Who's Radical?

Is Barack Obama a radical? All we can say for certain is that 1) he partnered with a slew of them to get himself into positions of power in Chicago and, 2) he gave them tons of money when he had the chance. It's possible that this doesn't reflect his heart, but rather, a cool calculation about how to crack the corrupt Chicago power structure - but, in the end, the difference may be academic. Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review -

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke.

Look at the linkage that exists in that one paragraph. Barack gets to be head of Bill Ayers' Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and is given the power to distribute as much as $150 million to improve education, when he just is a couple of years out of law school and has no background in education. Some of the money goes to Reverend Wright. Some of it goes to people who make Wright appear mainstream and mild.

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago.

That's the reality. Liberals are scambling to hide that reality behind - what else - accusations of racism. In today's Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson pretends that the reaction of a couple of angry McCain supporters makes McCain the equivalent of George Wallace because Wallace had angry crowds, an assertion that was widely shouted down when made a few days ago by civil rights Congressman John Lewis. Jackson is too smart not to be conscious of the perfidy he's engaged in.

HAVING FAILED to convince voters that they represent a break from the tragic Bush presidency, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and vice presidential running mate Sarah Palin are careening into George Wallace territory to destroy the nation's first African-American nominee, Democrat Barack Obama.

Frank Rich says in the New York Times:

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

While Rich takes the predictable liberal stance that saying Barack's middle name is a racist attempt to make him the "other," in its endorsement of Obama today the Boston Globe, owned by Rich's bosses at the New York Times, celebrates Barack's otherness, calling him by his full name.

Voters can make no more powerful statement about America's commitment to inclusion and opportunity than to put forward this man - Barack Hussein Obama, son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas - as the nation's representative to the world.

So if otherness is good, Hussein is good, but if otherness concerns you, Hussein is evil. Not content to simply endorse for President the man who is so uniquely unqualified for the position whose political partners have been hateful, violent and racist, the Globe, in a separate disendorsement, calls McCain unfit!

Campaigns are crucibles, and this one has revealed McCain to be erratic, out of touch with ordinary Americans, and, with Palin as his shotgun messenger, too quick with the sneer, smear, and division. He has been a profound disappointment, and he is unfit to lead the nation into its perilous future.

While it seems pretty clear that Barack is a radical, we have no way of knowing if he'll have any allegiance to the philosophy of those who got him to where he is. One thing Barack has been consistent about is that Barack comes first, ideals second.

Scary Self-Confidence

Is John McCain's old age, coupled with Sarah Palin's scary self-confidence, combining to make her TV exposure last week a loser for the GOP? Frank Rich at the New York Times thinks so.

The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

Wow. 'Hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition.' Sounds like Barack Obama, doesn't it?

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

That Sarah! She just hasn't learned to be phony and slick up there in Alaska the way the mainstreams expect.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

Wow - 'preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years' sounds like a pretty good description of Barack Obama, doesn't it?

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

Just as Dems were wondering about dumping Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago - just a couple of weeks after they had been wondering how they had created a ticket that was so upside down.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

All of the above is, of course, just Rich trying to be rich. What is working against McCain is 8 years of George W. and an economic disaster, forces so powerful that the unelectable Obama could actually win this election.

The Party That Can't Win

Somehow, this doesn't seem like enough anymore.

Stepping up the Republican ticket’s attacks on Senator Barack Obama, Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday seized on a report about Mr. Obama’s relationship with a former 1960s radical to accuse him of “palling around with terrorists.”

The dire economic stories of the past three weeks have shifted the tenor of the race from "change" to "blind change." Voters will not be concerned with who they're voting for, only who they're voting against.

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it, and how I see America,” Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said in Colorado, according to a pool report. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us.

Dick Morris cleverly observed a few months ago that this is a race between an unelectable candidate and the party that can't win. While I still believe that Obama is unelectable, that comes with the caveat that voters have to know that his short political career was made possible by partnerships with America hating radicals. That point must be driven home by a powerful third party campaign like the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry four years ago, and for some reason, conservative powerbrokers are uninterested in investing in such an effort. Lacking a truth squad on the Obamafia, it appears increasingly likely that the GOP as the party that can't win will be the story of this election.

“Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

It's ironic that the effort to tag Barack now with responsibility for his relationship with 60's bomber Bill Ayers is justified by a New York Times story that was designed to inoculate Barack - to offer him protection from this sort of attack - from responsibility for his close alliance with the Ayers family.

The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The fact of the matter is that Barack was made the head of the Ayers controlled Chicago Annenberg Challenge when he had no background in education or any other reasonable qualification for the job. That credential was his only argument - except for his important work as a community organizer - for a state senate seat the following year.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”

That one phrase, indicating that Barack "played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers," is as deep as the Times got in its search for the evidence as to why Barack felt compelled to deceive voters about his relationship with Ayers.

Crossed Paths

The New York Times has a front page piece on Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. As you might expect, it is an attempt to minimize the linkage between them. The title tells the story.

Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths

Yup - their paths just happened to cross. Or, as Barack puts it, Ayers is just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

A review of records does not an investigation make. I'm anxious to hear the answer to the obvious questions their relationship raises, but the Times skims over critical issues. Like how it was that the Chicago Annenberg Project, controlled by Bill Ayers, just happened to make young Barack the Chairman - just in time for a run for the state senate the next year. Would the lawyer Obama, lacking any education credentials, have been a credible candidate without that title no his resume?

In fact, according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment.

That's easy for them to say. Let's see some investigative reporting from the Times on this issue, and Barack's connections not just to Bill Ayers, but his brother and father. It strains credulity to accept the Times' portrayal of the relationship as anything but a coverup.

Aren't they curious why Barack played down his connections to Bill Ayers?

Them Apples

The debate isn't the big thing that came true. Word is there will be a bailout plan completed over the next few days.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday that negotiations over a proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan is back on track and lawmakers
would work through the weekend to pass a plan.

Apparently wanting a break from the important stories they've been covering this week, the mainstreams are looking for sexier storylines. Which has the New York Times wondering, is he just too cool?

However forceful and passionate Mr. Obama can be, his speeches and public appearances this week have underscored how he is sometimes out of sync with the visceral anger of Americans who are losing their jobs and homes. He often talks about growing up on food stamps and about having paid off his student loans only recently, yet his tone and volume, body language, facial expressions and words convey a certain distance from the ache that many voters feel.

Call me crazy, but I think "cool" is just code for "black." Isn't it obvious that the Times is injecting race into the conversation?

“People want presidents who lead and relate to them — they don’t want
presidents who analyze and seem above it all,” said G. Terry Madonna, a pollster
and director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin &
Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “Obama still comes across as dispassionate to
the point of coolness. He is so comfortable in his own skin, he can be hard to
connect with for people who are struggling.”

When they say, "People want presidents who lead and relate to them," are they really saying, "People want presidents who don't have Muslim names." It sounds like hate mongering.

For Mr. Obama, the financial crisis poses different risks. He wants to
appear fired up over the economy, but he has written before about wanting to
avoid appearing like a stereotypical angry black man. Unlike Jesse
Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black leaders whose fulminations could scare white voters, Mr. Obama is not from and of New York, Detroit, or the segregated South; he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. To some degree Mr. Obama faces the opposite challenge from fiery black leaders who came before him: Is he too cool for a crisis like this one?

See - I knew it!

Proxy Prejudice

Is someone spreading innuendo suggesting that Barack is Muslim?

As a radio talk host and Barack blogger I have tons of material forwarded to me, and I've seen precious little of this. Yet, confusion over Barack's religion persists.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times, complains that this confusion is part of a deliberate attempt to make Barack the "other."

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it.

When I’ve traveled around the country, particularly to my childhood home in rural Oregon, I’ve been struck by the number of people who ask something like: That Obama — is he really a Christian? Isn’t he a Muslim or something? Didn’t he take his oath of office on the Koran?

Isn't confusion unavoidable as average Americans start to tune into the campaign for the first time, getting to know a candidate who is named Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood being raised in Indonesia, and had two fathers who were Muslims?

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

You mean Christians wouldn't have a natural concern about whether a candidate is not Christian? Shall we get Mitt Romney's opinion on this - he's a Christian?

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

What do you think would happen to John McCain's candidacy if he had Reverends Wright and Pfleger as spiritual/political mentors?

Journalists need to do more than call the play-by-play this election cycle. We also need to blow the whistle on such egregious fouls calculated to undermine the political process and magnify the ugliest prejudices that our nation has done so much to overcome.

Barack's problem is not that others are trying to otherize him. His issue is that he has otherized himself!

Money Miscalculation?

Remind me again: Why did Barack forgo public financing?

Obama campaign officials had calculated that with its vaunted fund-raising machine, driven by both small contributors over the Internet and a powerful high-dollar donor network, it made more sense to forgo public financing so they could raise and spend unlimited sums.

So why is the New York Times splashing a front page, top of the fold story on that decision today?

The signs of concern have become evident in recent weeks as early fund-raising totals have suggested that Mr. Obama’s decision to bypass public financing may not necessarily afford him the commanding financing advantage over Senator John McCain that many had originally predicted.

Did the Obama campaign not consider that fundraising might slow - and even if it didn't, that keeping the numbers up to snuff would require a major campaign focus that McCain wouldn't be burdened with?

Mr. McCain will be dispatched for only four major fund-raisers: one on Monday night in Chicago, in which the party raised about $4 million; another next week in Miami, then Los Angeles and New York in October, finance officials said.

With his $84 million from the fed, a hundred million already in the RNC's account, and the expectation that the party will raise a hundred more, McCain will have $300 million to spend - plenty of money to run a successful presidential campaign. Barack, meanwhile, has to work hard for his money.

Campaign officials expect their Internet fund-raising engine to ramp up as the election approaches. And they hope that much of the high-dollar fund-raising can be done without Mr. Obama. In the New York area alone, there are some 18 events planned in September, all with surrogates, including Mrs. Clinton, Caroline Kennedy and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

But campaign officials conceded that Mr. Obama inevitably will have to make some appearances. On Friday night in New Jersey, Mr. Obama devoted five hours for two fund-raising events, including one at the home of the singer Jon Bon Jovi, in which the ticket was $30,800 a person. Mr. Obama is also scheduled to appear at back-to-back fund-raisers in Los Angeles on Sept. 16.

With June and July fundraising off for over June and July, the release of August numbers next week will show whether Barack has things back on track, and if enough was raised to make up the summer shortfall. Meanwhile, Democrats will have to sit and worry that Barack might be falling into the trap he built for himself.

Obama campaign officials had calculated that with its vaunted fund-raising machine, driven by both small contributors over the Internet and a powerful high-dollar donor network, it made more sense to forgo public financing so they could raise and spend unlimited sums.