Category: Election 2008

[digg-reddit-me]The consensus seems to be that Obama made some hay at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa. According to every account I have read, he had the best speech and the best audience response and his organization proved it could pack a large auditorium better than any opposing candidate, which would seem to bode well for the upcoming Iowa caucuses. The Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen concluded that “Obama’s superb speech could catapult his bid”.

Some background to illustrate the importance of the Jefferson-Jackson dinner:

The dinner is the Democratic party of Iowa’s main fundraiser which attracts a few thousand of the top activists in the state and most presidential candidates. It was where John Kerry launched his successful come-from-behind victory over Howard Dean after Kerry retooled his campaign. This year’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner was the largest ever, with over 9,000 people packed into the Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Obama had the largest contingent of supporters, followed by Hillary and then Edwards. Each candidate had their moments, but Obama was clearly the star of the show.

Coupled with a strong showing on Meet the Press this Sunday, a number of New Hampshire polls showing Hillary’s support dropping as much as 10 points with Obama gaining almost all of that, and a strong Iowa organization, the stars might aligning for this “skinny kid with a funny name”.

Here’s some excerpts from his speech with the complete video after the jump:

A little less than one year from today you will go into the voting booth and you will select the next President of the United States. Here’s the good news. The name G.W. Bush will not be on the ballot. The name of my cousin Dick Cheney will not be on the ballot. We’ve been trying to hide that for a long time. Everybody has a black sheep in the family. [laughter]

The era of Scooter Libby justice and Brownie incompetence and Karl Rove politics will finally be over. But the question you’re gonna have to ask yourself when you caucus in January and you vote in November is what’s next for America. We are at a defining moment in our history…The promise that so many generations fought for seems like it’s slipping away…we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it.

It is because of those failures that America is listening…we not only have a moment of great challenge, but a moment of great opportunity. We have a chance to bring the American people together, in a new majority…

That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do…

When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq … And he will not be able to say that I waivered on something as fundamental as whether it is okay for America to torture because it is never okay. That’s why I’m in it!

… I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century … and I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says you matter to us, your future is our future, and our moment is now. America, our moment is now.

Our moment is now!

I don’t want to spend the next year or the next four years refighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s. I don’t want to pit red America against blue America. I want to be the President of the United States of America.

And if those Republicans come at me with the same fear-mongering and swift-boating that they usually do, then I will take them head-on. Because I believe the American people are tired of fear, and tired of distractions…we can make this election not about fear, but about the future, and that will not be just a Democratic victory, that will be an American victory, a victory that America needs right now!

I am not in this race to fulfill some longheld ambitions or because I believe it’s somehow owed to me. I never expected to be here. I always knew this journey was improbable. I am running in this race because of of what Dr. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” Because I believe that there’s such a thing as being too late, and that hour is almost upon us.

Complete video after the jump.

“I played basketball and I’m skinny but the people I play with will tell you I don’t mind going down low and throwing elbows.”

From ABC News last week. I just hope it’s true.

Now this is a bit too good to be true:

[digg-reddit-me]I have been anticipating this piece for a while now – Andrew Sullivan’s cover piece from The Atlantic on Barack Obama, his argument for Obama’s candidacy. His argument is not the same as mine, although we share a number of common themes and particular positions.

Some choice excerpts from this very good piece which I recommend everyone read:

On Hillary Clinton and Political Fear

Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness…He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.

On the Essential Struggle of Our Time

This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots, the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam, the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place.

You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps

Quoting Obama on His Religious Conversion

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

On the Necessity of an Obama Presidency

In dangerous times, popular majorities often seek the conservative option, broadly understood.

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

[digg-reddit-me]On ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, Senator Obama discusses the hubris a person needs to believe that he or she can be president:

I think if you don’t have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you can be president then you probably shouldn’t be president. . .There’s a slight madness to thinking you should be the leader of the free world.

Watching this reminds me of half of the reason I support Barack Obama: the less important half which involves his personal appeal and charisma. I can’t imagine another candidate in the present or past speaking like this, providing a genuine insight into the campaign process and himself on purpose. Most of the time when the “real” candidates are revealed, it involves them making mistakes – either in front of a camera, or mistakes so serious the matter ends up in court. The definition of a gaffe in Washington is when a politician is accidentally honest.

Obama talks in a way no other politician does. Not because he is an inherently better person but because he is of a different generation. The lessons of the past 20 years of cultural warfare don’t seem to apply to Obama; he transcends them because he lived through them. Somewhere in this is the core of Obama’s appeal.

The video is after the jump.