Category: Obama

Obama drawing some blood in the Iowa race with this postcard.  Here’s hoping.

Much of the media has now pronounced Obama’s campaign all but hopeless and anointed Hillary the Democratic presidential candidate.  Why?  A national poll showing Hillary with a 20-point lead over all contenders and an Iowa poll showing her, for the first time, taking a slim lead in Iowa.  I am not sure Obama can win, but for me, this race seems far from over.  Even Michael Crowley’s piece in TNR with the hope-filled title: “Hope sinks” gave me some reasons to believe there’s more to come.  Here’s why:

Crowley in his piece used the same trope that the Hillary campaign has been handing out about Obama’s “new politics” – her campaign has tried to say Obama is caught in a catch-22, unable to criticize her or play politics without losing his mantle as the candidate of change, as the candidate of the new politics.  Based on Obama’s campaign team, based on what I have gleaned of Obama’s personality from the various profiles, based on the fact that Obama was a Chicago politician, it’s obvious he’s ready and willing to play hardball.  I frankly don’t see the contradiction being the politics of hope and political hardball.  To say that politics is more than a game where we pick our positions based on carefully polled tactical decisions does not indicate you won’t criticize your opponents.  It is one thing to say that politics has to be about more than character assassination, and another to be unwilling to take on your opponent’s positions.  Conflating the two is nothing more than a tactic to confuse the issues, or an indication that a reporter is confused.

Of course, Obama has fed into this by refusing to mention Hillary by name.  To me this seems like a tactical decision rather than a matter of principle.  The time will come, and it will come soon when he will start criticizing her by name – apparently starting with the New Hampshire editorial excerpted below.  He will call on her by name in a speech soon, after he begins to gain some points in the polls, at least in Iowa.  And it will be news and will help build his momentum.  For the past six months, I have been hearing about the fears from the Obama campaign that they will peak too early.  That’s why I give some credence to reports such as this one that indicate that they plan on coming from behind just before the Iowa caucuses.

Crowley reports that Obama has the team and the organization in Iowa to succeed, and that if he is able to get some younger voters to the caucuses, he might succeed.  Of course the youth vote always seems to disappear in elections.  But with the strongest Democratic organization in Iowa and a veteran political team, this seems very important.

Another reason to think all is not over: the moment Hillary was anointed the presidential candidate, she made two mistakes.  First, she voted for the Lieberman-Kyl bill that seems eerily reminiscent of the 2003 bill to authorize military force with Iraq.  And then she accused a questioner of being planted by an opposition campaign when he asked a legitimate questions about her support for the Liberman-Kyl bill.  This prompted the TNR blog headline “HAS HILLARY LET OBAMA BACK INTO THE RACE?”.  Obama took the opening with an article in a New Hampshire paper:

I strongly differ with Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was the only Democratic presidential candidate to support this reckless amendment. We do need to tighten sanctions on the Iranian regime, particularly on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which sponsors terrorism far beyond Iran’s borders. But this must be done separately from any unnecessary saber-rattling about checking Iranian influence with our “military presence in Iraq.” Above all, it must be done through tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, which I have supported, and which Sen. Clinton has called “naive and irresponsible.” Sen. Clinton says she was merely voting for more diplomacy, not war with Iran. If this has a familiar ring, it should. [my emphasis]

And now we also find that the Clintons are beginning to do what they are so good at doing: alienating their potential allies by attacking anyone who disagrees with them.  The Hillary camp is apparently put out by the quality of Obama’s foreign policy team and has asked Mr. Documents-in-my-Socks Sandy Berger to be an enforcer to let anyone supporting Obama know that they will have no place in a Clinton administration.  It’s called cheap; and it’s called hardball.  And Obama will hit back.

Clintonian hubris, an Obama strategy to put the pressure on Clinton late, with Iowa in a statistical dead heat, and a ton of other primaries following hard-upon Iowa.  It seems to me that Obama has a good chance of winning even if he doesn’t hit his stride.  And if he does, I feel this may be a short race.

Meanwhile, Ted Sorenson, close Kennedy confidante, makes a good case for Obama as the heir to JFK.

I’m not sure why Britain’s Telegraph or Matt Drudge consider this news, but Ted Sorenson, President John F. Kennedy’s speech writer and one of his closest aides, has declared Obama is the true heir to JFK’s legacy and a better candidate or president than Hillary or Bill Clinton, including this Obama campaign talking point:

“Judgment is the single most important criterion for selecting a president. At the time of the [1962] Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy’s powers of judgment were tested as no president has ever been tested. Fortunately for all of us, he really came up with the right answers. He was 45. Obama’s 46 so he’s an old geezer.”

The main reason I find the newsworthiness of this surprising is that Ted Sorenson made this explicit in an editorial for The New Republic [subscription required, as the article is in archives] in July, concluding:

[digg-reddit-me]Perhaps most tellingly, both [JFK and Obama] preached (and personified) the politics of hope in contrast to the politics of fear, which characterized Republican speeches during their respective eras. In 1960 and earlier, cynics and pessimists accepted the ultimate inevitability of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as today they assume a fruitless and unending war against terrorism. Hope trumped fear in 1960, and I have no doubt that it will again in 2008.

Although President Kennedy became the breakthrough president on civil rights, health care, and other liberal issues, he was not the most liberal candidate for the nomination in 1960. His emphasis on the importance of ethics, moral courage, and a multilateral foreign policy made him–like Obama–hard to pigeonhole with a single ideological label. His insistence that the United States “must do better” in every sphere of activity, including its cold war competition with the Soviet Union, caused some historians to mistakenly recall that he “ran to the right” of Richard Nixon on national security issues, forgetting his emphasis on negotiations and peaceful solutions.

JFK’s establishment opponents– probably not unlike Obama’s–did not understand Kennedy’s appeal. “Find out his secret,” LBJ instructed one of his aides sent to spy on the Kennedy camp, “his strategy, his weaknesses, his comings and goings.” Ultimately, Kennedy was both nominated and elected, not by secretly outspending or out-gimmicking his opponents but by outworking and out-thinking them, especially by attracting young volunteers and first-time voters. Most of Kennedy’s opponents, like Obama’s, were fellow senators–Johnson, Humphrey, and Symington–who initially dismissed him as neither a powerhouse on the Senate floor nor a member of their inner circle. That mattered not to the voters; nor does it today.

Above all, after eight years out of power and two bitter defeats, Democrats in 1960, like today, wanted a winner–and Kennedy, despite his supposed handicaps, was a winner. On civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the race to the moon, and other issues, President Kennedy succeeded by demonstrating the same courage, imagination, compassion, judgment, and ability to lead and unite a troubled country that he had shown during his presidential campaign. I believe Obama will do the same.

What seemed to me more newsworthy about the Telegraph article than the headline, and the bulk of the article which made this point:

The Kennedy legacy and the aura of Camelot have been powerful but largely unspoken themes underpinning the campaign of Mr Obama, another charismatic Harvard alumnus heralding a new era in politics.

Rather, Sorenson had some harsh words for each of the Clintons–however, nowhere near as harsh as the Republican candidate or Mike Gravel are and will be. He made all the main liberal criticisms of Hillary and Bill, saying that they had and will:

• squandered talent and opportunity;
• continued of politics as usual – “a continuation of the Clinton-Bush 20 years”;
• triangulated positions and compromised on core liberal values;
• compromised the honor of the presidency – “I don’t think that it was the noblest time for the White House when the Lincoln bedroom was rented out to donors and pardons were being issued to some truly dreadful people”;
• and of course, that Hillary will lose to the Republican candidate because too many people don’t like her and she only appeals to people’s intellects.

That’s new and news to me. And it follows a trend of many of those in the Establishment who do not believe another term of the Clintons is the answer. Certainly an improvement, but far from the answer.