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Sunday, June 22. 2008
Firing Back
Barack Obama will be president. I’ve decided.Actually, he’s decided.
The McCain/Republican smear machine has already started their insipid attacks on the Democratic nominee, trying to paint Obama as an inexperienced child. In a conference call the McCain campaign said Obama’s view of terrorism as a law enforcement issue instead of a military problem was a “September 10th manifestation” and therefore “soft” on terrorism.
On Monday Obama said to ABC News we could be successful in fighting terrorists within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, just as we had done when the terrorists first hit the World Trade Center in 1993. Those responsible for that attack are now sitting behind bars.
In contrast, the ones responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks are still at large. Osama bin Laden roams Pakistan and Afghanistan freely with his lieutenants while our troops die in Iraq.
The McCain campaign national security advisor Randy Scheunemann said Obama “… does not understand the nature of the enemies we face.”
“Randy Scheunemann … who is he,” you ask? He’s been a Washington lobbyist since the mid 1980’s and first became a McCain advisor in 1998 for McCain’s first campaign to be president. He’s a neocon who once was a director of the Policy for a New American Century (PNAC) and chairs a number of other neocon organizations, including the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, started shortly after the attack of September 11, 2001.
Scheunemann is one of the architects of the Iraq War and one of the leading voices pushing to continue an American presence there indefinitely.
Obama replied, saying he wouldn’t take any lectures from the Republicans about combating terrorism, adding, “These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11.”
That’s the spirit.
This presidential race has been going on for a long time now, the longest and costliest in history. Obama, the champion of a new kind of politics, the guy who wants to cut loose the grip lobbyists have on Washington is getting hammered for opting out of public financing of his campaign. Obama supports public financing, giving his critics ample ammunition to call him a hypocrite, a flip-flopper.
But Obama is receiving public financing. He is raising so much money from small donations sent in by the millions of voters who support him it makes the campaign reform laws quaint at best. The goal of public financing, a completely voluntary choice for the candidates, is to take the lobbying out of the equation. Obama’s fund-raising approach has done that. Few, if any, big doners in his list of the contributors. Of course, that could always change with the start of the official general election campaign. The Democratic Party as it’s own special interest groups: unions and the like and they always want their voices heard.
Senator McCain, on the other hand, has opted for public financing. For the former “Straight Talk Express,” that sounds like the ethically and morally correct choice. But is it? According to a few Washington insiders, when McCain’s campaign was on the precipice, about to collapse from mismanagement and lack of funds, McCain secured a $4 mil loan on the promise he would choose public financing.The lobbyists running McCain’s campaign must be wringing their hands over that one, but they are experts at finding loopholes and exploiting them. McCain has actually raised almost as much money in May as Obama, a record month for McCain, whereas the 21.9 million Obama has raised is low by the Illinois senator’s usual standard. And the month of May was big for McCain in part because he had three huge fundraising dinners that brought in millions in bundled donations.
Bundled donations are yet another loophole in the campaign finance laws that have done nothing to stem the influence of lobbying on campaigns. Obama’s strategy has been to skirt the fundraising establishment and go directly to the voters for his campaign financing. Truly public financing. Not mandated by weak laws written so as not to piss off the lobbying machine, but embraced by a public really looking for change.
For more than a few American voters, that change is simply having a Black man with a Muslim-sounding name occupying the oval office. The policies of Obama barely remembered, let alone understood. And that’s okay too, since there are more than a few American voters who will vote for McCain simply because a Black man with a Muslim-sounding name could become president. The ugly face of racism will now become center stage, nearly four decades after leaving the public eye when the victories of the civil rights shared the public’s attention with the Vietnam War.And like the pivotal and nation-changing ’60’s, race in America will share the public’s attention with yet another unpopular war: Bush’s war in Iraq.
The economy will be another big story, as millions lose their jobs and homes and all those displaced American wonder what’s going to happen and “how will I (we) survive?” For millions, Obama represents that hope for something to change because we are going to need something. It’s beginning to look pretty bleak for some of us.
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