I want somebody who has integrity, who’s in politics for the right reasons, I want somebody who is independent. Somebody who is able to say to me, ‘You know what, Mr. President, I think you’re wrong on this and here’s why,’ and who will help me think through major issues and consult with me, would be a key advisor. I want somebody who is capable of being president and who I would trust to be president. That’s the first criteria for VP. And the final thing is, I want a president (SIC) who shares with me a passion to make the lives of the American people better than they are right now. I want someone who is not in it just because they want to have their name up in lights or end up being president. I want somebody who is mad right now that people are losing their jobs. And is mad right now that people have seen their incomes decline, and wants to rebuild the middle class in this country. That’s the kind of person that I want; somebody who in their gut knows where they came from and believes that we have to grow this country from the bottom up.
Wolfson, in yet another sign that some Clinton acolytes are having difficulty letting go of the past, caused a stir by telling ABC News that his boss would have captured the Democratic nod had Edwards been forced to the sidelines before the Iowa caucuses in early January.
"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," the often pugnacious Wolfson said.
Au contraire, argues David Redlawsk -- head of the University of Iowa's Hawkeye Poll and, in the walk-up to the caucuses, himself an Edwards backer.
An e-mail sent today by the school's news service says that polling on caucus night supervised by Redlawsk indicated "that the absence of Edwards would have helped (Barack) Obama."
McCain has spent years manipulating the public's perception of his stance on abortion and reproductive health. He's been against overturning Roe v. Wade and he's been for it; he's embraced the idea of a pro-choice running mate and, more recently, recoiled from it. It's no wonder the public is confused.
The right has been twisted in knots for years over whether McCain respects "life" enough to earn its support. And, among Democrats and pro-choicers, the confusion is even greater. Poll after poll shows them unclear on McCain's positions....McCain's maverick reputation and his calculated political meanderings on choice add up to one thing: The public thinks McCain just might be a moderate on abortion.
The widespread belief that John McCain is a moderate on abortion is dangerously wrong.
In his turn to the dark side, John McCain is following the usual Republican script for negative campaigning. It's worked well for the GOP over the years. Democrats who've ignored such attacks, like Kerry and Dukakis, went down to defeat. Obama is at least responding, and rapidly, and he generally avoids being put on the defensive. He responds mostly with facts, and with mockery of the lies and the stupid dishonesty of the attacks. But even in his strongest ad to date ("Big Oil's filling John McCain's campaign with $2 million in contributions") Obama has kept primarily to the issues and hasn't struck back using the kind of personal tone that McCain has.
Michael Schaffer at TNR points out that this is missing an opportunity for some "political jujitsu":
That's the tenor of a new article in the Weakly Standard - a preview no doubt of the slime machine's coming attacks as the campaign heats up. It's already being widely quoted and reprinted throughout the RW blogs.
The article focuses on Obama's years as a state senator, referencing articles in two local papers to make its case, the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender. It's long and extensively researched, and the quotes are from material that isn't available online, making it difficult to check both their accuracy and their context. Someone with access to the papers' offline archives may want to do a little research. One article I did manage to find a partial reference to didn't actually seem to be to a statement of endorsement by the paper itself as the WS claimed, but to an article by a local activist that happened to be printed in the paper. No doubt the rest of the article is based on similarly misleading material as it tries to connect the dots between the usual suspects of the Chicago activist scene and Obama's legislative history.
The selection of a Republican could bolster Obama's unifying message, a Capitol Hill Democrat familiar with the discussion said...
"Choosing someone like [Veneman] doesn't hurt you with the Democrats. It just doesn't hurt you. But it helps you with Independents and Republicans."
If it doesn't "hurt you with the Democrats," it sure as heck should. Why on earth would they be considering a "true-blue agribusiness Republican" for a Democratic VP? What's the problem with choosing a Democrat for a Democratic Administration? Haven't we had enough Republicans for the past eight years? Isn't a change election about, well, change?
Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, laying out his vision of an inextricably interconnected world working together to meet common challenges such as global warming, nuclear weapons, and extremes of economic inequality and the religious fanaticism and terrorism it breeds:
John McCain meanwhile spoke at the Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio ("the best of the wurst!"), a hastily arranged substitute for the oil rig where he'd planned to speak on the need for offshore oil drilling and its safety for Florida's beaches, a venue that had to be cancelled not just because of an onrushing hurricane but also because of an oil spill.
[A] veteran MD-80 flight mechanic described the onboard irregularity to PopularMechanics.com as potentially "extremely dangerous." ...
[T]he plane had exhibited "controllability issues" after encountering turbulence following takeoff, and the pilot apparently had difficulty managing the pitch of the aircraft—that is, the extent to which the nose of the aircraft is pointed up or down. Pitch is critically important to aviation safety, as it determines the speed of the aircraft and its rate of climb or descent.
Examination of the aircraft on the ground revealed that turbulence had caused an emergency slide located in the plane's tail section to deploy in flight. The inflated slide then apparently pressed against hydraulic lines leading to actuators that move the elevator at the top of the aircraft's T-shaped tail...
LAREDO, Texas - Day after day, Mexican trucks line up as far as the eye can see for entry to the U.S. at the World Trade Bridge, carrying everything from raw tomatoes, broccoli and fresh basil to frozen seafood. They also bring in salmonella, listeria, restricted pesticides and other food poisons.
Customs and Border Protection officers take less than a minute per truck to determine which products enter the U.S. and find their way into grocery stores and restaurants...
The real quandary for Obama is that he has to win the "low-information voters" in November in order to win the election, but he needs the "high-information voters" now in order to field his grassroots operations leading up to November. Low-information voters are never going to understand FISA. It is a subject that takes time and energy to master. Low-information voters look at FISA and only see the ability or inability of the government to investigate potential terrorists. Yet a large number of high-information voters in both the left and right wing of politics understand that this is much more than an issue about national security -- it's an issue of balancing national security and individual rights. At the same time, most low-information voters only understand that FISA relates to national security. In other words, low-information voters are susceptible to fear mongering on this issue...
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The chart was made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17, but its source was not. It was from a 1957 article by Air Force sociologist Alfred D. Biderman, and the techniques are now all too familiar to us.
McCain and the GOP are trying to paint Obama as a flip-flopper on gun control after his statements on the Heller decision last week. In fact, he's been quite consistent on his position, which is that communities have different needs with regard to gun control and therefore they should have the right to regulate as they need to locally, a position not strictly at odds with the decision.
Obama's statement on Heller, which struck down the DC handgun ban as unconstitutional, was pragmatic and mostly OK as far as it goes:
Barack Obama is riding the leading edge of a Democratic wave, benefiting from a potential -- although by no means certain -- cyclical shift in the partisanship of American voters which could last at least through 2016, if managed carefully.
CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.
The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.
[T]he Obama campaign sent a lukewarm endorsement of the measure [FISA compromise bill]: As to the key reforms of FISA, the bill is an acceptable compromise, not perfect but the best one can do under the situation. As to the retroactive immunity for telecom companies, Obama says he will work to change that in the Senate.
What gives? Why did Obama stay silent for so long, and why did he finally offer such a muted response to the bill?
The speech Obama gave today for Father's Day has a good message, not just for fathers, or for African-Americans, but for all Americans. In short, he said that it's time to raise expectations, to rekindle the value of empathy, and to believe we can actually do the things that higher expectations and empathy tell us need to be done.
The Clinton campaign likes to talk about how the Florida and Michigan delegations should be seated at full strength because we have to "count every vote." Hillary Clinton's express appeal to the emotional experience of voter disenfranchisement in Bush-Gore Florida 2000 is meant to short-circuit thinking about the issue. After all, who would want to argue that we shouldn't count every vote?
In fact, Florida and Michigan are almost certain to have their delegations seated at the convention in some fashion. Clinton is pushing for it; Obama has said he is committed to having it happen as well. The question is what value will each vote from these states end up having relative to the delegate count that is the metric of the nomination contest.
Florida and Michigan are likely to have their delegations seated at the convention with their delegates' votes being valued at half instead of full strength, as the regulations that everyone knew about and agreed to ahead of time call for. If this is done, Florida and Michigan will be punished for their unsanctioned primaries not by disenfranchising their voters but by recalculating the value of their votes per delegate.
