Hillary Clinton should not become Obama’s
Secretary of State, but should remain in the Senate instead, working to preserve unity among Democrats.

Having her on board, working in the Senate to clear the health care initiative, is of far more importance than having her out of the country all the time — regardless of how politically expedient it would be for Barack Obama to have her out of his way.

When the new Congress convenes, Democrats will have a strong majority in both chambers. Not the filibuster-breaking majority they wanted, but still. However, the mere fact that the Democrats will not have such a majority, means that they will still have to make deals with some Republican members of Congress in order to get proposals passed. In that reality, it would be a smart move to have Reid work the Democrats on the left while Clinton works the Democrat ‘Blue Dogs’ and the moderate Republicans. (Okay, the few moderate Republicans that still remain after ‘Bloody Tuesday’ of last November 4.)

Of course, there will be times when Clinton will want to make a fist and celebrate her own, possibly vengeful victories over the Obama White House. So be it; that’s what you get when you essentially copy the old Roman ways of governance. You get a rowdy Senate, with senior Senators who see themselves as the Saviours of the Nation. Again, so be it. Obama will have to deal with it and he probably can, thanks to people like Rahm Emanuel.

The smart old lion of the Democrats, Ted Kennedy, probably sees things the same way and has therefore undercut the entire Secretary of State-game for Obama by publicly asking Clinton to lead the health insurance initiative.

By doing so publicly, Hillary can’t turn the offer down; thanks to her hard work trying to get her own failed health care initiative through Congress back in 1993, turning down Kennedy’s request would be equivalent to her erasing part of her legacy.

And if there is one thing the Clintons hold dear, it is their legacy.

Let there be no doubt that on November 4, 2008, America changed. Let there be no doubt that the long march, started a woman on a bus, finally reached the finish line.

Let there be no doubt that apathy because of the colour of your skin, or because of where you’re from, is no longer an option. Let there be no doubt: all that has changed with Barack Obama’s election.
Let there also be no doubt that, when Obama said that “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand” in his victory speech, the world has changed in the past 8 years. The United States of America is no longer the one superpower that remained after the fall of the Soviet Union. If the current crisis has shown Americans one thing, it should be the realization that Ameríca’s economy is intertwined with the rest of the world, that it is no longer the undisputed leader that stands alone on a mountain top. And let there be no doubt that, indeed, political power no longer grows out of the barrel of a gun.

But let there also be no doubt: the world will never be the same again. Other players have entered the top of the game, thanks to – ironically – the lack of leadership displayed by the US during the past 8 years. To assume that America can regain its position of world leadership of yore, is a fantasy. Instead, America must work together with other nations, the other leaders that rose when America turned its back on the world for eight long years.

Let there be no doubt that America must again learn what responsibility is, and that America must show that responsibility. Barack Obama said he wants to “turn the page”. That is a welcome goal. But he mustn’t only turn the page on 8 years of George W. Bush, he must also turn the page on Bill Clinton, and all presidents before him.

Let America show that it is willing to change. Ratify the follow-up to the Kyoto Treaty, which neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton wanted. Sign and ratify the moratorium on land mines, on chemical weapons, on biological weapons, on the development of new nuclear weapons.

Let there be no doubt that America must walk the talk.

Lecture other countries about their ethical behaviour by improving America’s own ethical behaviour. Lecture by action, heal the damage done. When America demands of nations that they agree to stop producing chemical weapons and must allow international inspections for verification, America must allow those same inspectors to check American factories. When America demands of European countries that they abolish farm subsidies, let America abolish its own.

Support the International Crimes Tribunal. Repeal the ‘The Hague invasion act’. Become a nation among nations. Understand that there is not just one country on this planet, but that there is only one planet. And make other countries understand this, too. Again, by actions, not by lecturing.

“The true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from our ideals”, Obama said. How I wish that were true.

The true strength of nations comes from their willingness to work together, by carefully appropriating the might of their arms and the scales of their wealth, not as goals unto themselves, but as tools with which to promote shared ideals.

It was mid-October 1992, and Bill Clinton led George HW Bush with 16 points in the polls. In the end, Clinton won the elections by 6 points. In 1999, Al Gore led George W Bush 51 to 40 points in at least one poll. In 1973, Jimmy Carter led Gerald Ford in one poll by 13 points; Carter finally won by just 2.

All this is meant to convey one message: Democrats, don’t you get your hopes up too much just yet.

This race is going to tighten to microscopic margins, and John McCain might yet win.

That’s why Barack Obama’s campaign is pushing people to vote early, and vote now, while Obama is still high up in the polls. This is especially the case in Ohio, where the Democratic state leadership has done everything it can, within the confines of the law, to allow early voting everywhere — especially in districts which in 2000 and 2004 were very close, and which narrowly went for Bush.

And Obama’s campaign just might have learned something from Tom Bradley’s campaign for governor of California, in 1982. The Bradley Effect is named after him — but for the wrong reasons. The Bradley Effect, in my book at least, had everything to do with motivation and early voting, not with racism.

Tom Bradley led his white Republican counterpart in the polls by a wide margin, but in the end lost. Many to this day wrongly say that it was racism that led white people to say to pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley, while in the end, they voted for the white candidate.

Not so.  Closer examination of the polls leading up to the election in hindsight showed Bradley’s lead narrowing significantly. In the end, Bradley’s lead had evaporated to just 45-44.  He then lost the election because of early voting; Republican voters simply were more motivated than their complacent Democratic counterparts, and they went out to vote early in massive numbers, precisely because Bradley was out-polling their favourite candidate.

This is the Bradley Effect the McCain is now banking on. Team McCain is hoping that the strong polling numbers of Obama will motivate McCain voters to go out to vote early.

Team Obama is trying to do two things at once: dilute the Bradley Effect, and gain the upper hand in the process while he is still leading McCain in the polls.

And that’s smart thinking by people who seem to know their campaigns history. Election Night on November 4 will tell who outsmarted who. This fight could still go either way.

John McCain is slipping fast in the polls. As he senses that he has nothing to lose, the gloves are off. Team Obama will now face one mother of a nasty Republican fighting machine. They will give Obama no quarter, not one inch, and each and every moral objection will be thrown aside. And it started today.

A number of McCain campaign aides, close associates and anonymous sources from within the GOP machine have in the past 48 hours confirmed that the war is on. There won’t be any backing down; anything they can find or make up to hurt Obama, will be used. That strategy holds a big risk for the 72 year old.

When he tried the same approach, about three weeks ago, he got chastised for spouting discredited lies by not only the Obama campaign, but also the press. But it worked; Obama’s numbers started going down, McCain’s went up – and then the financial meltdown happened, upsetting the McCain game plan.

So now he’s going to go back on the attack, but with a true vengeance. Palin started today, raking up Obama’s old connections to some people. Except for Jeremiah Wright, no subjects are off-limits. But McCain had better be careful still, because there’s a new risk involved.

By now, with only a month before Election Day, voters are deciding on their choice, and they’re now adding the ‘is my candidate of choice presidential material’ question.

Bill Clinton knows how incredibly important it is to come across as being stable, cool, not worried. It makes you look presidential. That’s what he told Barack Obama during that lunch, about a month ago: “Act like a president.” And that Obama did during his first debate with McCain. The latter continuously attacked Obama and the pundits thought McCain had won the night.

But the voters didn’t think so. All the polls after the debate showed that Obama had not only clearly won the debate, but he’d also…surprised them by coming across as ‘presidential material’.

So he is viable. Presidential.

McCain has been trying to shape himself as presidential material as well – his stunt to suspend his campaign and go to Washington a day later because of the financial crisis, was evidence of that.

But now McCain is in danger of putting himself in a position he can’t get out of. That of being seen as an aggressive idiot, a screamer who spouts lies and slanders people.

That’s not perceived as being very ‘presidential’ by many people.

Still, and judging from what happened in 2000 and 2004, former Bush campaign aide Steve Schmidt, who now runs McCain’s campaign,  and given that many voters are susceptible to believing lies, McCain might get away with it.

So The New York Times accused senior John McCain campaign aide Rick Davis of being a paid lobbyist for a company, and still being on the payroll on the company’s Freddie Mac account, right up to last month, just before the mortgage lender was nationalised. The Grey Lady, on who the McCain campaign declared war on Tuesday, based its accusation on oral information it got from sources who remained anonymous.

Oral info? Anonymous sources? Three of them Democrats, one Republican…? I’m a reporter myself, by trade. And this is what I call ‘skating on thin ice’.

Today, Team McCain blasts the Grey Lady, and categorically denies the story, and — what’s more — it says it can prove that the newspaper of record is wrong. It also calls out the newspaper, demanding that it show the world its evidence.

Now, the people running The New York Times are not stupid. Or so I should hope. So I’m assuming that the editors feared that this would happen, and that they have documented evidence to back up their accusation, which they will publish within hours. Otherwise, one would think, they would never have published it.

So. Let’s hope, for the Grey Lady’s sake, that the editors weren’t stupid. Because if they botch this, they will have lost all credibility.

John McCain is desparately trying to neutralize the economy as the dominant issue in the presidential election campaign. To that end, he changes tack whenever the winds of opportunity demand it.

Two weeks ago on Monday, he said that the government should not bail out AIG. But Wednesday, after Barack Obama more or less came out in support of the bailout, McCain suddenly supported it.

Last Friday, McCain made several public statements about his plans for the economy — and his ‘plans’ seemed a combination of what Treasury secretary Henry Paulson had been proposing, what Obama said, and what Congress want.

Now, McCain has come out and said what he feels should be changed in Paulson’s plan. And again, McCain’s proposals are a carbon copy of what most Democrats on the Hill have been saying, and what has been emanating from Team Obama for several days.

Of course, Obama came out officially stating what he feels should be changed — which is almost exactly what his co-Democrats on the Hill want, which is logical as Obama is a Democrat too — and now McCain is yappin’ like a little kid that Obama is copying his ideas!

It seems to be policy in the McCain camp.  Whatever the plan or idea, if it clashes with popular opinion, don’t mention it. Stick to whatever’s popular instead, and stick to it like velcro.

During the weekend, Democrats and Obama started objecting to some points in the Paulson, and guess what? McCain started objecting, too. Then on Monday, Democrats wanted the government to impose bonus and pay limits on CEOs of investment banks that are being bailed out.

And almost immediately, there was Mr Deregulator, John McCain, who said that he too is now in favour of pay limits. PAY LIMITS!? John McCain, a Republican, wants to regulate the pay of CEOs of private companies…???

Is John McCain the second coming of Karl Marx? Not even Newt Gingrich can believe what McCain is saying these days.

But of course, the Anybody But Obama crowd can. They’ve never even heard of socio-economic ideology. All they know is what they’ve been told by their parents, and that is that anyone titled ‘Democrat’ is an instrument of the devil himself. And so they’ll vote for McCain.

And so it will be.

Many a time have I been scolded for assuming publicly that the colour of Barack Obama’s skin would play its part in the upcoming election. Many a times have I been warned that racism in America is on the wane. Many a times have I been scolded for being prejudiced about Americans.

Well, they were right: not all Americans are prejudiced towards black people. Not all, just many.

A hundred to one says that John McCain will immediately voice his support for this emergency reform plan, proposed by the Bush administration. The reason: McCain can hide behind it, while at the same time silencing Barack Obama’s most effective artillery barrage, which had succesfully been aiming at McCain’s biggest vulnerability – the economy.

As said before here: if McCain can disarm Obama on the economy front, it’s back to the subjects of Character, Experience and Leadership. Those three subjects headlined the campaign for almost two weeks, until last Friday, and Obama suffered while McCain gained.

]]> http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/quick-obama%e2%80%99s-main-gun-now-silenced/feed/ 0 http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/quick-mccain-going-after-obama-strong-suit-again/ http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/quick-mccain-going-after-obama-strong-suit-again/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:57:03 +0000 Kaj http://www.kajleers.nl/?p=207 ]]>

They failed in their quest to attack one of Barack Obama’s strong suit — his image — and so they’re trying something else: Team McCain is now attacking Obama’s signature issue, his strongest, er, strong suit, which is the economy. It’s the single main issue on which Americans trust Obama more than McCain.

And so Team McCain has once again switched to Bush Mode: identify your opponent’s main strength, attack it, weaken it, then take it and slam him with it.

I don’t believe the guys over at Fivethirtyeight.com, the people who say that they “do polls right”. I also don’t believe the aggregate of the polls at Realclearpolitics.com. Or Pollster.com. I don’t think neither of those companies or websites is correct, due to the Big Black Holes in this particular election.

I have three reasons to doubt polls more than ever.

1. Barack Obama is black. There, I’ve said it. Now, Big Black Hole Numero Uno is: how many people are telling the truth, when they get their evening phone call by a pollster’s volunteer who asks whether they’ll be voting Obama or McCain, and when they’re asked whether race is an issue? I can’t imagine one person who will blurt “Oh I ain’t voting for that guy, he’s black!” The irritating thing is, that nodoby knows whether this is an issue at all. So it’s a black hole in a black hole.

2. Turnout. This is the Holy Grail for Democratic pollsters. (And something more of them are desperately clinging to.) There are scores of strategists within the Obama campaign who believe that voter turnout this year is going to trump all records. And of course, they believe that most of those newly registered voters will turn out to vote for Obama.

I don’t believe it. Yes, Obama-leaning people have been registering in massive numbers, but the Big Question — which none of the polling companies or aggregators can answer — is whether it will be enough to offset the number of McCain-leaners. And, for that matter, no one seems to have measured whether the legion of the Anybody But Obama-crowd, who weren’t motivated to turn out until the rise of Sarah Palin, is now going to turn out to vote after all.

3. Doubt. People are still too much in doubt, that’s maybe the one thing that’s strikingly obvious from the polls (and a safe thing to conclude). People are swinging wildly, like a pendulum that’s out of whack.

And heck, aside from those three things, I’ve never trusted polls as absolutist measurements of popular opinion. I merely view them as harbingers of trends.

I for one do not believe that the unpolled people — those who ordinarily don’t go out to vote, but who the Democrats believe will now turn out in massive numbers — are a different species from those who are being polled.

Take a bunch of unlikely voters, compare their voting trends to those of likely voters, and you’ll see pretty much the same picture.

So therefore, I personally believe that if there’s going to be a higher turnout, that it will be divided among trend lines. And those trends do not look good for Barack Obama.

No matter which way you look at it — from the left, the right, from down below, above or behind — one can only conclude one thing: Obama is losing support, and McCain has made a huge comeback. And that’s still trending. Even the clearly Obama-leaning folks over at Fivethirtyeight.com have toned down their rhetoric; it seems as if they, too have resigned themselves to a fairly strong possibility of McCain winning the elections.

There’s no denying it. McCain’s comeback is HUGE. It also shows just how much a lot of independent voters, who are the ones who seem to literally be running over to McCain, were on the fence, unconvinced and unmotivated, resigned as they were that this year was going to be a Democratic year. Not so! The Republican base is rallied, people have started to believe again.

It means something, it cannot be denied. And against all this, if I look at the way things are trending, all that Obama has done and is doing now, isn’t helping. He’s had a darn good run in the past five days, bashing McCain over the head with everything that has gone wrong economically speaking.

So let’s see what the Harbingers of Trends tell us at the end of the week. Say, next Monday and Tuesday. And I predict the following:

Obama will have been slamming McCain over the head with McCain’s signature weakness, the economy, for 1,5 weeks next week. If Obama hasn’t reversed trends in the Harbingers of Trends (and McCain isn’t caught with an underage boy on a toilet in Utah, or something similar), he will lose this election.

Why? Because it would mean that for all the want of change among the voters, and all their fears about the economy, they simply didn’t care. It would also mean the Great Failure of the Obama strategists, because it would mean that, in the end, the economy was not the electorate’s main concern after all.