Quibbles and Bits – August 5

1) Today’s NYT has a piece by David Brooks outlining his ideas about why Obama is not “slam-dunking” this election so far. Brooks basically says what we’ve said here at NQ for some time. Who is this guy?

There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

Or, as Brooks illustrates in the piece, Obama has been IN several places, but is not OF any of them. He is not connected enough to anything for people to evaluate the choices inherent in those connections. He keeps apart from nearly everything and, seemingly, everyone. Where are his old friends, classmates? Yearbooks? Birth certificate? His poor, typical white grandmother? His uncle the liberator? His childhood teachers, family snaps, etc, etc. Usually, we’re inundated with this stuff from a presidential candidate.

Read the rest ->

Back when my SO was a punkish-looking young (white) guy driving older model cars, he’d get stopped by cops from time to time. Invariably, those cops would ask him, “who’s your daddy and where do you work?” (Small town GA!) They wanted to know my SO’s connections, how he was “linked in” to the wider community.

It’s a response anyone has when trying to evaluate someone new. And anyone who consistently defies outlining those connections worries us. For good reason. The more cautious of us check references. We call the babysitter’s previous clients, check out a plumber, and a builder before committing to employing these people. We do due diligence.

IF you’ve ever been in a position to read resumes, one thing you’ve probably noticed is those resumes that show lots of job hopping but little impact don’t typically rise to the top of the pile. Switching jobs is not a problem, but having nothing to show for those jobs is.

2) Jon Stewart addresses Bob Herbert’s “phallic problem” last night. DEFINITELY worth looking at. If I tell you the bit tries to put the “race genie” back in the bottle, would you go watch? Milkandcookies has it here.

3) At USAToday, Jonah Goldberg calls Obama a postmodernist.

“PoMos” hold that there is no such thing as capital-T “Truth.” There are only lower-case “truths.” Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo’s telling, reality is “socially constructed.” And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that “privileges” the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We’ve all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it’s for speech they like.

Goldberg reminds of Obama’s oft used line: “——- is not the person I knew.”

Would that I could have told my math teacher upon receiving a failing grade, “That’s not the math I know.”

On the troop surge, Obama’s position has changed countless times, but he says it’s unchanged. Worse, he has this grating habit of prefacing his new positions with something like “as I said at the time.” But he didn’t say “it” at the time, he said the opposite of “it.” But saying that he said “it” is, to him, the same as having said “it.”

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The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical. Sure, the campaign has policy proposals, but they are props to advance the narrative of a grand movement existing in order to be a movement galvanized around the singular ideal of movement-ness. Obama’s followers are, to borrow from David Hasselhoff — another American hugely popular in Germany — hooked on a feeling. “We are the ones we have been waiting for!” Well, of course you are.

4) During Obama’s speech to the Urban League, he mentioned legislation he worked on with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to help homeowners.

From the transcript at realclearpolitics:

I’ve got a different approach. Two years ago, I offered a proposal to crack down on mortgage fraud. I worked with Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank to pass a housing bill that will help families refinance their mortgages and stay in their homes.

Yet the history of this bill suggests trouble. It includes the idea of a “trust fund” to help homeowners and includes bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack – all controversial. The trust fund portion is particularly controversial since it seems tied to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and since trust funds are almost always raided for other purposes – federal gasoline tax anyone?

Openmarket.org has this to say as of June:

Long a priority of groups on the Left, the “trust fund” — also called the “affordable housing fund” — would get its revenues from a legislatively fixed share of the surpluses of the government’s Federal Housing Administration or the profits from the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The latest version — in the housing and GSE oversight bill that cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May — would establish the fund by taking 1.2 basis points of interest from Fannie and Freddie’s loan portfolio — about $500 million a year.

The article goes on to say safeguards in this bill are far too weak considering the players.

These safeguards are important, because some of the biggest “housing advocates” also have politics in their portfolios. These groups would include the ACORN and the National Council of La Raza, both of which provide housing counseling as well as lobby for liberal causes and politicians.

ACORN has an especially dubious histrory concerning both election fraud and misuse of federal funds. Several ACORN workers have been indicted and/or convicted of voter registration fraud with phony signatures. In Washington state, seven ACORN employess were indicted in what the Democratic Secretary of State called the worst case of voter fraud in the state’s history. As Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund reported, “The list of ‘voters’ registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, … actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy.”

And ACORN has also been sanctioned specifically for misuse of federal housing funds. In 1994, the ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) received a grant from the newly created Americorps to assist low-income families at finding housing. In applying for the grant, the AHC claimed its activities were completley separate from ACORN.

But one year later, the Americorps Inspector General would testify that “AHC used Americorps grant funds to benefit ACORN either directly or indirectly.” She found several instances of cost-shifting from ACORN’s lobbying group to the housing entity, and also found several instances of steering recipients of housing counseling into ACORN memberships. (This report by the Employment Policies Institute contains the Inspector General’s testimony in full.)

This bill deserves lots of scrutiny for many reasons, and it has been in process for quite some time now. Will anyone pay attention? What has Obama’s role really been?

Also during the Urban League speech, Obama mentioned education related work he claims in the Senate:

That’s why I’ve been working to reform our schools for years. That’s why I introduced a comprehensive plan last fall to recruit, prepare and retain effective teachers across America and why I added a program to the education bill that passed just yesterday to prepare high quality teachers in urban areas. That’s why I introduced legislation to lower the dropout rate, starting in middle school. That’s why, when I’m President, we’ll give every child access to high quality pre-kindergarten programs, recruit an army of new teachers for our communities, stop leaving the money behind for No Child Left Behind, and make college affordable for anyone who wants to go. That’s how we’ll give every young person the skills to get a good job; that’s how we’ll ensure that America can compete in the twenty-first century global economy.

Back in November, MSNBC described this legislation:

He cited his record in the Illinois Senate, where he said that he started the Early Learning Council, to point to how early education programs could be successfully implemented.

In order to address the current teacher shortage, Obama said that he would create a national teacher service corps, which would provide $25,000 scholarships to encourage undergraduates to become teachers. He also called for “professionalizing” teaching, creating a career ladder that would allow teachers to pass national assessment tests and reward teachers who perform well.
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Though Obama called for a renewed investment in math and science education, his plan would actually pull money from the federal government’s greatest investments and achievements in math and science. Obama would delay funding for the NASA Constellation program for five years, though he would maintain the $500 million in funding the program would receive for its manufacturing and technology base, in order to help fund his education policy. The campaign did not say how much money delaying the program would provide.

The plan would also be paid for through the auctioning off of surplus public land, closing the CEO pay deductibility loophole, reduce costs of standardized procurement and through the some of the money that would be saved by ending the war in Iraq.

And, according to another presidential candidate at the time, Obama supported No Child Left Behind as a state senator before he started opposing it as a presidential candidate.

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