analysis on the morning after the (historic) win. He said on air that Obama's win was as much about him as it was about America becoming a more just and and better country than it is. Yes, because America just won't be great until every liberal fantasy is fulfilled, until every media command is obeyed, and until there is no more history to be made. From now until November, the media will pound its narrative home. And if it does not get its way, and McCain somehow defies history, all will be wrong again. Until the next great liberal hope rises, and the media finds another champion through whom it can remake America in its image.

Under Construction

2008-06-03T20:33:00.001-04:00

Please check back again soon. I am just putting the finishing touches on the blog and will be posting shortly.