Before I start, I want to remind you of one thing that many people may have forgotten
but I have a memory like an elephant (even though I am a yellow dog Democrat. Last winter, we learned that the McCain campaign's strategy against Barack Obama would be to portray him in the GE as a typical corrupt, Daley style politician.
Now, I want you to think about the news coverage this week in light of this fact and ask yourself how much of what you saw was staged by the RNC. 10%? 20%? Read on.
I. Kathleen Parker Says Obama Lacks “Foxhole” Qualifications Remember how I said yesterday that the next two months are all about Obama proving that he has the presidential qualities of
love, courage and wisdom because this is the time when the RNC will try to prove to the American people that he lacks these same attributes?
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... And that his stand on particular issues of interest to the Democratic base is much less important than his success at defining himself as someone whom America can trust to lead the nation. Someone with leadership potential.
Check out this bit of oppo from Kathleen Parker which the Fort Worth Star Telegram calls
Obama lacking presidential traits but which some other sites have called
Who would you want McCain or Obama in your foxhole? http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/738... I have wondered from time to time if Kathleen Parker is paid by the right wing to make women look bad. Misogynists like to stereotype women as irrational---creatures driven by emotion, bereft of logic. Basically, she says that McCain is a good guy, because he gave up the chance to leave the Hanoi Hilton early in order to show solidarity with his fellow POWs. Obama is not a good guy, because he eventually distanced himself from Rev. Wright. Therefore, we should elect McCain----because if he is ever in a POW camp with us, he promises not to go home early?
Like I said, don’t look for logic here. This is strictly an emotional wallow. However, when we reach the part of the election where the candidates are being defined as good guys or not so good guys, you will find a lot of tugging at heart strings and a lot less matters of substance.
For instance, if this were a matter of debate, in which logic and constituency was an issue, poor Ms. Parker would score a big red F. Look at what she wrote this spring.
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Kathlee... The question still remains: Why did Obama, future author of racial harmony, stay with a preacher whose black nationalist leanings were no secret?
There is just no pleasing some people. Not if you are the presumptive Democratic nominee.
II. RNC Calls Obama a Politician. Will Announce that Earth is Round Sometime Next Month. Recalling how outraged the progressive wing of the Democratic Party became when Rev. Wright called the political candidate, Barack Obama a “politician”, the RNC is about to unveil a series of four ads in key battleground states in which they will do just what
Democrats here at DU are currently doing (shame on them ).
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/070... Sources familiar with the media buys say the Republican National Committee has reserved advertising slots in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, large buys that could mark the first serious wave of televised attacks on Barack Obama.
Further details of the advertising plans were unavailable and an RNC spokesman said he was unaware of ad plans and of the substance of any planned attacks. John McCain and the Republican Party have stepped up efforts in recent days to portray Obama as a "typical" politician, and have accused him of changing his position on a range of key issues.
Can we talk? Who runs for president of the United States? Politicians. Can we stop pretending that being a politician is a dirty, shameful thing? Thomas Jefferson was a politician. He held his tongue during the John Adams administration, when speaking out against the government could have landed even the Vice President in jail, and then he ran for president and won. He had to endure political smears—he was an atheist, he was sleeping with his sister-in-law who was also a slave. We are all lucky that he was willing to do what politicians had to do, otherwise the Federalists might have had their way, and we might be singing
God Save the Queen now.
That election was a lot like this one. There was a Constitution busting president who had used a phantom menace---the threat of France—to deprive Americans of their civil liberties. And there is another, more recent election that was a lot like this one. In 1976, Jimmy Carter had to appeal to the nation's independents after he sewed up the nomination. In the wake of Watergate, he ran on the
A Leader for a Change platform. He was a 100% character candidate, and he managed to beat a fairly popular incumbent Republican, despite having many strikes against him---no national experience, training as an engineer rather than a lawyer, a heavy Southern accent at a time when the rest of the country thought “South” meant George Wallace.
Character can win if the country is fed up with what it has and the people want a change of direction. Obama is a “character” candidate. The Republicans will concentrate all of their efforts trashing that character. They will portray him as 1) inexperienced, 2) out of touch with average Americans (too liberal) 3) unpatriotic 4) corrupt (typical “politician”). The whisper campaign that he is a Muslim will continue, too.
III. If Innuendo Does Not Work, Just Make Shit Up This article about McCain and Obama is less irrational than Parker’s, but only because nationally syndicated Parker is forced to stick with something close to the truth or every liberal blogger in the country will descend upon her like a pack of rabid weasels . Those whose names are less well known can make arguments that seem more elegant, because they can build them with lies. No one is going to fact check people like----what is his name?---Victor Davis Hanson at
National Review on line .
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDA4Z... McCain couldn’t even hold the changeable Obama to his primary pledge to use public campaign funds, and thereby cut down his opponent’s significant edge in private cash contributions. The cash-rich Obama has now sworn off public financing.
Note that the article is called
Imagining the Election That is what the author instructs his readers to do. Imagine the election as they want it to be. I.e. make shit up. Is your candidate a crook who has been caught twice with his hand in the cookie jar (and once with it down the blouse of a blonde lobbyist named Vicki)? Does he have memory problems? Did he lie about the stage of his melanoma? Is his nickname "Flipper" because of his stance on issues like abortion, the war, energy, taxes? Does he prefer fist fights to negotiation? No problem. Just rewrite history.
About that quote above, in the world where real people live, McCain had to agree to accept public financing in order to qualify for a loan to keep his campaign afloat and now he is in deep shit with the FEC, while Obama said that he would
consider public financing.
Since Hanson is factually impaired, ignore the stack of “waffles” in his fable and look instead at the storyline. He paints McCain as the tortoise and Obama as the hare. McCain is a seasoned warhorse and Obama is a “frisky” stallion ( “Lock up your women. A Black man’s in town!”). McCain is George Foreman, which makes Obama….
a Black Mulsim????.
“Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” indeed. (Title of my first journal of this series)
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... The Hanson piece above is extremely silly---and infuriating. It will be used as a template for other character attacks on Sen. Obama so study it.
IV. Friendly Fire: Howard Fineman Calls Obama a “Traditional Politician” on Countdown and Rachel Maddow Does Not Smack Him Down For It Here is a simple rule. When you produce anything for YouTube or write anything that is meant for a lot of lay people (not political insiders) to read about Sen. Obama, make sure that it can not be construed as calling him 1. a liar, 2. a coward 3. dumb 4. inexperienced 5. mean spirited 6. greedy or 7. a “typical politician”. If you do, you are doing McCain’s work for him.
An examples of a “friendly fire” attack on Obama’s character this last week---
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25515018 /
Howard Fineman and Rachel Maddow on
Countdown yesterday.
FINEMAN: And I‘m at something called the Aspen Institute Ideas Conference. There are a lot of very interesting, important, powerful people here in politics. A fair number of Obama fans, some of whom I‘ve been talking to today and they are concerned about it. One of them is somebody you probably know, Arianna Huffington, and her point, as others have made here, is it‘s not so much left or right, although it might be that, too, as it is whether Obama is risking damaging his brand and that brand is about authenticity in being a different kind of politician.
So, when he decided not to do the public financing, when he decided to support the FISA bill, when he decided to take a more positive attitude towards NAFTA, it wasn‘t any one of those things necessarily, it‘s the idea that suddenly he was becoming a traditional politician, a traditional maneuverer. And a traditional maneuverer is precisely what he‘s been running against so far in this campaign.
MADDOW: It‘s also true that that means the left-wing critique or progressive critique of Obama just jives directly (ph) with the McCain critique of Obama which could be dangerous when it‘s coming from both sides. Roger Simon on Politico.com wrote today that there is a difference between running as a candidate for president and running as the leader of a movement.
Note that Fineman listed two of the “waffle” points from Hanson’s hit piece above and added a third of his own, about FISA. Basically, Fineman just said the same thing that Hanson and Parker said in their columns. Obama is a typical politician. This is the strategy that the John McCain campaign said it was going to use against Barack Obama all the way back in January. Paint the Illinois Senator as a Daley style dirty tricks politician.
Fineman just succeeded in calling Obama a liar, a coward (since he suggests that Obama is scared to run as a liberal) and a typical “politician.” Obama got slimed on
Countdown . Friendly fire is the worst kind of all.
When I see an atrocity like this, my RNC oppo radar goes wild. Could it be that Obama did not really make a sudden move to the center this week? Maybe what really happened is the McCain camp----together with the RNC----is unveiling that “Obama is a typical Daley style politician” attack strategy that they have been promising since January. And that is why Cal Thomas wrote about how Obama and Clinton hated each other before they loved each other and Parker wrote about how Obama dumped Rev. Wright for calling him a politician and that is why Hanson cooked up a stack of “waffles” and that is why Howard Fineman called Obama “a traditional politician" , and that is why the RNC has four ads coming out which will portray him as “a politician”.
What exactly did Obama do to merit the label of “traditional politician” this week? He declined to criticize John McCain for using his POW experience as a campaign issue. I can not fault him for that. Plenty of people----especially nice people---would cut John McCain slack on that one. And one of Barack Obama’s character traits that endears him to his supporters is his compassion.
What else? He said he supports allowing some church groups to administer government social programs as long as they follow the law regarding hiring and discrimination. That policy, too, is consistent with Obama’s own history of partnering with church groups in Chicago as a community organizer. The Church with which he was associated for almost twenty years had a dedicated social outreach program. And, as I show in my last journal, African-Americans and Latinos are much more positive about faith based social programs than other groups in the U.S. Again, I see consistency.
On FISA, I am going to write a lot more frankly than anyone else has. The administration is playing a dangerous game. Recall how McCain’s adviser said that he welcomes another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Bush-Cheney can not afford to allow such an attack to occur---unless they can blame it on the Democrats. Congress has stalled on FISA and telecom immunity for almost a year. However, certain provisions of the law are about to run out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barack-obama... The ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool, and I'm persuaded that it is necessary to keep the American people safe -- particularly since certain electronic surveillance orders will begin to expire later this summer. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I've chosen to support the current compromise.
This is what Obama has written at
The Huffington Post . Now, imagine that you are the unholy alliance of Cheney, Addington, Rove, Wolfowitz. You desperately want McCain to win. You want to keep the Dems from getting 60 seats in the Senate, too. However, America’s fear of terrorism is down to 35%. Another terrorist attack could raise that number and increase McCain's chances, but if that happens on the Republicans watch everyone will blame W. On the other hand, if, because of Democratic stubbornness, one single change in terrorist surveillance has happened recently, then you can blame the attack that occurs in late September or early October
on the Democrats . And specifically on Senate Democrats like Barack Obama. You can use the deaths of more innocent American civilians as an excuse to launch a new war against Iran. Suddenly, America will be scared of change. It will want something tried and true.
Between now and November, Congressional Democrats can not give the appearance that they have removed even a single tool in the so called “War on Terrorism”, because that is all the excuse the administration needs to launch the October Surprise that it could not use in 2006, because of the Iraq NIE---the report that revealed that the War in Iraq had made us all more vulnerable to terrorism rather than safer from it.
As much as I hate the idea of the telecoms getting immunity, I hate the thought of more innocent Americans dying even more. I believe that Obama is making the wise and the compassionate choice here---and once he elected president, he can fix this mess, the way that Thomas Jefferson fixed John Adam’s mess.
V. Fight the Smears! You know the Big Lie they are trying to sell America,
Obama is a typical politician with all the little lies that it implies, he is a liar, he is a back stabber, he is greedy, he is ambitious, he is all talk, he can not be counted on in a fight. Had he and the Clintons not made up, we would be hearing a lot more about the events of the primary campaign, too (this was why I said that certain memos would only be defused by unity).
This is how
Gore is a liar started. This is how
Kerry is a waffler started. This is how
Edwards is a phony and
Hillary is a bitch started. I have plenty of journals that show how this kind of oppo works, who the usual media whores are, how they do their dirty business.
Call them to account. Start email campaigns against the worst offenders. Be especially brutal against those who make racial slurs. (These guys will not be able to help themselves). Paint glowing character portraits of Obama. Do not be distracted by divide and conquer bullshit issues that are tossed our way. Do not be distracted when they dredge up former political opponents to talk about "dirty tricks" (this tactic is inevitable for this kind of Big Lie, especially now that Obama and Clinton are best buddies). The Daley political machine's problems are irrelevant to this campaign (that tactic is also inevitable, so resolve now that you will not be swayed.)
McCain means endless wars for oil and twelve more years of Republican rule (two terms for his VP).
Obama means that we have a future.
