A website dedicated to the man so uniquely unqualified to be President. This blog by by radio talk host Todd Feinburg has been replaced by RealClearThinker.com.
It's not quite right to say the incoming president Barack Obama has no executive experience. For the past two years, he's run a sprawling presidential campaign with tentacles in every state that raised some $650 million from 3.1 million donors.
Arguing that Barack is qualified to be president because he ran for president.
All campaigns have cadres of surrogates that transition into running the Oval Office. But Obama also has the largest grassroots network of active operatives of any campaign in history. What happens to that network?
And he has an organization!And a website!
Behind Obama's successful campaign was a successful Web site: my.barackobama.com, a hybrid social-networking/political-organizing site, built by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook. The site has over a million registered users whom the campaign could ping at a moment's notice, to make phone calls, send e-mails, post videos on YouTube and help plan and attend events and rallies. That network would be enormously helpful for a re-election campaign in four years.
I got woken up at 1am this morning so that Barack could tell me, via text message, that I had got him elected president. So far, I'm not so impressed with my new relationship to power. A little more distance might not be a bad thing.
After losing the presidential election in 2004, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., returned to his role in the Senate. But he maintained his Johnkerry.com Web site and has used the mailing list to draw attention to issues, raise money for ad campaigns and boost candidates in 2006 and 2008 elections.
Just think how meaningful that has been for us all.
One of Obama's stated goals as president was to get people more involved in their government. On Tuesday night, with the election results showing a decisive victory and Sen. John McCain offering a concession, Obama e-mailed a few million of his closest friends: "We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next," he wrote. Then, signing off, "Thank you, --Barack."
Okay. But make it 1pm, not am, if you're going to be sending me another text message, okay?
When the Obama campaign purged his website Sunday night of his troop drawdown proposal for Iraq, it also purged his claims that the surge wouldn't work. If you're going to rewrite history, it's a good idea to delete the record, no? Here's the truth of Barack's poor analysis, in video, as compiled by Wake Up America.
And from the Top of the Ticket blog at the LA Times:
A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days.
The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge.
The Arizona senator, who advocated the surge for years before the Bush administration employed it, says the resulting reduction in violence is proof it worked with progress on 15 of 18 political benchmarks and Obama's plan to withdraw troops by now would have resulted in surrender.
When President Bush ordered the surge in January, 2007, Obama said, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse," a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he acknowledged progress, but maintained his position that political progress was lacking.
Tuesday, while Obama gave a speech on foreign policy, the New York Daily News was first to notice the removal of parts of Obama's campaign site listing the Iraq troop surge as part of "The Problem." An Obama spokeswoman said it was just part of an "update" to "reflect changes in current events," as our colleague Frank James notes in the Swamp. The update includes a new section on the rise of al-Qaeda violence in Afghanistan.
Barack's website has been updated - he is no longer calling for a blind withdrawal of troops from Iraq - the position that outflanked Hillary and won him the nomination.
Here's what his official position has been since before the primaries, as outlined on his website, without any caveats about talking to commanders or conditions on the ground:
Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.
Could you give that to us again, just to make sure no one is confused?
Obama has a plan to immediately begin withdrawing our troops engaged in combat operations at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of next year.
Barack Obama believes we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. Immediately upon taking office, Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: ending the war. The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.
Under the Obama plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel. He will not build permanent bases in Iraq, but will continue efforts to train and support the Iraqi security forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism.
Democrats were duped into dumping Hillary. Has a more malicious and manipulative politician ever walked the earth? It's hard to imagine.
