On Behalf of Barack

[CrisisPapers]

| Ernest Partridge |

With an abundance of intelligence, energy, eloquence, and "audacious hope," Barack Obama has opened a commanding lead over his sole remaining rival, Hillary Clinton. If he captures the Democratic nomination, in the general election he will face in Senator John McCain a shopworn supporter of an unpopular war, tainted with scandal, and despised by the right-wing base of the Republican party. Despite all that, McCain will be a formidable GOP opponent, for he will have at his disposal the Justice Department's coast-to-coast campaign of voter suppression, the financial support of mega-corporations, "black-box" voting machines and compilers, and a corporate media that has proven itself capable of transforming, in the minds of many, an authentic war hero into self-promoting phony, and a deserter into the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Overconfidence may well prove to be Obama's and the Democrats' undoing.

Barack Obama was not my first choice. But John Edwards fell victim to his excessive candor and integrity. His spot-on assessment of economic injustice and his scathing indictment of the corporatocracy was regarded by the media to be outside the realm of "acceptable" political debate. And so Edwards' campaign, starved of funding and media attention, withered and died, a sober reminder of the media's continuing veto power over aspiring candidates for political office.

Obama is not the ideal candidate (there aren't any), and many of his Senate votes trouble me. But in the past few weeks, he has displayed qualities of leadership not previously evident to me. Hillary Clinton might well be a good president. Barack Obama, I believe, has the capacity to be a great president.

Ironically, the totality of attacks on Obama might, on reflection, add up in his favor. For if these are the best that the opposition can come up with, this must be one fine candidate.

With this consideration in mind, I will examine what appears to be three of the more prominent criticisms of Obama: lack experience, "mere rhetoric," and plagiarism.

The experience issue

Clinton cites her thirty years of experience in public service. Obama, in contrast, is a newcomer.

The issue is a non-starter for the GOP for whom "experience" as a Hollywood actor (Reagan, Schwartznegger), or "experience" in business failure (George Bush), are somehow regarded as qualifications for high public office. But tuo quoque ("you're another") is a weak rebuttal. The question remains, what are Obama's qualifications?

They are impressive. In addition to his magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, he has taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Because the restoration of the Constitution of the United States must be one of the most urgent tasks of the next president, expertise in Constitutional law must rank high in the list of qualifications.

At age 46, Obama can not claim thirty years experience in public service, since he did not begin his career when he was sixteen. Even so, when he graduated from Harvard Law, he did not seek a fortune as a corporate lawyer, but instead practiced civil rights law. In fact, his entire working life has been devoted to public service.

However, rather than recite his curriculum vitae (which you can read here), let's focus instead on his management skills and those of his rival, Hillary Clinton, in the current campaign. Frank Rich sums it up nicely:

The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating....

As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and - talk about bizarre - against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

With this contrast in management skills in mind, ask yourself: which campaign strategy is more likely to prevail in the general election?

The "mere rhetoric" issue

Early in the campaign, we read that Clinton was a better debater and Obama a better speech-giver. Last Thursday we observed that Obama had closed "the debate gap." He remains the champ at the podium. So Clinton is reduced to belittling Obama's way with words and his extraordinary ability to "make contact" with his audiences. At a campaign appearance at Hunter College in New York City, Clinton said: "It is time that we moved from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions. This is not about a personality. This campaign is about hundreds of millions of Americans who are yearning for leadership again."

Sadly for Clinton, Obama appears to be answering that "yearning for leadership."

Let's not kid ourselves: It's all about envy. Hillary would sell her soul in exchange for Obama's "rock star" charisma. And it ain't for sale.

Clinton supporters frequently complain that Obama's rhetoric is devoid of specifics. "It all sounds nice, but he won't spell out his positions on the issues." Well, he's not hiding his policy positions. Those who desire "specifics" need only visit Obama's "Issues" page at his website www.barackobama.com, where his proposals are spelled out in detail.

But if Obama follows the "advice" of his critics by toning down the rhetoric and replacing it with policy "specifics," he will make a serious strategic error. For as Al Gore vividly (and fatally) demonstrated in 2000, the public has little patience for policy-wonk lectures from its candidates. It much prefers inspirational "rhetoric." Obama will not repeat Gore's mistake.

The plain fact is that in politics words do matter, as Obama said plainly in that notorious passage "borrowed" from his friend, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Unfortunately, Clinton's "plagiarism" accusation has distracted attention from the compelling truth thereof:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." Just words. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Just words. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Just words. "I have a dream." Just words.

Add to this, the Gettysburg Address, the Sermon on the Mount, FDR's fireside chats, Winston Churchill's wartime broadcasts which, as Edward R. Murrow put it, "mobilized the English language." Words turn the hinges of history. Words put the reins of leadership into the hands of a politician.

And words can be a window into the soul and the intellect of a leader. Those who speak well and write well, also think well. To be sure, most political rhetoric these days is the handiwork of speech writers. Thus the success of Ronald Reagan. And when dimwit politicians stray from the teleprompter, we learn more than we'd like to about their smarts. Witness George W. Bush: "You're working hard to put food on your family." "Is our children learning?" "Fool me twice..."

Listen to the extemporaneous speeches of John Edwards and Barack Obama, and notice their performance in debates. These are their own words. As one listens, who can doubt that these are extraordinarily intelligent individuals?

The "plagiarism" kerfuffle

Nothing better exemplifies the paucity of criticism against Obama, than Hillary Clinton's attempt to pin the "plagiarism" label on her opponent. When she brought the issue up in Austin, Texas, with a scripted (plagiarized?) quip, it elicited the only booing of the debate. Obama's haymaker reply put an end to that issue.

Obama did concede, however, that he should have credited his friend Deval Patrick.

So, in the spirit of full attribution, let's review this plagiarism complaint. As I see it, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (Shakespeare, Macbeth). And the offending "borrowed" remarks?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." (Thomas Jefferson) Just words. (Deval Patrick) "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Just words. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." (John F. Kennedy/Theodore Sorenson) Just words. "I have a dream." (Martin Luther King) Just words.

Silly, isn't it?

And recall Ronald Reagan's speech at the memorial service for the Challenger astronauts: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'" To their credit, the Reagan library and the National Review put the borrowed words in quotation marks. But neither cited the source: John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American volunteer in the Royal Air Force, who died in 1941 at age nineteen, a few weeks after he wrote these words.

Next, compare these two passages:

"The hits that I took in this election are nothing compared to the hits the people of this state and this country have been taking for a long time."

"You know, the hits I've taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country."

The first is by Bill Clinton, in the 1992 presidential campaign. The second is by Hillary Clinton, February 21, 2008. Plagiarism? No more or less than Obama's use of Deval Patrick's words, at the latter's invitation. Julianna Goldman of Bloomberg News asked several experts if Obama was guilty of plagiarism. Their unanimous judgment: he was not.

Accusing Barack Obama of "plagiarism" is, to put it mildly, a "stretch." As noted earlier, if this is the best that Obama's opponents can throw at him, he emerges as a remarkably "clean" candidate.

In sum, I now would judge Barack Obama to be far more qualified for the presidency of the United States, than I did several weeks ago when I was rooting for John Edwards. Obama has, in his campaign appearances, displayed qualities of intellect and moral stature that I failed to fully appreciate before. We will be well-served if he becomes our next president.

But if he is to succeed in his quest for the presidency, Barack Obama must continue to display and implement his extraordinary leadership and management skills. For as we have learned from both the 2000 election campaign ("inventing the Internet") and the 2004 campaign ("Swiftboat Veterans for Truth"), if the actual words and deeds of the Democratic Party candidate can not be turned against him in a GOP smear campaign, new words and deeds will surely be invented.

It's going to be a very rough road from here to the White House.

-- EP

[bpeale]

1. whatever. i don't trust the guy & will not vote for him even if he is the nominee

[IndyOp]

2. I am sure you have good reasons for thinking this at this point...

I hope you'll keep your mind open until November. A whole lot could happen between now and then.

Peace.

[susankh4]

4. Yeah... he's got til November

to convince us that he (and his followers) really didn't mean to alienate us with his mysogynist statements gay hate alliances.

I'll give him a chance.... but it won't be a blank check.

[Cha]

11. See ya..

wouldn't wanna be ya.

[ekwhite]

3. Great post Ernest

But do you really want to get involved in the nuclear flame war currently going on at DU? :nuke:

[caseycoon]

5. K&R Thanks for posting this! n/t

[blackspade]

6. Great post!

This is the kind of post that I like to see.
I want to see candidate spokespeople here make their case rather than clubbing each other.
Count me undecided at this point.
If the Barack and Hillary crowd are interested in my vote for their candidate than my advice to them would be to start addressing actual issues and where their candidates stand on them rather than flaming the shit out of each other.

I've loved it here for the last 6+ years, but the atmosphere is getting toxic.

[katty]

7. GOP attack machine will be as horrible as ever-and then some

[CRH]

8. I will wait for his actions before more judgment, ...

His touted organizational abilities are mostly those of the political insiders that form the core of his campaign. It must be said, the true test of a leader is his/her ability to surround themselves with knowledgeable, effective, loyal, and mostly honest individuals, to provide each of the many sectors with able leadership, answerable in the end to the president. The first display of the power behind the Obama throne, his close advisers, is one of unimagined success, in destroying the established dominate Clinton political machine, with an ending momentum that is impressive.

His true test as a president will need more than personality, speaking abilities, rhetoric, and even instilling the hope so much touted. He will face not only the repair of the most destructive Presidency in the history of the country, but he will also face three new crisis(es) never before addressed, and that the public is largely ignorant. To make the public aware of these future demands, he will have to completely change the way the people think about the economy, consumption, social inter dependence, social commons in relation to individual possessions, to name just a few. A host of other reforms to future social expectations, to a new corporate economy evolving to a different philosophy and model, and to the population bomb that is challenging our future existence, will all need to find political forum for later action. The next president must educate and with political cooperation and corporate economic cooperation, lay the ground work for these changes within the psychs of the people, reinventing their purpose.

Simply stated, whoever is elected president needs to redirect the economy, government, citizen lifestyles, beliefs, and the society, toward the twenty first century realities of the effects of peak oil, the effects of climate change, and address the burdens of the overshoot of global population on this finite planet. To say these crisis needed to be addressed the last few years is gross under statement, try decades. The price of failure is a die off like humanity has never witnessed, a die off that will happen in your children's lifetimes.

Obama, or whoever is elected president needs to challenge political, economic, and social, thoughts and perceptions. He must challenge individuals and corporations, cultures and countries, philosophies and religions. He must challenge the collective human self destructive urges preventing the actions for the common good of the planet earth. He must challenge every human ego to act for collective survival. The test of the next administration is if the power behind the politics becomes self serving and divisive, or is instead harnessed into solutions that perpetrate an evolution toward survival.

For this, I will wait to see the actions and the motivations behind them, and watch in silence as history records the judgments. Peace is not enough, global cooperation is paramount. The change needs to happen first at home, within individuals and collectively the society, it is only then as government and nation we can lead toward a global solution.

Our leaders can only direct the politics and economy, only the individual voters can reorder and redefine their lifestyle. The ultimate responsibility lies within individual selves, and for this I am only left with, the audacity of hope.

[UALRBSofL]

9. All You Need Is Hate

I have been thinking about writing this for some time, but I have hesitated because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target. That is the agenda of Hillary Clinton-hating.
Its existence is hardly news — it is routinely referred to by commentators on the present campaign and it has been documented in essays and books — but the details of it can still startle when you encounter them up close. In the January issue of GQ, Jason Horowitz described the world of Hillary haters, many of whom he has interviewed. Horowitz finds that the hostile characterizations of Clinton do not add up to a coherent account of her hatefulness. She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them. “She is,” Horowitz concludes, “an empty vessel into which can pour everything they detest.” (In this she is the counterpart of George W. Bush, who serves much the same function for many liberals.)
This is not to say that there are no rational, well-considered reasons for opposing Clinton’s candidacy. You may dislike her policies (which she has not been reluctant to explain in great detail). You may not be able to get past her vote to authorize the Iraq war. You may think her personality unsuited to the tasks of inspiring and uniting the American people. You may believe that if this is truly a change election, she is not the one to bring about real change.

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).
But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.
Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.
Horowitz warns that as the campaign heats up, this “type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long,” and he predicts that some of it will be made use of by Republican operatives. But he is behind the curve, for the spirit informing it has already made its way into mainstream media. Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.
None of those who say and write these things is an official Hillary Clinton-hater (some profess to like and admire her), but they are surely doing the group’s work.
One almost prefers an up-front hater (although he tells Horowitz that he doesn’t like the word) like Dick Morris, who writes in a recent New York Post op-ed of the Clintons’ “reprehensible politics of personal destruction” (does he think he’s throwing bouquets?), and accuses them of invading the privacy of opponents, of blackmailing and threatening women, and of “whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed.” Morris calls Harold Ickes, a Clinton aide, a “hit man” for the president, and he calls the president “Hillary’s hit man.”
This is exactly the language of the most vicious anti-Hillary Web sites, and here it is baptized by its appearance in a major newspaper.
Horowitz observes that there is an “inexhaustible fertile market of Clinton hostility,” but that “the search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary’s most fanatical opponents is a futile one.” The reason is that nothing drives it; it is that most sought-after thing, a self-replenishing, perpetual-energy machine.
The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.
Stanley Fish

[bluescribbler]

10. Too true, unfortunately

It's the main reason why I was always wary of her candidacy. I feel that her nomination would be the GOP candidate's best fund raising mechanism. I've seen the "Hellary" and "Shrillary" stuff. I've seen her labeled a "marxist", and a "corporatist". She can't possibly be both, but there you have it. I feel sorry for her, I really do. But pity won't win my vote.

[Cha]

12. Thank you, Ernest Partridge,

for this goldmine of facts and interesting analysis..too bad more people won't see it in the GD-P but it has made it's way to Greatest Page so that's good. :)

Bookmarking for referencing and the money quote..

"Sadly for Clinton, Obama appears to be answering that "yearning for leadership."

Let's not kid ourselves: It's all about envy. Hillary would sell her soul in exchange for Obama's "rock star" charisma. And it ain't for sale."

The saddest thing..is hilary did sell her soul on the IWR vote but in the long run it didn't help her at all but it did ruin millions of lives.