Condi's Road to Redemption

Secretary of State Rice remarks on Obama's historic victory. Her hair was bouncing and behaving, no longer was she in a sculpted hair helmet. She must have visited Pookie's Clip and Flip for a fresh perm. Condi looks good and sincerely happy, perhaps this will be her first step back on her long journey to redeem her ever-loving soul. God's speed, Dr. Rice. Welcome back to the fold.

Bill Kristol's Message to McCain: Fire the Campaign

Bill Kristol's message to McCain, "Fire the Campaign":

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.

What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

The hope for McCain and Palin is that they still have pretty good favorable ratings from the voters. The American people have by no means turned decisively against them.

The bad news, of course, is that right now Obama’s approval/disapproval rating is better than McCain’s. Indeed, Obama’s is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama.

So drop them.

Read the entire New York Times article, "Fire the Campaign," by Bill Kristol here.

Obama, McCain Put Politics Aside on 9/11 Anniversary

By Julianna Goldman. Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama and John McCain will put their presidential ambitions on hold today to make an unprecedented joint appearance at a commemoration marking the seventh anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

With no speeches and little fanfare, the two candidates will walk together down a ramp into the pit where the World Trade Center towers once loomed over lower Manhattan and lay a wreath at Ground Zero for the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the seven years since the terrorist strike that killed almost 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, Sept. 11 has been a tool and a trap for U.S. politicians. Yet the day itself has remained sacred.

``Both parties have used it for their own political benefits, but it is risky,'' said Trent Duffy, a former aide to President George W. Bush and a partner at the Washington communications firm HDMK. The candidates ``realize that the best statesmanship, and hence the best political move, is to not play politics on 9/11.''

Keeping up the nonpartisan spirit of the commemoration, McCain and Obama later will make back-to-back appearances at a televised forum on civic engagement sponsored by Columbia University. The subject is one of the few on which the candidates generally agree.

Commemorations

Bush today observed a moment of silence at the White House and then went to the Pentagon to dedicate a memorial to the victims there. McCain, before heading to New York, attended a service in rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Air Lines Flight 93 crashed after passengers tried to overpower the terrorists steering the plane toward Washington.

``I have had the great honor and privilege to witness great courage and sacrifice for America's sake, but none greater than the sacrifice of those good people who grasped the gravity of the moment, understood the threat and decided to fight back at the cost of their lives,'' McCain said in his remarks.

This is only the second presidential campaign since 9/11 and the first year that the Democratic and Republican candidates will appear at Ground Zero on the anniversary.

City officials urged the candidates not speak at Ground Zero to avoid even the appearance of politics.

read the rest of the story here.

Barak Obama email:

"Today, we honor the memory of the lives that were lost on Sept. 11, 2001, and grieve with the families and friends who lost someone they loved in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pa. We will never forget those who died. We will always remember the extraordinary efforts of our firefighters, police and emergency responders, and those who sacrificed their own lives on Flight 93 to protect their fellow Americans. And we give thanks for the Americans defending us every day in our communities at home, and in our military abroad."

"On 9/11, Americans across our great country came together to stand with the families of the victims, to donate blood, to give to charity, and to say a prayer for our country. Let us renew that spirit of service and that sense of common purpose. Let us remember that the terrorists responsible for 9/11 are still at large, and must be brought to justice. Let us resolve to defeat terrorist networks, defend the American homeland, stand up for the enduring American values that we cherish, and seek a new birth of freedom at home and around the world."

Voting In The USA

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Yesterday, I was having a discussion with another fellow on a political blog. After I compared the media capitulation during the run-up to the Iraqi War with the Sarah Palin campaign blitz, He asserted that “Educated people did not vote for Bush on average, he would have lost by a landslide if poor white trash were not allowed to vote.”

My reply is the following:

Now, as you know, you and I certainly see this point differently. All American citizens should have the right to vote, even as you frame it "poor white trash"--your term, not mine. One can be poor and one can be white, but I certainly don't believe that God makes anybody "trash"......
But, unfortunately the ruling class has played this group of poor whites like a fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry. This group seems to be more disaffected, disgruntled, and manipulated than any other constituency. Even black folks aren't that gullible, no matter how ghetto. It's hard to get black folks together to do much of ANYTHING, let alone get off their duff and vote.

Black folks are more distrustful of government, skeptical of politicians, and disengaged politically. Most black folks don't really believe what politicians say, and rarely benefit from anything that politicians do. It's hard to get black folks to the voting booth, regardless of socio-economic status. My nephew was registering voters in Florida and he was surprised how few black folks were even registered to vote. He said that he went to a sugar plantation, he called it a farm (but, we all know the truth) and the black folks on the plantation didn't even know they had the right to vote. He was blown away by the abject poverty that many black Floridians lived in, while surrounded by the gated opulence of the rich and affluent. The deep chasm between rich and poor was striking in Florida. Nevertheless his group managed to register over 100,000 new voters. Will they actually turnout on election day? Who the hell even knows.

Now, the poor whites on the other hand, actually seem to believe what the politicians say, although they rarely even do anything for this social class. The Republicans rely on the fears and bigotry to scapegoat and bully their way into power. Obviously, it works, the GOP elected George Bush & Co. twice* by manipulating this constituency. Joseph Goebbels Rove and the merry band of the riechwing are doing it again with Palin and McCain.

And they'll play the race/class/gender wedge issues to their advantage. Look at how McCain's campaign used Katie Couric's assessment of Hillary Clinton to buttress Sarah Palin; or the McCain sex ad to play on the old fears of the black man's penis; historically, the ruling class has used the disaffected white poor as a buffer for their power. They just scapegoat and play on xenophobia and negrophobia to the max. It's like we live in a version of political groundhog's day. Whereby every election it's the same negrophobic propaganda crap. Nixon had his Southern Strategy, Reagan his Welfare Queens, Poppa Bush had Willey Horton, Bill Clinton had Sista Soulja, etc., etc.. . . . it just goes on and on.

So, I know you and I differ, but let me make myself clear I think that poor whites should be able to vote just as ALL citizens of the USA should vote.

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