Friday’s campaign round-up

July 4, 2008

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* This would be an interesting twist on a convention speech: “The Obama campaign hopes to turn the last evening of the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 28 into a giant rally of voters in a football stadium. The unusual move, confirmed by two sources, would be an echo of John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech in 1960. Kennedy delivered his address before thousands of supporters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Obama’s big moment also would fall on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C…. Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos, can seat more than 76,000.”

* AP: “Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that a shake-up in the leadership of his campaign was part of a ‘natural evolution’ as the organization becomes more national in scope.” Yes, right. Over the course of two days, McCain added a new campaign manager, a new campaign structure, a new national political director, and a new field director. As routine as the sunrise, right?

* Noted without comment: “Florida’s most powerful bachelor is getting hitched. Gov. Charlie Crist, single for nearly three decades, on Thursday morning became engaged to his girlfriend of nine months, Carole Rome.” Crist is, of course, a leading VP candidate for the Republican ticket. Rome is — I’m not kidding — an heiress to a Halloween-costume fortune.

* The latest CNN/Opinion Research poll finds that 63% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Obama, while 59% say the same of McCain.

* Obama leads McCain in Rhode Island by 28 points.

Of course the first (?) gay VP nominee would be a Republican closet case. ‘Natch. Way to break down those barriers…

  • So this is what it’s come to-me agreeing with a NYT editorial about a candidate who I support. Sheeeeeez

    New and Not Improved

    Published: July 4, 2008

    Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics.
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    Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.

    Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.

    The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11.

    In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared.

    Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.

    The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.

    He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no matter who is president and how good his intentions may be.

    On top of these perplexing shifts in position, we find ourselves disagreeing powerfully with Mr. Obama on two other issues: the death penalty and gun control.

    Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”

    What could be more reasonable than a city restricting handguns, or requiring that firearms be stored in ways that do not present a mortal threat to children?

    We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder.

    We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.

    There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.

  • Crist got married? Now that ups his standing in the VP stakes.

    Sadly, I get the feeling that McCan’t is going with Mitt, though I think he ought to go with Mike.

    Whoever he chooses, I will doubtlessly be surprised…

    … by how totally worthless that person will be to the ticket. 😉

  • Sheeze,

    Says it all right in the name.

    “Oh no! Barack Obama is a Moderate! Heaven forfend!”

    Look, I’m a left-leaning progressive centrist and you are not going to make me change my vote by arguing that Obama is not in fact the most liberal Senator in the Senate (not that he ever was) or that in fact he is (just like John Sidney McCan’t) a politican.

    As for gun control, regulation can exist even if there is a personal right to own guns. Even Scalia said so (only so he wouldn’t get shot down inside the Supremem Court Building of course). But to have those regulations and more importantly to enforce them wisely and consistently, we need Barack Obama in the White House, not John Sidney (5’9″) McCan’t.

    Remember it was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms under President George Herbert Walker Bush who attacked Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge and started the seige of the Branch Dividians at the Waco Compound.

    You just can’t trust the Republican’ts with our Freedoms or our Government.

  • Getting married might help Crist with the Xtian right, but getting married to a woman whose company sells this stuff might not helping. The original is here.

    BTW, this is about the only thing which is accessible on this company’s website.

  • Charlie is not fooling anyone here in fl. And he’s just engaged, although they are planning on a fall wedding.

    Although, if you’re going to have a “beard”, it might as well be a hot one !

  • “Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that a shake-up in the leadership of his campaign was part of a ‘natural evolution’ as the organization becomes more national in scope.”

    His organization wasn’t national in scope before? And they admit this? Next thing you know they’ll be aiming for a national product launch by Christmas.

  • * AP: “Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that a
    shake-up in the leadership of his campaign was part of a ‘natural evolution’

    evolution?…well we know it’s not intelligent design..

  • “Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Thursday that a shake-up in the leadership of his campaign was part of a ‘natural evolution’ as the organization becomes more national in scope.”

    Shouldn’r he have said it was the “intelligent design” of his campaign? He’s risking his staunchest (i.e. dumbest) supporters!

  • Crist, huh? He really is gay, ya know. Thirty years a bachelor and now he’s engaged to a woman after 9 months? Next thing you know, he’ll add an “H” to his last name. Whatever puts you in power, I suppose…

  • Lance writes:

    “Oh no! Barack Obama is a Moderate! Heaven forfend!”

    I write: Obama swore an oath to support and defend the constituton when he entered the Senate. Dumping the 4th amendment for political expediency is a violation of that oath; and is not moderate or centrist-it is political cowardice. And political cowardice is not “change that we can believe in.” It’s the same old shit.

    Check this out:

    Commentary: How dare they rip the Fourth Amendment?
    By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

    Early next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love.

    That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

    That a majority on both sides of the aisle — not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties — intend to vote for such a violation of Americans’ right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever.

    We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.

    That they will do this while the last empty phrases of the political windbags at the Fourth of July celebrations are still echoing across a thousand city parks and the bright red, white and blue bunting and blizzard of American flags still flap in the breeze is little short of breath-taking.

    How dare they?

    Those denizens of the White House and Capitol Hill and all those gray granite buildings that line avenues with names like Constitution and Independence in the nation’s capitol would have us believe that we must trade our rights, all of our rights, for some measure of security from the terrorists.

    They would have us believe that a nation of 300 million people must surrender what a million other Americans gave their lives in war to protect in order to protect us from a couple of hundred fanatics hiding in caves in Waziristan.

    Benjamin Franklin himself wrote of such a debate:

    “Those who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

    The fact that British troops, operating on flimsy general warrants handed out by local magistrates, were kicking in the doors of ordinary Americans and rifling through their pantries and papers in search of smuggled, untaxed goods was a prime reason why our ancestors rebelled against their king and went to war.

    This is WHY we celebrate the Fourth of July. This is why the vote on renewing the expanded version of FISA and whitewashing the egregious violations of the Fourth Amendment for seven long years by our government is important.

    If neither John McCain, the Republican, or Barrack Obama, the Democrat, can find the courage to oppose such a violation of so basic a right, then what are we to do for a president, a successor to George W. Bush, The Decider, who has since 9/11 decided what rights you are entitled to keep, what laws he will or will not obey, and whether you will be protected by these words of the Constitution:

    “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

    That’s it. That’s the Fourth Amendment. That is what these folks in Washington, D.C., have violated continuously and in secret for seven long years.

    Somewhere across an ocean and a desert, hiding in his cave, a man of hate named Osama bin Laden is laughing up the sleeve of his dirty robe at the thought that he and a small handful of fellow fanatics could tie a great nation in knots — knots of fear stoked by our own leaders.

    We have done incalculably more and greater damage to ourselves since September 11, 2001, than a thousand bin Ladens and ten thousand al Qaida recruits could ever have done to us.

    Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Now it would seem that we have no one to fear but ourselves and our leaders.

    The questions I pose are these:

    How can even one senator on either side of the aisle in good conscience vote in favor of this law that does nothing to enhance our security and everything to diminish our rights as a free people?

    How can both men who seek to become our next president cast such a vote when both should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder declaring that they would govern by our consent and with our approval, not by wielding the coercive and corrosive and corrupt powers that King George III and his latter-day namesake from Texas thought are theirs by divine right?

  • gee geeeez, don’t you get sick and tired of people whose strongest argument for supporting a candidate is that he isn’t as bad as the other guy. yes geeeez, I certainly do. So who are you voting for geeeez? Obama. Why? He’s not as bad as the other guy. He’s helping to take away one of my cherished civil liberties, but he isn’t as bad as the other guy, and he’s just being a politician, so that makes it acceptable; and what the hell, I don’t have anything to hide anyway. Indeed I’m grateful to this wonderful country, whose military I served in , and to which I have been paying taxes for decades for giving me this opportunity to make history by supporting a politician of color (a transitional figure) who will continue the screwing I’ve been getting all these many years. The “change we can believe in” is that this time the guy doing the screwing isn’t white. What a great country!

  • In his attempts to reach out to religious conservatives, Obama sells out the mental health parity issue. Here is a quote from what Obama said:

    “Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother,” Obama told Relevant Magazine. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.”

    The problem with this is that he makes a distinction between mental illness and physical illness that has been decried by those trying to emphasize the importance of treatment of mental illness by health plans. A mental illness is a physical issue because serious mental illness is organic both in etiology and treatment. By using the term mental distress to trivialize mental illness, Obama undermines progress in recognizing the seriousness of depression, anxiety disorders, and other disabling mental conditions.

    When a mother harms her baby after it has been born (or herself before it is born), then it is treated as a criminal matter.

    Obama is in the dark ages on this issue. By pandering to the religious conservatives in this statement he also reveals how little he cares about or understands issues that are important to women. That is another reason why so many women voted for Hillary and regret that she is now gone from the race.

    I shouldn’t need to point out that here, with his support for banning late-term abortions, he takes the matter of abortion entirely out of the hands of women, their families and their doctors, and makes it a matter of law. That is so far removed from any Choice candidate, that your assurances that he would be OK on this issue because NARAL likes him ring very hollow indeed. I don’t know if this is yet another sell-out or if he has always sided with religious conservatives on this matter, but it is WRONG.

  • Obama leads McCain in Rhode Island by 28 points.

    Sweet.
    Really puts a strike line through this upthread bullshit:
    That is another reason why so many women voted for Hillary and regret that she is now gone from the race.

    Of course… that won’t stop the breathless, witless pontificating about the opinions all woman supposedly hold.

    [Insert bellylaugh at Stupid’s expense here.]

  • Blah blah blah on the gun control thing. Obama said back in October that the DC ban was probably unconstitutional. He’s a constitutional law professor, and it turns out he was right. I give him +1 for this.

    I know libs want to be FOR the 4th amendment and AGAINST the 2nd amendent, but I actually support the whole Constitution. There can be *reasonable* limits on both, and that’s precisely what the Court said.

  • Blah blah blah on the abortion issue, too, Mary. A little bit of law and regulation is good for almost anything. If you think there can’t be a law to say, abort a baby one day before it’s due, you’re so deluded that it’s not even worth reading your posts anymore.

  • For the record, I do in fact tend to disagree with him on the death penalty issue (for practical reasons if nothing else) and of course FISA.

    Campaign financing? Yeah, we see the ‘excuses’ already coming out of the RNC for setting up their ‘independent’ branch to smear Obama. They would have done this anyway. The Repubs have been more well-funded for 99% of the elections in history. Ask me if I care about this time. Furthermore, there’s nothing even remotely illegal or even immoral about Obama’s position. In fact his stance on PACs and lobbyists and 527s have earned him more points in my book.

  • CB: Rome is — I’m not kidding — an heiress to a Halloween-costume fortune.

    Check this out for a great belly laugh:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/charlie-crist-isnt-gay-ok_b_110890.html

    Funniest quote:

    Here’s the part that Tennessee Williams would have really liked: Gov. Crist’s intended, Carole Rome, inherited – and runs — one of America’s oldest Halloween costume companies. The woman marrying the gayish governor from the sultry southern state actually makes beards.

  • “not intelligent design” – that was funny!

    Republicans sure seem to have a thing for heiresses.

  • You chose Obama. Don’t be backing out now. I and others told you that he was not more liberal than Clinton or Edwards or the others…

    Pressure him to be more liberal, whatever. But you chose him, you’d better be there in November to finish what you started!

    I’ll be there.

  • Franklin – Mary didn’t choose Obama, and argued against his selection.

    We believe in a well regulated second amendment.

    If you believe that people must be able to have their weapons at home and in firing mode – why do you support the other restrictions?

  • Isn’t it just a little too cute that McCain was down in Columbia during the hostage ransom, er..rescue? Can we really believe that was not real reason he was down there in the first place? Why campaign down there anyway? No one votes in Columbia in US elections. Doesn’t this reinforce McCain as the next Bush. BTW why campaign in foriegn countries anyway?

  • What happens if Crist marries his fag hag and then DOESN’T get asked to join the ticket? Talk about potential Tennessee Williams psychodrama.

    Obama. I think what people are having a hard time adjusting to (the late term abortion thing is a perfect example) is a candidate who’s views are far more complex than the cartoonish stark black and white pronouncements that is normal for these people.

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