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 This blog by by radio talk host Todd Feinburg has been replaced by RealClearThinker.com.
A New York Democrat is backtracking from what he called "a thoughtless comment" about Barack Obama, saying the presidential candidate didn't have "the political courage" to leave his church earlier over its controversial pastor.
Where is he wrong?
Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan was visiting a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla., Sunday when he was confronted by Obama critics who wanted to know why the candidate hadn't ended his association earlier with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama severed ties with Wright this year after videotapes surfaced showing the pastor making anti-American statements from the pulpit of the Chicago church where Obama worshipped for 20 years.
Nadler said he was guessing that Obama "didn't have the political courage" to leave the church earlier.
Sounds like a reasonable guess. What's your explanation?
"It tells me that he wasn't terribly politically courageous. Does it tell me he agrees with the reverend in any way? No," Nadler says. Blurry video of the exchange was posted by Pamela Geller at the blog Atlas Shrugged.
"I made a thoughtless comment yesterday which does not reflect the way I feel about Barack Obama," Nadler said in a statement Monday, adding that he is campaigning in Florida for Obama "because I feel so strongly about the importance of Barack Obama becoming our next president."
This should have happened in July. But it could provide the difference in the bitter neighborhoods.
John McCain has not wielded the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. club over Democratic rival Barack Obama, who repudiated his former pastor and eventually left his Chicago church.
But that hasn't stopped some of those supporting the Republican presidential candidate. The GOP in Pennsylvania, a must-win state for McCain, is airing a tough, last-minute TV ad on Wright and Obama.
"If you think you could ever vote for Barack Obama, consider this: Obama chose as his spiritual leader, this man," the announcer says in the ad, first reported yesterday by Time magazine's political website.
Wright is then shown, in the now-famous video, thunderously saying from the pulpit of a Chicago church while Obama was a member, "Not God bless America, God damn America!"
"He also picked Wright to baptize his children," the announcer says, before Wright is shown saying, "The US of KKKA!"
"Barack Obama, he chose as his pastor a man who blamed the US for the 9/11 attacks," the announcer continues. "Does that sound like someone who should be president?"
Everyone is excited about this bit of video tape from Barack, doing an interview in 1995, in which he praises is Reverend Wright. What I find far more intriguing is Barack's accent - or lack thereof. Where'd the twang come from? Was it acquired as an electoral strategy?
I am living in a world with two realities. On the one hand, there is the pile of polls that indicate that Barack Obama has a lead of a few points that, barring some game changing event of some significance, the current trend will solidify into an unavoidable outcome on November 4.
On the other hand comes the certainty that Barack Obama is unelectable.
I've not heard others say this, until today, when I was happy to read Dallas talk host Mark Davis write the same thing in an open letter to John McCain.
But it is my faith in something else that leaves me still thinking you can win: My belief that Barack Obama is unelectable.
I have faith that America will not turn in these serious times to a candidate so wholly unfit to lead the free world. Your campaign's flaws are playing out in an arena that will be more forgiving as Nov. 4 approaches.
I know that all of the fundamentals of this election scream out for a Democrat, it doesn't matter who, just a Democrat to win. But I don't see how someone so young, inexperienced and radical can get the nod of the American people.
The Obama ride has been historic and scintillating. His political gifts are vast and his campaign skillfully run. But when it comes time for voters to determine who will take the oath Jan. 20, an appreciable number will realize that showering him with adulation on the campaign trail is one thing; handing him the keys to the Oval Office is quite another.
This opinion is not unique to Barack Obama. I don't think anyone can win the presidency carrying around the burden of Barack's resume and Barack's friends - what I affectionately refer to as the Obamafia.
You will win not because your voters are actively thrilled with your agenda, but because they are sufficiently repelled by his.
Bring back Abe Lincoln for another run at the White House, but have the co-founders of his career be Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, and I'd put my money on his opponent.
This is every bit as valid a basis for victory, and you will then have a clean slate on which to write a legacy that I hope is more coherent and compelling than your campaign has been.
Then I ask myself - what if they don't know? What if voters just aren't conscious of who Barack is, and who is friends are, and how seedy his past associations are? If the desire for change is so great that they never bother to look? Sure, Reverend Wright had his time in the news cycle, but that was months ago. And the mainstream media is doing it's best to keep the truth about Bill Ayers from being explored.
I have no idea whether you should try to rhetorically wrap unreformed terrorist Bill Ayers around Mr. Obama's neck tonight. Frankly, I don't know if you can do it skillfully enough to defuse criticisms that you are bringing this sudden concern to the campaign too late.
On the one hand, it is impossible for Barack to win the presidency. On the other, it seems that events have conspired to make him unstoppable. I'm living in both worlds at the same time, trying to figure out which one is real.
McCain is in the unique position of having to calm down his crowds, protecting Barack from folks angry over the possibility of Obama winning the election.
In Lakeville, Minn., this evening, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., found himself confronting some of the anger at and fear of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., that has reared its head at his campaign rallies just as his campaign and the RNC have begun waging a character assault on Obama, painting him as connected to terrorists foreign and domestic, a "liar" who is hiding his true self.
"Frankly we're, we're scared," one voter told McCain. "We're scared of an Obama presidency. And I'll tell you why. I don't want to bring a child up in a country uh where -- I love this country, we'll bring our child up no matter what -- but I'm concerned about someone that cohorts with domestic terrorists such as Ayers."
Said McCain, "I want to be president of the United States and I obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be. But I have to tell you, I have to tell you, he is a decent person. And a person that you do not have to be scared as president of the United States."
The crowd booed.
Turning the focus of the election back to Barack is the purpose of the Ayers comments and ads. While Democrats will call this smears, the focus is a legitimate one. Without a track record of leadership, the questions asked about Barack's judgment are important ones.
All week, supporters of the GOP ticket have yelled ugly accusations about Obama as McCain and running mate Gov. Sarah Palin proceeded down a path where Obama was painted as someone sinister.
"Treason!" "Terrorist!" "Kill him!" audience members yelled when McCain or Palin invoked Obama's name.
The McCain-Palin campaign today defended these comments as those of "real Americans."
Tonight McCain tried to defuse the volatility.
Voters, as they become more savvy about Barack's connection to radical individuals (Wright, Pfleger, Ayers, Alinsky, Farrakhan, etc) and groups (Acorn, CAC, etc), will naturally grow more concerned about his own radicalism.
Said another voter, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight this next time in your debate."
McCain said, "we want a fight and I will fight. But we will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him."
Again, the crowd booed.
"I want everyone to be respectful," McCain said. "And let's make sure we are. Because that's the way politics should be conducted in America. So lets -- make sure -- you're all respectful. I don't meant that has to reduce your ferocity. I just mean it's gotta be respectful. OK? And I would say that 99 and forty-four one-hundredths of every person who's come to my town hall meeting has been respectful. I am proud you're here and I'm grateful for it and I appreciate your enthusiasm."
Barack is a radical - that is clear. The unknown is whether his ideology will remain relevant if he assumes the presidency, or if he will leave his radicalism, and his radical friends, behind in order to be a successful president.
Another woman stood and said, "I got to ask you a question. I don't believe in -- I can't trust Obama. I have read about him. And he's not, he's not – he's an Arab. He's not."
Shaking his head no, McCain grabbed the microphone away from her.
"No ma'am," McCain said. "No ma'am. No ma'am. He's a, he's a, he's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about, he is not. Thank you."
Is telling the truth about Barack and his scummy friends enough to pull the current campaign narrative away from the clutches of the economy? Barely, but I think it is. The challenge remains how to educate Americans about the Obamafia. Right now, the job of educating the public about Bill Ayers et al seems to have been assigned only to Sarah Palin.
Campaigning through Republican strongholds of Gulfcoast Florida today, Palin continued her weekend theme of tying Obama to Ayers, who was a founder of the violent Weather Underground group blamed for several bombings during Vietnam War protests, when Obama was a child. Obama has denounced those activities.
Ideally, the theme of Barack's shady character would be pursued by a third party, not by the McCain campaign. It's hard for a campaign not to come across as shrill and speaking only from self-interest when attacking during the final days. But it's still good to hear discussion about the bad guys who Barack made close bonds with.
And in an interview with conservative New York Times columnist William Kristol published today, the Alaska governor suggested that there should be more discussion about Wright, who was Obama's pastor of 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Obama has denounced the pastor as well.
But when Kristol pressed Palin about Wright, she replied, "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country... To me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up."
Which must be done. Jeremiah Wright is the only member of the Obamafia known to the general public, but the hot pursuit at the truth about Barack's dirty past never materialized. While it may be too late now to bring it up with power, McCain can't let November 4 arrive without voters knowing about who Barack is.
And I guess we’ll soon know McCain’s call on whether he wants to bring Wright up — perhaps at his debate with Obama Tuesday night.
I asked at the end of our conversation whether Palin, fresh off her own debate, had any advice for McCain. “I’m going to tell him the same thing he told me. I talked to him just a few minutes before I walked out there on stage. And he just said: ‘Have fun. Be yourself, and have fun.’ And Senator McCain can do the same.” She paused, and I was about to thank her for the interview, but she had one more thing to say. “Only maybe I’d add just a couple more words, and that would be: ‘Take the gloves off.’ ”
Tomorrow night should be very interesting. How does McCain damage Obama without doing as much damage to himself?
Shocked? I've been eagerly awaiting the moment for months!
McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)
Why would any justification be required? Never more than now, with a candidate uniquely unqualified for the office, is it necessary to judge a potential president by the company he's chosen to keep!
“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.”
I'd expect the 527's to be taking care of the Obamafia lineup, but if McCain has to do it for himself, let's get to it guys.
McCain began that effort this week by linking Obama to Democrats Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines, former executives at Fannie Mae. Johnson was named to head Obama’s vice presidential search before he stepped down amid controversy. Raines is a supporter of Obama (though evidently not an “adviser” as McCain charged at first).
Those guys are chump change. Brings us the big guns - Wright, Pfleger, Farakhan, Ayers, Dohrn, Rezko, etc.
Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.
I often wondered why, despite the obvious need to proceed with caution, Hillary didn't go after Barack harder then she did.
The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”
She had the gameplan she needed, but she didn't pull the trigger.
Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton “would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.”
It's like John Kerry all over again.
Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Which Barack is not. And the video is there to prove it.
A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS” — exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.
Which is why Barack cannot be elected.
“What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make.”
While Hillary didn't know how to get the job done, McCain has already proven that he won't behave with progressive incompetence.
How does Barack's candidacy survive Michelle's view of America?
You combine these sorts of clips with Reverends Wright and Pfleger, sprinkle in a little Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers, and you've got an ad that the Swift Boat guys from 4 years ago could only dream about.
Dick Morris mentioned recently that one of the biggest mistakes the Obama campaign has made was not realizing earlier the importance of controlling Michelle. She is on the record as having a negative attitude towards this country, providing a very damaging confirmation of Barack's long connection to radicals. A relatively unexplored foundational member of the Obamafia is Frank Marshall Davis. But he'll play a starring role in the fall.
As noted in the July 29 curtain-raiser to this series, the seeds of Obama's far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a teenager growing up in Hawaii — and they were far more radical than any biography or media profile has portrayed.
Poet-journalist Davis speaks in Hawaii in this undated photo.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 — a man he refers to only as "Frank" — was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-American activities."
In a belated story on the relationship, the Associated Press describes Davis as "left-leaning."
In fact, Davis was a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, according to the 1953 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities of the Territory of Hawaii, which labeled him "a bitter opponent of capitalism." The report was introduced as evidence in the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings probing the "Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States."
Why isn't Barack getting any traction? There are lots of reasons, but if you've been getting your news from the mainstream media, you're probably surprised by the tight race. After all, they've created the distinct impression that Barack is a shoe-in, haven't they? That the election is over?
Let's look inside the polls a bit to see why Barack is not the runaway favorite. First, here are the five most important issues this year according to voters polled by Rasmussen.
Economy
National Security
Ethics
Iraq
Healthcare
Which candidate do voters think has the best answers to these problems?
The economy is a tie - 45 each.
National Security goes to McCain by 12%
Ethics goes to Barack by 2%
Iraq goes to McCain by 12%
Health Care goes to Barack by 12%
You see - despite the perception that Barack is more in step with voters expectations, voters are evenly divided on the economy - which is far and away the number one issue. McCain's dominance on national security issues gives him the advantage, on average, on the rest of the issue. This is in stark contrast to the sense the media portrays that Barack is dominant in all catergories except Iraq.
At this stage in the 1988 presidential race, Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, had a 17 percentage point lead over George H.W. Bush, who went on to win the election. John Kerry emerged from the 2004 Democratic convention with a strong lead over George W. Bush only to lose the election as well. In 2008, conventional wisdom says Mr McCain is running a much less effective campaign than either of the Bushes.
That only reinforces disquiet about Mr Obama’s inability so far to take a decisive lead.
The gulf between the strong anti-Republican leanings of the electorate and support for Barack continue to haunt Democrats.
The Democrats have moved further ahead of the GOP in newest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot. If given the choice, 47% of voters would choose their district’s Democratic candidate, while 34% would choose the Republican candidate.
But Rasmussen shows the race getting even tighter between Barack and McCain.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows that the race for the White House has become breathtakingly close. Barack Obama attracts 44% of the vote while John McCain earns 43%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 47% and McCain 46%.
What happens in the fall, when voters are trying to sort through the meaning of the Obamafia - Reverends Wright and Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, etc?
Readers of this blog have been hearing for some time that this election is not about John McCain - the race is Barack's to win or lose. That's due to the fact that the fundamentals of the election year so favor a Democrat. People want change - the question is, does Barack represent the change they want. Change can be scary.
Americans are also spending more time fixated on what an Obama administration would look like—a majority, 51%, said they focus more on what kind of president the Democratic senator from Illinois would be compared with 27% who said they focused on what kind of president McCain would be.
If the campaign is about Barack, why isn't he doing better? People want change - the question is, does Barack represent the change they want. Change can be scary. A new poll from NBC/Wall Street Journal clarifies the fear that Barack may not live up to his slogan - Change You Can Believe In.
...the Arizona Republican senator has an 11-percentage-point advantage over Obama when voters were asked which candidate’s background and set of values they identify with more—58% said that candidate was McCain, while 47% said Obama. In contrast, 34% said McCain does not represent their values, while 43% said Obama does not.
Who do voters feel comfortable with?
McCain also came out ahead, 46%-41%, when voters were asked who would be the “safer choice” for president.
These humps for Barack are Jerermiah Wright humps. They'll become more problematic in the fall when the Obamafia becomes better known.
