Category: Barack Obama

Krugman is not alone:

We do not need Obama to heal the rift between good and evil, or to bind up the nation’s wounds with Bush’s venom still in her bloodstream. Obama’s balms of civility and bipartisanship may lull Americans into complacency, but they seem ill-equipped to end the outrages and injustices of the current administration’s policies and restore America to moral solvency.  Obama has given us no indication that he will exercise the bold, far-reaching, and, yes, partisan leadership that will be necessary to undo the travesties of the past seven years.

Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, now says that Clinton’s attack yesterday on Barack Obama’s alleged presidential ambition in Kindergarten was a joke. TPM is not so sure. Penn must have polled the response, I’m assuming, and decided to cut his losses.

A reader writes:

Am I missing something, or doesn’t this whole thing make Obama look pretty prescient about opposing the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment on Iran, and Clinton look like a dupe (again!) for supporting it.  Clinton was willing to give the President some legal justification for bombing Iran to destroy a fictitious WMD program, and Obama again smelled that something was rotten.

Played right, I think this is a huge new chip for Obama.

It certainly can’t hurt.

And the campaign goes global:

The trend is pretty clear, even from a statistically conservative graph:

More from Taegen:

Key findings: Since the last ARG survey, Clinton has dropped 10 points among women in Iowa and she has dropped 17 points among men in New Hampshire.

I don’t know but here are two straws in the wind:

"I trust him. I think he is talking about a new kind of politics. It’s courageous. Hillary is slick. Democrats are taking us for granted," – Angels Daws of Harlem.

And Juan Williams:

In a nation where a third of the population is now made up of people of color, Mr. Obama is in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial politics. He is asking voters to move with him beyond race and beyond the civil rights movement to a politics of shared values. If black and white voters alike react to Mr. Obama’s values, then he will really have taken the nation into post-racial politics.

Obama himself is counting on Iowa to do the job, even though it has a very small black population. Why? Because one of the biggest obstacles to black support is the widespread sense that a black man can’t get elected in America. If a black man can win the Iowa caucuses, they might just begin to change their minds. And if they do, then South Carolina looks much more promising for the Illinois senator. If I were Clinton, relying – again! – on her husband to gain power, I’d be worried.

A new endorsement:

As president, Barack Obama would only begin the process of healing what ails our society and ensuring that the U.S. plays a beneficial role in the world. But we believe he is that rare politician who can stretch the meaning of democracy, who can help revive what William James called "the civic genius of the people."

Background on the Jamesian Obamans here. Ralph Luker, of Cliopatria fame, is one of them.

"I think the fact of the matter is that Senator Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it. What she can’t be is selective, in terms of, you know, cherry-picking and making determinations that she’s now suddenly the face of foreign policy, that she shaped economic policy, except the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case that was somebody else’s problem or somebody else’s fault," – Barack Obama, telling it like it is.

I wonder if he disliked her this much before the campaign? It’s only when you are constantly exposed to the shiftiness, double standards and having-it-every-which-way style of the Clintons that you grow to distrust them as deeply as some of us do.

"I thought it would have been weird to tattoo ‘Obama’ on my arm, but now I have some dude’s initials on me," – Rory Steele, an Obama campaign organizer, detailing how he keeps a tally of Obama supporters in Western Iowa.

Every now and again, amid the blog whirl, it’s worth reminding ourselves who will actually determine the outcome of this election.

"Obama also has valuable experience apart from elective office, and he also has to be careful about how he uses it. This is his experience as a black man in America and as what you might call a "world man" — Kenyan father, American mother, four formative years living in Indonesia, more years in the ethnic stew of Hawaii, middle name of Hussein, and so on — in an increasingly globalized world. Our current president had barely been outside the country when he was elected. His efforts to make up for this through repeated proclamations of pal-ship with every foreign leader who parades through Washington have been an embarrassment. Obama’s upbringing would serve us well if he were president, both in the understanding he would bring to issues of America’s role in the world (the term "foreign policy" sounds increasingly anachronistic) and in terms of how the world views America. Clinton mocks Obama’s claims that four years growing up in Indonesia constitute useful world-affairs experience. But they do," – Mike Kinsley, declaring for Obama.

My Obama essay, discussed this morning on This Week, can be read here.